Wow, crazy media week it has been. I woke Monday morning to find myself in a Rocketboom segment (that’s me on the far left rocking the Ask a Ninja shirt). Rocketboom field correspondent and friend Bre Pettis was interviewing a guy at RoboGames who made a steambot and I just happened to be hanging out in the background. Violet and I were there doing our own videos for GETV which you can see here and here. Bre also interviews CTP on his Arca Musarithmica. Along with presenting crazy interactive musical robotic contraptions at RoboGames, CTP also officiated my best friend Jay’s wedding that weekend. It was a busy weekend for sure. Oh yeah, my best friend Jay got married. Big ups to him and Shiho on a happy future.

Then there’s all the craziness around digg. Digg 3.0 was released this week and to create some media buzz, Kevin Rose and the digg team had a launch party last week at a dark and hot (as in heat not as in the shit, though it was kinda nice) bar to show off the new and upcoming features. Irina and I were there doing our GETV thing, getting interviews with Kevin & the Stamen kids who are responsible for the brilliant visualizations you’ll see next month. So of course, our GETV episode gets dugg as does the bonus footage and we put blip.tv, our awesome hosting provider, through the digg test. Twice. They rocked it of course and the result is tons of new people know about GETV. Of course the digg crowd is damn fickle and despite their harsh words for Irina, I know they’ll be back.

The vlogosphere keeps getting better, or I’m just discovering undiscoverd gems like Ze Frank’s the show. Ze’s show has been on my radar for a couple of weeks and now it’s down to daily must see viewing. Seriously, give up 2 minutes of your life and take in the fabulously fucked up essence that is Ze Frank. Describing him just won’t do it justice, so peek it yourself. He does everything you wish you could so you don’t have to, especially thinking.

the show with zefrank

I spent a good chunk of time at RoboGames this weekend, 3 days of robot competitions ranging from big, heavy nasty combat bots to mini bi-pedal sumo bots. Did some GETV interviews with Violet, including this one I just posted of a maker of a robotic exo-skeletal assist suit. Also, here’s a quick vid I shot of two of the more deadly heavyweight bots, though it becomes apparent fast who has the advantage. Violet has some writeups and more videos.

The last couple of weeks have been crazy busy and fun, with Vloggercon last weekend and RoboGames this weekend. Vloggercon was awesome on so many levels, but mainly for me it’s the people. The videoblogging community is passionate, amazingly creative, and very supportive of each other. Even in the face of stark disagreement, videoblogging humans do come together to interact with 3d flesh and blood likeness of friends we’ve only seen in 2d.

My main role for Vloggercon was making sure we had bandwidth and WiFi to feed to he hungry video uploading and downloading masses. Amazingly, we pulled in 4, yes FOUR, T-1 circuits thanks to Layer 42. That’s a 6 megabit symmetric pipe we had to play with, much more than the inhouse DSL we had for Webzine 2005. Thanks to Cliff, I dropped in a Smoothwall caching web/DHCP server to help with download performance. The caching server meant that if 20 people decided to watch Galacticast at the same time, only one copy is downloaded off the net and the other 19 are served up locally. Even though we had a phat pipe to play with, we were dealing with 400+ video freaks, so it’s never bad to optimize. Feeding the 4 T-1s, we had 3 Linksys 802.11b wireless access points which worked like a charm.

We also had two live web video streams going throughout the event thanks to Alex and Monkeybrains. We had cams in each of the main presentation rooms beaming out the live vlogger love, combined with IRC allowing 150+ people to participate remotely.

Vloggercon was also meaningful because in several ways it was like the next iteration of Webzine. Schlomo booked the Swedish American Hall for the event after seeing how well it worked for Webzine. The 3 presentation rooms roughly followed the format we used for Webzine as well. This was very much a grassroots event created by passionate individuals who believe in independent publishing, being the media, which is what Webzine is all about.

Aside from handling the Internet and WiFi infrastructure for Vloggercon, and meeting tons of amazing people whom I’d only known online, I also pinched off a couple GETV episodes with Irina. There is the Robert Scoble leaving for PodTech episode and the fun Who is Your Secret Vlogger Crush? one. Good times all around.

I did a GETV episode with Vancouver’s favorite geek yoga instructor at the Netsquared conference last week. I’m experimenting with blip.tv’s Flash embed. Like YouTube but without the watermark and better licensing terms.