Lunch with the greatest podcaster of our generation? Why not. He tweeted. “Lunch at Ironworks.” Leo Laporte and his entourage and some fans are in Austin for SXSW.  It’s Leo’s first.  He’s already boggled at the myriad of events and choices.  What party to go to?  What panel? Leo will be tricasting his “This Week in Google” (TWIG) and “This Week in Tech” (TWIT) from TexasCoworking at 200 E Sixth Street in Austin, TX on Saturday, March 13, 2010 and Sunday, March 14, both at 5 pm CST.  Texas Coworking provided the equipment and space and both SiliconAngle (Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins and Michael Sean Wright) and NewTek Tricaster provided expertise, production and equipment for this event and their

A report by Mashable that walks through data researched by Barracuda Networks Labs speaks volumes on what I call a new class of web user.  The fanatic, engaged early adopter. We (SiliconAngle labs) were storing and analyzing twitter up until July 2009 until the project moved over to Bing. The reported data from Mashable is pretty much on the money. Mashable reports: Barracuda Labs also analyzed Twitter’s growth over time, and the numbers are consistent with previous reports that show while Twitter grew like wildfire in early 2009, it has dramatically slowed down in recent months. Going back further to early 2008, the report estimates that the microblogging tool grew by just 0.31%. However, with the quick rise of media coverage

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a little gathering of geeks taking place in my home state, starting this week, called South by Southwest. Naturally I’ll be down there attempting to bring relevance from the chaos which generally is that event. I’ll be assisted by Michael Sean Wright, Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and a cast of dozens. You’ll be able to find my primary coverage here at SiliconANGLE, but also showing up on the TWiT Network, The Inquisitr, Nicefishfilms, Rizzn.com, and elsewhere. In the mornings, I’ll be roaming the halls of the convention center hunting down interviews, and in the afternoons, Michael and I will be anchoring a few hours of live coverage from the Texas Coworking Studios, followed by Leo’s regula

John McCrea and Chris Messina are joined by special guests — Don Thibeau of the OpenID Foundation and Drummond Reed of the Information Card Foundation — to discuss the launch of the Open Identity Exchange, the result of a year-long collaboration between the two foundations. Watch HiRes. Links related to this episode PC World's coverage of the announcement: Open Identity Exchange backs U.S. gov't privacy guidelines From the Financial Times blog: One step closer to a single sign-on for the web The official press release from the Open Identity Exchange: Open Identity Exchange Launches at RSA

This is an issue that I simply cannot wrap my head around. Spec work appears in the design field infinitely more times than any other industry. It absolutely floors me that people think that it is even remotely ethical to build their businesses by tearing down ours. Mark Hemmis’s comment on AIGA policy statement on spec work The past couple years have seen an increase in the use of crowdsourcing by companies to procure design assets. It works like this: Requesting organization posts a request for submissions to a design crowdsourcing site (e.g. 99designs,crowdSPRING, MycroBurst, etc.) Interested designers review the request, and create their entry They submit their entry to the site Requesting organization selects

Google has officially started a war.  With the launch of their life-streaming product this week, Buzz, competitors with established mail products such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are now officially on notice.  Get social - fast. Buzz is Google’s response to Twitter.  For those of you that have tried the product, you will quickly see that the best part about Buzz is the fact that it is integrated with Gmail.  Aside from that, there is no massive innovation relative to established ‘Lifestream’ products like Facebook and Twitter that enable you to socialize around user’s activities.  You can follow people’s updates, they can follow you, yadda yadda.  I will say, however, it was very slick how they pre-populate some of that

Gabe Rivera's Techmeme is the news reader of choice for much of the Silicon Valley tech-setters -- more so than Techcrunch because it has a much wider selection of articles. I often see Gabe at press events, he has a press pass like other journalists. But is he a journalist? After all, he doesn't write any of the stories that appear on Techmeme. It seems that the Austin based conference South By South-West (SXSW) doesn't think he's a journalist because it refused to give Gabe a press pass. Does SXSW think that Gabe's Techmeme is a simple news aggregator and therefore not media? Probably. But Gabe is not just a software engineer with a news algorithm and a server. He's better viewed as the editor-in-chief of Techmeme with a large staff o

A friend of Art and I, Dr. Melissa Clothier, put a post up on her blog today talking about an interesting trend in society fueled in part by social media and our ever splintering layers of technology: Rent-a-friends: This Rent-A-Friend concept is intriguing. So rather than fussing with some person with a boring, involved life-story, call up Joe and go to the movie. You hang out, talk about the movie, have some temporary company and then, boom, done. No sordid break-up stories. No diatribes against back waxing and Representative Massa. No queries into your grandma’s health. No enduring pictures of the kids, or worse, vacation. From the original post at the Las Vegas Sun: We’re lonely. One in four people said they had no close friends

This is astounding: ClickZ in the UK reports: U.K. to Regulate Social Network Marketing - ClickZ Marketers and brands using social networks will soon find their activities in those spaces regulated by the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority, following recommendations submitted by the Advertising Association this week. The proposed amendment to the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code - expected to be in force by September - will extend the regulatory framework currently in place for paid online ads to all other online marketing communications. As a result, claims from marketers on their own Web sites and third-party sites like social networks will now be subject to ASA scrutiny, as they are in TV, print, and other forms

When asked the biggest challenges in online video advertising this year, top executives at media agencies like Starcom and MediaVest say they're most eager to target audiences better and to access more sophisticated data around viewership. At last week's 4A's conference in San Francisco that drew top brass at ad agencies and brands, Daisy Whitney caught up with MediaVest's President Donna Speciale, Starcom USA CEO Lisa Donohue and 4A's Managing Director Harold Geller. Here's what they had to say about hurdles in Web video in 2010 in this week's New Media Minute.