TWiT Reflection into the New Decade

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

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Kevin Rose & Leo Laporte Song “Diggnation Tech Nerd” by Questpoetics

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After 3 Year They Still Line up for Their iPhones

… But not nearly as crazy as the previous two years. To recap, last year Apple released a faster iPhone to take advantage of AT&T’s faster network (3g) and mega-podcaster, Leo Laporte did a 24-hour marathon run-up to the phone’s release. Before that, in year one, it seemed like the whole world was lining up three or more days early to get what some were calling the “Jesus phone.” And even though I’d sworn myself to wait until version two I couldn’t resist the gravitational pull, walked in after the lines died down that night and bought my iPhone (see my iPhone Unbox! Pls Sign Me Up for a 12-Step Gadget Program blog post. Good times. Funny, I miss hanging out in the lines of happy apple-fanboys, even when I wasn’t intending on buying anything. It was just fun to be there, catching the happy vibe. Sigh.
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Palm Pre Launch… So What (UPDATED)

If it weren’t for the tech media to stir up the hype, the launch of the Palm Pre would probably go unnoticed. Of maybe more truthfully, even with the hype it’s going unnoticed. Sad.

UPDATE: Just when it was safe to ignore the little device, the nicest tech-journalist, Leo Laport, unplugged the ongoing “Gilmore Gang” podcast that he was hosting, when Tech Crunch founder, Mike Arrington, insinuated that Leo got his demo Pre because he was expected to give a positive review. Arrington said that his question was meant to be in the spirit of full disclosure, but in his follow-up Tech Crunch post, he hinted that he was “investigating” who was getting preview units when Tech Crunch didn’t get their promised demo Pre because Tech Crunch hadn’t been favorable to Palm in previous reviews. Wow. Roll video:



sources:
“Photo: iPhone Launch Versus Palm Pre” posted by Keander Kahney on Cult of Mac blog (http://cultofmac.com/photo-iphone-launch-versus-palm-pre/11437) retrieved 06-06-2009

image by Peter Yan (peteryan.net)

Thanks to iJustine for the heads-up on the Cult-of-Mac article via twitter (http://twitter.com/ijustine)

Thanks to Bwana (http://twitter.com/bwana) for the youtube link & leo statement, http://bwana.posterous.com/leo-laporte-responds-via-arringtons-statement retrieved 6/6/2009
Arrington follow-up comment: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/ouch/ retrieved 6/6/2009

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Weezer is all about the Pork & Beans

Recently featured on several of the Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcasts, Weezer riffs on Internet Culture, etc…

Technorati Tags: Internet, leolaporte, musicvideo, podcasts, twit, video, youtube

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I’m a TWiT – Now Live Video-Streaming 25-Hours a Week

This past week Leo Laporte went “live” with a proposed 25-hours a week of live Internet streaming video of the goings-on at the Twit “studios” located in Petaluma, California, just over 35-miles north of San Francisco. Laporte says that he wants to claim the Internet video space somewhere between life-cast shows like the one produced by Chris Pirillo and highly produced shows like the ones on Revision3 such as Tekzilla by Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont and Pop Siren hosted by Sarah Lane and Jessica Corbin. On a recent TWIT roundtable podcast Norton and John C. Dvorak were impressed with the audacity of Laporte’s belief that he can fill 25-hours of on-air content and have it not degenerate into an endless monologue (a la Pirillo’s single camera always-on “show”). When Norton wondered if Laporte’s plan wasn’t going to negatively effect his energy for his Saturday and Sunday 3-hour radio shows, Laporte’s resolve seemed a bit shaken.

Several weeks before, after one of his weekend radio shows Laporte was speaking to his assistant and his chat-room audience and he criticized Revision3 for not going far enough in their shows and for just duplicating the TV-esque formula that they had all worked on when they all worked together at Tech-TV.

Check out my next article when I’ll share more on why Laporte thinks Revision3 is blowing it and his plan to be the Internet (TWIT) King. jbb

Music: Divine Intervention from the album “Girlfriend” by Matthew Sweet

Click here for more on Geoff Smith, also check out his other videos at http://youtube.com/user/ringtonefeeder

Technorati Tags: Internet, leolaporte, media, podcasts, twit, video, videopodcast, youtube

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We Few Tech-Pioneers

Tech-buddy, Greg text-messaged me today complaining that our favorite podcast empire, TWIT, is all about the toys and business of tech but has nothing in the education space. I offered my usual snotty response: “Well, ED tends to act like a walled garden, I’m probably the only one I know to twitter DURING class.” To put it more clearly, we can complain about there being no education voice (so far), but the truth is that I’m the only one in my circle of “real world” friends and family who does any of this stuff. I mean, my four siblings are all college graduates, intelligent folks, but I’m the only one with a blog or who listens to podcasts and twitters. Going one step bigger, of the forty staff members teaching or working at my middle school I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who does any of this stuff. I know that the boss has a website, because he’s a home-studio musician and wants to share his stuff and there are maybe four other teachers with MySpace accounts. But again, I don’t know anyone else has an ongoing web-presence, except a few of my Pepperdine techies and a few of my students. So it doesn’t surprise me that all the podcasts are about tech or tech related things and there are few ed-related ones on the “A” list. The ED-audience will come. I think it’d just be cool if I saw my brother or some other friends random musings on Twitter.

To that end, I just saw this video on Cali Lewis‘ Geek Brief podcasts and she said that when she showed it to some family members they suddenly understood it and started to Twitter. If only …. The following is from the folks at the CommonCraft show at www.commoncraft.com.

BTW, I’m jbb on twitter and you can catch my little 140 character witticisms at http://twitter.com/jbb

Music: If It Makes You Happy (Featuring Chrissie Hynde) from the album “Live From Central Park” by Sheryl Crow

Technorati Tags: calilewis, family, kids, media, podcasts, twit, twitter, videopodcast, work

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Lusting for a new computer…

It was true in 1996, it’s true today. You can never be rich enough, thin enough or have enough computing power. From Leo Laporte’s blog, The Life of Leo, this little video gem made in 1996, Leo tells then student-filmmaker, Aaron Lubarsky that he he needs to be comfortable with whatever computing-device he buys because in three-years it’ll be ridiculously out of date, and in ten-years PDAs will have more power than the desktops, and then three-years after that they’ll be even more powerful and even smaller. He pretty much hit that prediction, only thing is manufacturers are pumping out upgrades more like every nine-months to a year and not three years.

I loved the part with the homeless guy leaning on a computer with the sign, “Will work for computer parts.” I pray that’s not a future vision of moi. Yikes. jbb

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Digication Gets My Vote

I’ve been doing blogs and web-stuff for so long that I know that it’s just not enough to put up a web-page about stuff going on in one’s classroom and call it done. In the middle of my first year at DeMille we piloted a web-portal called SchoolLoop. Way beyond a simple place for teachers to post assignments, it was a place where students could post their assignments, there was a grading module and “closed-circuit” email system to foster communication home and on-campus. At the end of the year, the school board decided that the portal required “further study” and let one or two high schools continue the pilot while closing it down for the rest of us. SchoolLoop was so great and it’s loss so frustrating that I didn’t bother with any school web pages, except for my daily iCal agendas, the whole year. This year I really needed to do something about that.

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