Most of the podcasts I listen to are tech-heavy. Just a warning. I will list each one and give a short description of each an whether its an audio or video podcasts. I have 3 categories: Tech, Gaming, and Misc. I personally use a 30GB Zune (Brown) to listen  or watch my podcasts only because it was such a good deal. I purchased it for $85 on woot.com! The podcast list is shown after the break.

TECH SHOWS

SYSTM [Video]

SYSTM is a hand-on tech show created for the hardcore DIY Hardware crowd. It’s also hosted by Patrick Norton but the show was originally started by Kevin Rose back when he worked for TechTV and G4. You will learn such things as Building your own NAS, DIY WiFi Antennas, and DIY Power Packs.

Diggnation [Video]

Diggnation is a weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories. The hosts are Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht who are both G4 Screensavers alumni. Kevin Rose started the Digg.com website as a news site where users “digg” or vote for the stories they like the most and the most popular hit the frontpage. Well Kevin and Alex review the top stories while drinking tasty beer beverages out of their houses which make for some colorful commentary. You can see why their show is so popular LoL. Recently they have been branching out of their California homes and starting going to areas around the country to meet their fans. Their show usually ranges from 30 minutes to 1 hour. They have a email answer segment at the end of the show and usually show fans in Digg shirts around the country.

GAMING

1UP Yours [Audio]

1UP Yours is the premier videogames podcast where hosts Garnett Lee, Shane Bettenhausen and John Davison report on the videogame industry and the community that surrounds it. This is a really long podcast and it can range from 1:30 hours to 2:30 hours. This is a casual gaming podcast and they stray sometimes from their own format to talking on a variety of subjects. The hosts are editors and game testers from some of the popular gaming publications like EGM, 1Up, GameVideos.com, etc. You will hear them talk about game current on the market as well as those still in production. One of the best segments is “What are you playing?” where the hosts and guests talk about what games they are into at the moment.

1UP Show [Video]

Each week, the editors of 1UP cover new titles and discuss the latest topics in gaming - all the while giving you a behind the scenes look at the on goings at the offices of 1UP, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Games for Windows magazine. The show gives some great insight into the games they review by doing interviews with the staff of 1up while showing you game footage. They also have some great interviews with game developers as well. You can also see great field reporting from such places as E3, Quakecon, and Comicon.

MISC

The Totally Rad Show [Video or Audio]

The Totally Rad Show is the summer blockbuster of geek news shows. Every week, hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata rip into the world of movies, video games, tv, comics, and more and pull out what’s rad. Most shows last 1 to 1:30 hours. They have either a audio or video feed. They have a quirky and fun approach to their reviews. Every show is started with the guys recreating a scene from one of their favorite movies of the past.

NPR Fresh Air [Audio]

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio’s most popular programs. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators.

This American Life [Audio]

The radio and TV shows follow the same format. There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe. Ten Commandents was the last program I listened to and Ira Glass goes over the real ten commandents by personal interviews with each person’s account of one of the ten.

Working for a software company, I see our software move through the development cycle and we would not release Alpha software for any kind of public consumption. Alpha releases are purely for our testers to test the software in-house. Only after much testing do we give software out to beta customers.

Too funny!

Digg Link

Flick has been beta testing this with some of its members but just yesterday made available to the world. I could wind of this by watching the twitter stream. I quickly logged into my account and gave it the old college try. With the 90 second cap in mind, I think this would work well for the videos I have taken with my digital camera since they are generally short clips. I uploaded 3 videos so far. The first is one of my dog Siena and the last two were some funny clips taken from Wizard World Texas 2007. I have more I want to upload but its late and wanted to just get something up there to try it. I don’t know how well the time cap will be received. I did a tweetscan of flick video and it seems to more people are just excited the feature is there. Some are complaining about the upload speed, some are saying Flickr is too late to the game, and others are comparing it to twitter with its 90 second cap. I for one think it works for certain kinds of videos. Flickr knows that there are other players out there now that can do longer videos and they have said compare Flickr videos to “long photos” of capturing slices of life.

Andrew Baron makes a good analysis on Understanding Flickr Video. I will definitely continue to use it and give you my review when I have played with it more.

WordPress 2.5

Presenter: Matt Mullenweg

The gathering started with an announcement by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, about WordPress 2.5 which was released that day to the web for everyone to download and try out. The new version is a massive overhaul for the look and feel of the software. I thought great, I just bought the WordPress for Dummies book, now all the screenshots are useless.

45 ways to Power Up your Blog

Presenter: John Pozadzides
Blog: One Man’s Blog

This lecture was probably the most insightful speech and made the $20 for the event well worth it. I am not going to tell you everything John had to say because I linked to his blog above but here are the high points I didn’t think about:

• Use english names for images instead of names like image001.jpg
• Use ALT and Title text for images as well. This will help in finding these images come up more in searches.
• Host your own images. If you link to Flickr or others you are just giving your traffic away.
• The rule of sticking to one topic is a myth. Instead, write about what you know and love … all of it.
• Email Subscriptions. Not everyone uses RSS and even the ones that do don’t have read everyone they subscribe to. (This is one I just started doing. We will see how well it works).
• The appropriate length of a blog is 3-4 paragraphs or 1-2 pages of content.

John also showed off an amazing piece of software called Woopra. This software is a real-time stats program for your website to track the number of visitors who go to your site as well as other neat functions. He demonstrated this using his blog site and how many visitors were currently looking at his site and of course the number went up by those in the audience viewing the site. Another sweet feature was the ability to directly chat with those visiting his site. I know this sounds scary but as John states he can only direct chat with people who have logged in to his site before or have left a comment. Besides, he says, you can ignore the chat request. The website is closed beta so all those that attended received a beta invite! Check out GeekBrief’s video interview with John.

After his talk I was able to talk to John about some other advice relating to my blog and he was very helpful. This seemed to be the best part of the conference, you can approach anybody there for advice or just chat and people were more than happy to help.

How to Prevent, Detect, and Stop Content Theft

Presenter: Johnathan Bailey
Blog: Plagiarism Today

This is a topic I didn’t really think much about until WordCamp. It makes sense since you put all that effort into writing your blog, then someone strips that information and puts it on their own website and passes it off like it’s theirs. Jonathan does give you some good advice which doesn’t take much time and effort. Here is just a few:

• Add a copyright notice to the bottom of your site.
• Apply for a creative commons license.
• Self-Linking: cross link to your site within your post.
• Watermark your images.

Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell

Website: GeekBrief.TV

These two are the celebrities of the group. GeekBrief.TV is a wildly popular video podcast on the internet where Cali Lewis dishes up the latest tech news from gadgets to software. They were there to talk about how they use WordPress on their 7 public sites, along with their latest endeavor which is called The Big Trip. This is where Cali and Neal plan to take their show cross-country to 50 states in 50 weeks. On their big trip site, they are funding the project by advertising by pixels.  The website PaidbyPixels is where you go to pay for advertising space on the page by so many pixels. It’s a really neat idea.

They also spoke about their humble beginnings back in Christmas of 2005 with nothing more than a dream and a desire to be one of the first Video Podcasters. Neal also showed off their Nokia N95 cellphone which is capable of streaming live video to the net via a service called qik. I was also lucky enough to get a signed autograph from both of them (I will post them on flickr soon).

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my observations at WordCamp Dallas 2008.

Play-By-Play Spoiler action starts here:
0:57 Colbert calls out Conan
1:42 Stuart and Colbert fabricating theory of Conan’s Creation
2:12Video from Stuart’s old MTV Show showing Stuart creating Conan
2:29 Recap: Colbert made Huckabee, Conan made Colbert, Stuart made Colbert… therefore Stuart made Huckabee!
2:55 Conan fabricates picture of him delivering Stuart & Colbert…making him 85 yrs old.
3:33 Colbert & Stuart show up on Conan’s Show
4:06 They all confront and take it outside the studio
4:51 Stewart takes a hit on Conan with a bat and Colbert continues with kicks and bats
5:02 Colbert takes a trash can to the downed Conan
5:14 Conan magically appears behind them and double punches them both.
5:36 Colbert & Conan throw Stuart down the stairs
5:41 Stuart & Colbert throw Conan through wall of boxes
5:50 Conan comes back with a blow torch
6:00 Colbert breaks out the nun-chucks
6:15 Stuart begins to be kicked to death by Conan & Colbert with ice skates
6:16-7:26 More hilarity ensues…
7:27 It all ends with a slow motion tri-punch as “Eye of the Tiger” plays in the background.
7:36 Mike Huckabee uses the time to say vote for me.

Check out these specs Minimum/Recommended:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista (only)
• Processor:Dual Core 2.6GHz Intel or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ /Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better
• RAM: 2 GB / 3GB
• Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0–compliant video card /512 MB video card recommended (see supported list)*
• Hard Drive Space: 12 GB
• *Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
  ATI RADEON X1300-1950 / HD 2000 / 3000 series
  NVIDIA GeForce 6600-6800 / 7 / 8 / 9 series

Hmm $300-400 console or $2000-$3000 computer. Easy decision for me. The last PC game I purchased was Half Life 2: Orange Box. I guess that will be my last PC game for a while.