Wow, big press week!  First Cariann and I were in the StarTribune on July 1st for SpaceVidcast.  Then today I was back on TwinCitiesLive talking about how to secure your computer (video below).  And finally tomorrow I’m scheduled to go on the air with Jay Kolls at 6:05am on KSTP AM-1500.  Yes, you read that right… 6:05 in the AM!  I have no idea what I’m going to do!  I didn’t even know there WAS a 6 in the morning!!!

Anyhow, enjoy the TCL clip from earlier, and I believe we have other local press outlets looking to do SpaceVidcast interviews as well! Watch for those in the near future.

I was on Twin Cities Live earlier today to describe Podcasting 101…

Ok, ok, I am bending to the will of the people!  I have this post with pictures of my tattoo and a bunch of people seem to want it.  I thought about it long and hard and have decided to give away the picture for anyone who wants it.  There is a string attached though.  If you use this picture in any way, you MUST take a picture of it and post it in the comments (use Flickr or something).  I want to see how this thing is used.

You can also download the original vector Adobe Illustrator art by right-clicking here.  Enjoy peoples!

This is basically the full 7 hour install of the two FTA satellite dishes we put in for SpaceVidcast.com.  There was a bit of a connection issue so it got broken in to two sections.  Might be best to skip through them a bit to see the progress. Enjoy!

Your truly is slated to be live on Twin Cities Live this Wednesday, May 7th between 3:00pm CDT and 4:00pm CDT.  Check out KSTP channel 5 in the Minneapolis, MN area to see the live show, or go to http://www.twincitieslive.com the day after the show to catch the video segment.

I’ll be talking about low cost videophones (AKA Skype) and how you can use that in interesting ways such as a baby monitor (or babysitter monitor), home security system or low cost telephone replacement.

Make sure to check it out live!  Of course I’m not in the TCL promo, but that’s probably because they don’t know how awesome I really am… yet…

UPDATE: I have written a technical analysis of Skype on Technology Evangelist before the TCL show.  I won’t be getting even nearly that techie on the show, but I wanted my uber geek friends to have something to do too.

UPDATE 2: Here is the Twin Cities Live segment as it aired on KSTP, Channel 5

KSTP is starting a new show at 3:00pm CDT called ‘Twin Cities Live‘. They have a nifty splash page for the site up at http://www.twincitieslive.tv that tells you the show will be starting April 21st. Here, I’ll save you a click:

I have been contacted by KSTP to appear once in a while (or once if I suck, maybe more than once if I’m actually good) as a technology guru type person.

So who are those two people in the picture? According to their press release, “The show is hosted by Minnesota natives John Hanson and Rebekah Wood. John was discovered during an open casting call at Mall of America and Rebekah went through a series of auditions before joining the show. Both grew up in Minnesota and were eager to return to the area.”

Wow, that sounds a lot like Good Company, doesn’t it? Returning to my trusty press release, “TWIN CITIES LIVE will offer the same “spirit” of local programming as Good Company did but with an updated format and content. John and Rebekah bring a unique perspective, and the production staff is dedicated to providing engaging and timely content on a daily basis.”

So all in all it sounds like it will be a lot of fun. A live studio audience on Fridays (although I think it would be cooler if they had one every day of the week) and possibly yours truly showing you what cool technology will help you in your life. For those who know me I’m really big on the ‘why’ not just the ‘how’. No one cares about CPU speed, amount of RAM, etc., etc. Technology is used to solve a problem or streamline a workflow. What most forget is that the specs don’t actually matter that much, it is the function and design of the product that will make all the difference. How you use the technology is what really matters, not how it was made or who made it. Unless Apple made it, then it is required to be cool and you have to buy it, no questions asked. Now everyone go out and buy an iPhone!

I was supposed to go in for a screen test this last week, but one of the producers called me, told me that they were super busy starting the show up (as I can imagine having gone through that same process more than once in my life) and I would be taken just straight to air. Here’s hoping that I do my former employer Hubbard Broadcasting proud. I’m going to see if they will let Cariann join me on the set and stream a little behind-the-scenes stuff live on Qik.

WCCO are you listening? KSTP knows how cool I am, why aren’t you bringing me on board? KMSP, you’re about 2 miles away from me and I never get a phone call. Geesh, where’s the love? KARE? Well, they are HD and that just scares me. Would I look fatter in widescreen?

SpaceVidcast.com is officially one of the most popular videocasts I have created. Over the course of 16 days we averaged over 3,750 viewers per day to get us 60,000 viewers in a little over 2 weeks time with *no* advertising. Amazing. To put this in perspective, if I exclude the iPhone launch video and take all other TechnologyEvangelist.com video views combined I still don’t reach 60,000 views. So I have outdone TE in just a little over 2 weeks time! Think of what will happen to SpaceVidcast.com when I unleash the ad hounds!

I have started the weekly videocast. Next we’ll finish up the site, move the studio to my basement and get this thing rolling. I think we can easily hit 1,000 concurrent viewers with 100,000 downloads of each episode easily.

This is a very exciting time for me. I am passionate about space travel and I’m glad that other are getting excited with me. The show still needs a little love, but we’re very close to something that I can truly be proud of and point at when people say “what do you do?”

Cariann gives us a tour of one of the largest indoor theme parks in the world (top 5 at least): Nickelodeon Universe at the Mall of America. It started as Camp Snoopy then became the Park at MOA before finally re-opening recently as Nickelodeon Universe. If you’re from the MSP area it is worth a look, or if you’re visiting the MOA you must stop in to see it.

SpaceVidcast.com started with around 250 live viewers, skyrocketed to 450 and held there for a while. Then the stream crashed and we were back down to 200 viewers. From there the viewership has been steadily declining until at the writing of this post we’re under 100 live viewers (83 to be exact).

I was expecting about 20 to 40 live viewers of the launch and about 5 live viewers during the down times, so 100 viewers is still well above my expectations. I had a feeling, and apparently a correct one, that people would get bored after the launch and start to bail. While space flight is the future of humanity it oddly has a very inhuman face. This creates a problem for viewership as people want a human connection and NASA TV simply does not offer that.

The solution is painfully simple yet quite complex. I have 1/2 of it online now by burning a chat room directly in to the video stream. The other half comes in the form of actually getting on camera and talking with people live, interacting with them. The trick here is timing. I have a full time time (well over 40 hours a week) and that makes it hard to squeeze in time to broadcast and get people excited about this stuff.

There are other ways to draw an audience as well. This show has zero marketing right now. I’m streaming simply to see if it can be done and to learn for my weekly show. I’ll be advertising for the weekly show so I expect/hope viewership will be higher for that. I’ll also try and get more compelling content over each show to keep people interested and excited. I think with all of these things we’ll have a winning combination.

So why do I care about viewership of a re-broadcast of NASA TV? I’m not even producing the show! I’m hoping to get NASA and space flight in front of people who have never really been interested in it before or are a little interested but simply never vested the time. These people don’t go to NASA.gov and look for the live steam. These people don’t go out of their way to learn this stuff, they stumble across it and if it interests them they stay. That means that the more viewers I have the more interested people we were able to bring in. The more that drop off, the more bored they get. Viewers are finicky and won’t come back if they get too bored too often. Thus, I need to be careful here. I went a little twitter happy these last few days, so I think it is time to scale it all back a touch before the huge events like landing occur and we do our first weekly show.

All in all this has been a great experiment. I’m happy with how it turned out and while I’m sad the viewership is declining I’m a little happy that my theories on how viewership would start to decline rapidly were correct. I’m ecstatic that the viewership scale was so much higher than anticipated. For a show that I figured would be a fun side hobby, this may turn in to a venture worth something. That’s great news as advertising can get spend-y.

For now the really high viewership has come to an end. I expect it to climb back around 200 to 250 during the days and under 100 at night. 450+ was fun while it lasted, but I’ll need to put a human face on NASA before I’ll be able to get back to 450 let alone the 1,000+ that I really want. So far we have had over 25,000 views of the stream, so not too shabby for something I was not quite prepared to do.

Watching the space shuttle launch is always a great moment of joy for me. Hosting a space shuttle launch show on UStream.tv was the highlight of the year! Hosting the show with several hundred enthusiastic viewers and having dozens of people tweet excitedly about the show… Best moment I can remember having in a very long time. The interaction with everyone watching was amazing!

The SpaceVidcast.com live coverage of STS-123 is up to 15,000 views and growing. At any moment in time we have *hundreds* of live viewers. These are not staggering TV viewership numbers, but these are interested people who are actively interacting and asking questions about space travel. As the mission goes on the numbers seem to be GROWING which is the opposite of what I thought would happen. I assumed that as we get in to the mission with hours and hours of downtime people would log out and stop watching. Apparently a lot of people love to see space travel as much or more than I do.

I have a bit of an issue with the SpaceVidcast.com web site. I am recording things like the launch, mission briefings and some EVAs but every time I post to the site it pushes the live stream further down the page. This is bad as I want the live stream at the top with everything else below it. I may have to make a modified template for live launches that puts the UStream.tv window at the top and log posts under it. Not very elegant, but it may work. Anyone know of a good Wordpress plugin to pin a specific entry to the top until I unpin it?

Outside of minor quirks like that the whole process has been very smooth. CamTwist Studio 1.7 worked like magic. The whole look and feel of the show that BlueFox created was amazing. Everything turned out better than I expected for a ‘beta’ show with no advertising. I wonder what will happen when I start the AdWords, Google Radio and Google TV advertising campaigns? This thing could turn out to be truly interesting!

For your enjoyment, the launch of STS-123 as hosted by me on SpaceVidcast.com from t-9 minutes and holding (about one minute before they went to T-9 minutes and counting) to MECO: