Ok, I don’t have any, and I mean any, inside info on this, but while watching the latest Tekzilla video podcast, Patrick and Roger gave some hints about the fact that they had “maybe” found a new co-host for the show. The co-host position was left vacant when Jessica Corben left to go and start two new shows on the network, popSiren and The Digg Reel.

In the meantime, Veronica Belmont has done a couple of guest appearances on the show, and did a great job. Veronica got her start on a CNET podcast, Buzz Out Loud with Tom Merritt and Molly Wood as the producer. Early on she chimed in sporadically, but over time she became more and more involved until she was for all intents and purposes the third host.

Jason Calacanis, ex-Weblogs, inc, ex-AOL, and present grand poobah at the human powered search engine Mahalo, snatched Belmont up to host a new video podcast called Mahalo Daily. Mahalo Daily had a predictably bumpy start but matured quickly to become a very enjoyable daily vidcast.

Recently on guest appearances Veronica has announced that she was moving on from Mahalo Daily to a new and secret project.

Mark my words, Veronica Belmont will be the next co-host on Tekzilla, making yet another addition to the now very formidable Revision3 team. She will be a great co-host because she is fun to watch and she almost always has interesting insights that add a much needed female influence on the show. I have missed Jessica Corben but I look forward to Veronica Belmont.

By the way. Now that Revision3 has matured, I officially no longer miss TechTV.

Ten Years After : LOL: The Life of Leo

Leo LaPorte is finally completely off the TV airwaves. Sad day. But, it is also a happy day because I couldn’t get the show here in these United States, and it has freed him up to think outside of the box and start putting together an online network of video-taped podcasts. I am calling it that because as it stands right now it doesn’t sound like what he will be producing will look anything like what we see on tv.

Right now, he runs the TWiT Netcast Network which produces around 12 different shows per week that are available for download from his site. Now he is looking at how to bring an element of live tv to it. At this point it appears that he will still keep producing the same shows with maybe the addition of a few more, who knows, but he will have multiple cameras aimed at him and his guests so that there will now be a live, interactive element to it.

LaPorte has always said that he likes the idea of interactive which was one of the driving forces behind many of the decisions made at the now defunct network TechTV. His desire was to always find ways for the audience to participate. TechTV lead the charge in using webcams so that the audience could actually be on the shows and asks questions and leave comments. It was an openness that we haven’t seen since.

I believe this openness is what engendered such a tight following in his audience. We have always felt that we are a part of the action, and to be honest, it doesn’t matter where Leo goes, if he is producing content, his audience will find a way to consume it.

I am looking forward to the changes in the upcoming months to TWiT and I am excited that I don’t have to bittorrent his content in order to see it.

If you are looking for interesting, well-produced podcasts that have a bit of a tech angle, check out TWiT.tv.

The good news for me is that now it is a ton easier to post to my blog using my Samsung Blackjack. Wordpress 2.5 has redesigned the blog entry screen so that it is much easier to get to typing posts. Before Wordpress 2.5, I had to scroll past an extremely long list of Categories to get to the part of the page where you type your entry. Normally, when I log into my site I am on a full-sized computer that displays webpages correctly. On a big computer, my extraordinarily long list of Categories are hidden in a pull down menu. My phone’s browser isn’t powerful enough to display my dashboard correctly and just stacks each Category one on top of the other.

“What’s a Category?” Great question. If you look just under the title of each blog entry you will see some blue words that categorize that story. Wordpress doesn’t limit how many categories I use and obediently remembers every one I have ever used. The list is crazy long.

Now, I don’t have to deal with that list when posting from my phone. Upgrade!

Now if I could just figure out how to type faster on this tiny keyboard…

– Update–

I am on my laptop now so I am kind of cheating, but I had to give a quick update about completing my entry.  After I typed up my blog entry, I clicked done which launched me back to my dashboard window.  I still had to scroll past the some 150+ categories except now it is not as bad because I am now seeing all these categories after I typed the entry.  With the blog article still fresh on my mind, I can categorize it more effectively.  So, I still have to scroll a lot, only now it is more profitable.

Finally there is a way to keep your online and offline calendar in sync. This is a big deal if you are like me and have had to enter calendar items manually in two places. What a drag. Google announced today that it has released a little tool that will check your Outlook calendar and synchronize it with your Google calendar. Hip hip hooray!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!

Thank you BoingBoing for this!

Here is a video of an electric wind turbine in Denmark eating itself after the built-in braking system failed during a storm. To give you an idea of how big this windmill is. Look at the base… do you see the truck? Each blade on this turbine is longer than a standard Tractor Trailer rig. Now imagine being below this when it goes…

I have heard of electric guitars, but this takes it to the HNL. I don’t know who this guy is, and I am too lazy to do much research, but what you are seeing or about to see is a guy playing a guitar through a Tesla coil. I am sure it is incredibly dangerous…he seems to be standing a long way back, but the sound it creates is incredibly interesting.

The Tesla coil makes the sound by creating bunches of tiny lightning bolts. Each bolt “pops” at its own frequency or pitch. If you string a number of those bolts together, you get music.

I want one of these. Or maybe better stated, I would like to play through one of these. After that, I don’t know what I would do with the coil.

Wow, what an ingenious way to repurpose a toy into something amazingly musical. As a guitarist myself, this is pretty interesting

I have started using the new service from Google that allows you to “host” Google Apps on your domain. I started the process of getting it all hooked up on Thursday of this week and so far it has been pretty cool. It was pretty simple. I went to the Google Apps page and signed up. I filled out the online form and that was pretty much it. I had to post some HTML in a specific folder on my site, but doing that was trivially easy. The HTML let Google know with certainty that I was the owner of the domain.

The Killer Apps

Once you have Google Apps set up on your domain,iIt allows you to share a family calendar, or a shared calendar with all those using your domain which, right now, seems like the killer app. Keeping up with all the things your family is up to is a real chore, and having a simple powerful calendar that everyone shares for free is incredibly handy.

I set Megan up with an account, and she immediately filled the calendar up with all our family’s upcoming plans. Super handy.

In addition to a family calendar Google Apps also gives you Google docs. I haven’t found a killer use for this yet, but it allows you to create documents that are available for everyone in your family. I can see where this could be very handy for a business domain, but in the family world, it seems to be fairly limited in usefulness.

If that weren’t enough, it also includes a built in start page based on iGoogle. It lets you set up a personal start page with a ton of different widgets that connect you to the information you need. I don’t use a start page much now that I have started using Google reader to keep up with the news that I am interested in, but I still like it. All the users on your domain that you set up with Google Apps also get a start page of their own.

I was hoping that there would be the option of having a common iGoogle start page that everyone on the domain could use. It could be a great place to communicate, but so far I haven’t found that option if it exists.

My Email Dilemma

It also comes with integrated email which means that my MurDog.com email addresses can go through Google’s Gmail interface which is incredibly handy. Right now however, I can’t get that running. In order for it to work, you have to update the MX records on the DNS server to point towards Google’s mail servers. I know that is pretty technical, but it should be a pretty simple thing if you can get access to it. The Google site has great instructions that make it pretty simple to make the changes.

I have a problem. My hosting service provider, www.thehostgroup.com doesn’t give me access to the MX settings. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. It is enough for me to start thinking about finding better hosting for this site. Having a personal email address that leverages the power of Gmail is an exciting prospect. I have sent a message to my provider in hopes of getting this resolved, but so far I haven’t heard anything from them.

One of the bad parts of having a personal email address that I have to manage is spam. It is a huge problem. I turned off my personal email address years ago because of spam. If I could get this Google apps thing to work then I would have Google’s horsepower behind spam control. It would be a huge help.

If I can’t get the email thing resolved, I might have to look at another provider for my web site hosting.

MurDog.com is just a personal site, and I don’t get any revenue from it so low-cost hosting is a necessity. If I can find a provider that is inexpensive, and allows me to host this WordPress blog I might be interested in switching.

For now, I will wait and see what The Host Group does.

Other than that, it is a pretty cool option from Google that should only get better.

I am down in Little Rock about to embark on three fun-filled days recording segments for the corporate training site GenoNow.  I will be making product training episodes for Dillard’s Department Store.  These segments will be in their “walled garden”, and not for public consumption, but the exciting part is that it give Dillard’s a way to push this high-level product training all the way down to its employees.

Communication is always a tough thing in a large organization, anyone who has played the game Phone Booth can tell you that.  Not only do messages get tangled in translation, but it also costs a lot.  GenoNow answers that problem by making these videos to all interested a la YouTube.  Companies can put their private content in their own private area, and corporate trainers who are interested in a wider audience can put content on the site where it is visible by all visitors.

GenoNow has public facing content also.  With subjects ranging from Dressing for Success for women in the work place to managing change in an organization.  There is some free content available so you can see how it works, but we believe it can be a real life saver for the human resource manager looking for a cost-effective way to train an ever-spreading and diverse workforce.

If you are interested in what I am up to these days, you can check out our site.  It’s pretty exciting.  Who knew that there would ever be an Internet start-up in Arkansas, not exactly a hotbed for technology, but here we are.