Here’s the letter CAT wrote to Leo:

Hi Leo!

Two years ago, (almost exactly) I had the idea to make you a Jayne Hat so that you would have something to wear during your new venture on TWITlive.  When you received the hat, I was so excited to see that you really appreciated it.

Over the years, fans of both TWIT and LetsKnit2gether would send me pictures of you, your daughter and others wearing your hat as part of a “Jayne Hat sightings” picture collection.

Recently, someone sent me a picture and pointed me to a video of Colleen happily wearing the Jayne Hat as she was leaving the TWIT cottage for her new adventure at Google. Now, although I am thrilled that amongst all the hats that you have in your collection, she chose the Jayne Hat to grace the halls of Google, I couldn’t leave you without one.

So, here is Jayne Hat #2.  Wear it well and remember, “A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything”.

Thanks for all your support,

CAT
LetsKnit2gether.com

If there were more government videos like this political discourse might even become rational!

This the video promo for Moby’s new album.

Amazing! It’s laid back, simple, and charming. Certainly not something a big record company would do. The changes in media are really opening up the landscape. I hope to see lots of other artists doing their own thing like this!

“Podcasting” is one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s new words for December 2008.  It looks like this is relatively soon for a new word to be entered since one of the other words for December is Rashomon, which has been around since 1951.

The first reference to the word podcast is possibly this post to the Yahoo group ipodder-dev from September 2004.  That’s just a bit over four years from made-up-word to “near-ubiquity in 2008.”  The power of the internet is on display.

The only thing that disappoints me is that the new podcasting entry only mentions audio.  Can a video podcaster get a little love?  I guess the video podcasters will just have to wait for a future dictionary update to go main-stream.

I came across this information on Twitter from @GrammarGirl and @MWGblog.   Ain’t Twitter great?  It seems these days that everything you hear, you hear first on Twitter.  Maybe Twitter will be in the dictionary some day.  I just hope they don’t call an individual message a “tweet.”

I came across this cartoon the other day.

It’s called “Word of Mouth” but I think what it really illustrates is that impressions that are closer to you are more valuable than others.  It speaks to Old Media v. New Media – Traditional Advertising v. Social Networking.  The friend isn’t even promoting her drink, she’s just sitting there, yet that influence is more powerful than all the overwhelmingly powerful noise of traditional advertising.

This is the power of Social Media.  A video podcast (for example) that has a regular community surrounding it creates a small family.  The number of viewers is perhaps smaller but the impressions are much more effective and valuable.    I think this needs to be taken into consideration when setting a price for ads or product placement.

Yea, I know, many advertisers and agencies don’t get it.  That’s the mantra.  But you know what?  I think many of them do.  They sit around and think about this stuff all day just like we do.  I think some of them want to feign ignorance so they can get something valuable for free.  Don’t fall for it.  A simple mention in the right video podcast is much more valuable than a magazine ad or a banner on a website.

So a few weeks ago I upgraded Wordpress on this blog and got locked out of the dashboard!  It just wouldn’t let me log in.  Then CAT upgraded another Wordpress blog we use as a test site and the same thing happened.  BOGUS!  Anyway, CAT did some research and was able to find a fix today, so now I’m able to post again.  YEA!  New posts with great wit and insight soon to come…

For those that don’t know Tom Green has been doing a talk show called Tom Green’s House Tonight from his living room for about two years. New Tee Vee went to his house for a behind the scenes video tour.

Tom’s quite a pioneer. What he does on his show is amazing. The surrealism of a TV talk show in his living room fits right in with his “meta” comedy.

Here’s another tour of Tom Green’s house where we get to see all his plants and what’s on the roof:

Looks like podshow is re-organizing and changing their name. I was never really sure if Podshow was going to succede. Here’s why:

In 2005 I was heavily invested in my broadcast television career. I saw the writing on the wall however and I was fond of saying, “It’s 1955 and we’re still making radio drama. Pretty soon somebody up in corporate is going to figure out that it’s cheaper to hire one guy to spin records all day and we’ll all be out of a job.” I decided to jump off the old media ship, take a risk, and try something new. But what?

I eventually decided that podcasting was the way to go in part because of what I was hearing from Adam Curry on the Daily Source Code. I followed the launch of Podshow in 2006 mainly by listening to the DSC and Podcast411. I was also studying video shows like, Rocketboom, Tiki Bar, diggnation, Rumor Girls, and GeekBrief.tv. The later two shows were with Podshow.

In the summer of 2006 CAT and I started working on Let’s Knit2gether as a new media test case. We wrote some episodes, started shooting, finished a pilot episode, learned about RSS, and put up a Wordpress blog. We stayed up all night for about a week and finally posted our first episode literally hours before getting on a plane to Ontario, California for our first Podcast Expo. We were determined to be podcasters when we arrived and we were. We had one episode!

At the expo we soaked up everything. We were still new to the game and we needed to learn as much as we could from everybody else. When we were leaving to go back home I remember turning to CAT and saying, “Where was Podshow? It was supposed to be this big deal and they didn’t even have a presence here.”

After we got home I found out that all of “Podshow was there in full force!” They were riding around in limos and having a grand old time. What? We were all over that place, actively searching out as much information as we could find, and we didn’t even notice them. Podshow was obviously in a serious bubble. I wrote them off right then and there. Any company that gets into a brand new industry and thinks they are the center of the universe separate from everyone else, is doomed to failure.

So now they have a new name, Mevio. OK, setting aside the fact that companies typically re-organize and change their branding right before they go out of business, maybe this will work for them. Hopefully this is actually a new direction and not the same old thing with a new name. They seem to be trying to do something more like Revision3 who, in my mind, are doing things right. We’ll see…

Yesterday at Roosevelt High School in Fresno California, a police officer shot and killed a student after being attacked with a baseball bat. I believe the person who took this video of the press conference that followed is a newspaper reporter for the Fresno Bee.

The Qik service allows you to stream video from your cell phone live directly to the internet. It then saves the video on the server to replay later. This type of technology changes everything, especially since it will eventually be available to everyone. The newspaper article on the Fresno Bee website has more information about the incident as well as more video.