• Cheap beer seems to follow us around for some reason, but we drink it anyway.
• Google’s I/O Conference happened this week, and many interesting (though not life-changing) announcements were made, including
  • A new Google Earth API/Plugin which integrates with their existing Maps API and brings all of those KML files and third-party 3D models and data to the web.
  • Google AppEngine went ahead and let everyone in from the waitlist, announced new pricing competitive with Amazon’s EC2, and a new Memcache API which should allow for faster (and cheaper!) performance. There doesn’t seem to be any improvement to ease of development, however.
• Adobe has announced 3D hardware support in Flash 10, but it’s Windows-only at the moment. For a “universal” platform like Flash, what will come of this feature and other Flash 3D engines like Papervision3D?
• Loren has finally upgraded many of his projects to Rails 2.0, encountering a few challenges
• I’ve been exploring lots of Rails deployment options (such as Nginx, Mongrel, and Thin) but I’m most excited about using the new Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) plugin for Apache. Dreamhost seems pretty excited, too.
• Loren has upgraded his video-on-the-web service from Justin.TV to Stickam, and has been working on new ways of bringing video to his investment club, Ben Hur Investments. Look for them, soon!
• Embedding and remixing are becoming new themes for text, audio, and video on the web. We talk about several services their impacts including RSS, Yahoo! Pipes, and Twitter, and discuss how Loren is using these tools to create a new service to track the Atlanta web entrepreneur community.  We also talk a bit about Twitter’s recent service “brownouts”, and what they might mean for the community.

We’re still sticking with an under-the-radar, links-on-blogs format for sharing this podcast, so you may download this week’s episode here, or listen below:

Please leave us some feedback, either in the comments here or on Loren’s post for this episode. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

We did this podcast with a little less preparation, so the topics wander a little bit more. Some things you can expect to hear:

• Justin.tv is great, but it may not be the be-all for live web video broadcasting because of the way it prevents you from embedding “episodes” and live chat in your own pages. Given alternatives like Ustream and Stickam, and thanks to the power of embeddable apps, like Backnoise, will it matter what Justin.tv does and doesn’t support?
• Features aside, content on Justin.tv is crazy! Loren and friends spent Saturday broadcasting themselves brewing beer, playing games, and getting rowdy all on Loren’s “come watch” page where their friends could play along via chat provided by Backnoise. Also, Marty missed the first game of the Pens vs. Red Wings game, but apparently could have caught it from Justin.tv!
• Google announced FriendConnect, with exciting demos and no other documentation to speak of. Is it vaporware? Is it evil?
• I talk in way too much detail about my experiences playing with the Google App Engine and its (lack of) support for the excellent Python web framework Django. Long story short: it’s great if you’re willing to write a bunch of infrastructure yourself, but lousy for banging out a weekend project.
• Also, there’s this new thing called the Dash, an always-connected GPS unit built on the OpenMoko Linux-based cell phone platform. They did a media blitz this week and Loren met them at startupriot just before it happened.

Please have a listen and give us some feedback! What’s interesting? What’s not? What would you like to hear us talk about? Or tell us we’re wrong about? Leave comment here or on Loren’s post for this entry.

As a first step into understanding this problem, my friend Loren and I have decided to try creating our own podcast. Namely, we recorded an episode of an as-yet-unnamed podcast which you can listen to here:

Using the free version of the Pamela Call Recorder for Skype, we recorded 3 15-minute segments to create a 45 minute podcast. During that time we talked about many things, from the ins and outs of getting started with podcasting tools to discussing the opportunities and challenges that come with putting oneself online “live” to the power that technology gives us to make meaningful artifacts from our lives. You can read Loren’s description of the podcast on his blog.

Give it a listen if you have a chance. You can listen via the embedded Flash player above, or you can download the ~10.8MB mp3 file here.

If you do listen, please leave us some feedback! I am interested to know your thoughts on the podcast itself, on what you’d like to see from a “podcast hub” site, on what information we talked about in the podcast you’d like to see made easily accessible (such as links or products that we mention), or parts you’d like to see excerpted (if any). Please remember that this is a rough “one-off” recording. After another episode or two we will want to try and choose a name and a general direction for the podcast before we go syndicating ourselves with RSS feeds, Atom feeds, and iTunes subscriptions.