You can also see this full video on MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv and Veoh

Or you can see shorter episodes at YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Blip.tv and Veoh

Water Shortage Worldwide – twestival.com and Dr Faye from Paul Walhus on Vimeo.

Mashable put together a list of Austin’s most important technology blogs and AustinCast.com – sister site of AustinLifestyles.com – wound up on that list in some pretty great company.

Here’s the list with a few excerpts from the blog entry at Mashable:

1. Austin 3.0 – A website designed to give the “younger Austin Geek a place to see what is going on in Austin.”
2. Austin Startup – Austin Startup is simply a news site that chronicles the goings ons and creation of new tech sector business in the Austin area.
3. AustinCast – This site is a frequently updated hub for video and audio interviews of local area movers and shakers in the technology scene. He’s published over 100 video interviews with the likes of Veronica Belmont, Pete Cashmore, Zadi Diaz, Cali Lewis, Lindsay Campbell, and Leah Culver as well as a number of local heroes to the Austin scene.
   
4. Austin360 – This is the official New Media offering from Austin’s reigning Old Media institution, the Austin-American Statesman.
5. GeekAustin – Probably one of Austin’s oldest tech blogs, LinearB’ and Orion have been chronicling the gaming, business and tech communities of Austin since 2000.
6. Michelle’s Blog - . . . she’s a very active leader and figurehead to the new, young Austin Tech community, and has her hands in just about everything.  Her personal blog reflects all the myriad of ventures she’s involved in there.
7. Josh Dilworth – Josh is over at PR group Porter Novelli, based in their Austin office. Amongst all his many work related projects like SXSW, he has quite visible presence amongst those in the online Semantic and AI community as well as an avid participant in a number of widely used social media tools. I was recently a guest on a podcast of his, Falken’s Maze.
8. John Erik Metcalf - John Erik Metcalf is a major figure in the Austin scene as well, as he’s a co-founder in one of the town’s two co-working spaces: Conjunctured
9. Social Media Club Austin – The site describes itself as “part think tank, part curiosity, all new media” and is a repository for all that is going on in the “business networking event” scene for the Austin area.
10. Some Assembly Required – a self-described “business development and networking blog” authored by Thom Singer.
11. The Jeff Beckham Weblog – Jeff is an Austin area blogger who focuses his posts on the evolution of media, specifically in relationship to how the Internet is forcing transformation on not just media industries but “the word itself.”
12. Door64 Blog – The blog for Door64, the forum and community portal for the Austin-area tech community.

If you an Austin area blogger and want to be added to the OPML file email Mark at Mashable to be included in the next version of the list.

Download Now! (OPML) (import this into your favorite feed reader)

 

Norman Mailer’s wife speaks at the Texas Book Festival just a few days before his death. His sixth and last wife, married in 1980, was Norris Church (née Barbara Davis), a former model turned writer. They had one son together, John Buffalo Mailer, and Mailer informally adopted Matthew Norris, her son by her first husband, Larry Norris.

Norris Church Mailer is the author of a previous novel, Windchill Summer. She was raised in Arkansas and now lives on Cape Cod. Her husband of thirty-one years, Norman Mailer, died just days after this talk.

AlertThingy! provides a connection to twitter, friendfeed, flickr, tinyurl and allows cross commenting. It’s better than it sounds and is used as a twitter replacement by many who want to make more sense out of twitter and narrow down their focus on specific people and topics.

TwitterCal – This service allows you to post events from your Google calendar to your Twitter accounts.

Twitter Digest – This tool allows you to subscribe to a message stream from a Twitter user of a group of users on the web or through an atom feed.

Summize – A Twitter search engine, contender for the top app in this category.

Flaptor Twitter Search – A simple Twitter search engine which generates an rss feed. Also provides trends, comparisons.

del.icio.us twitter tags – what people are bookmarking about twitter lately

TopTweet – This site provides you updates from the top Twitter personalities.

Twitter100 – Allocates a box to each of the people you follow on a single page and displays their latest tweets.

Quotably – Shows Twitter user’s conversations in a threaded conversational style making it easier to follow.

Tweetburner – Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.

TwitterLocal – This shows you all the tweets on a google map from your local area and generates an RSS Feed of tweets.

TweetCloud – Let’s you make a tagcloud from a twitter user, also indexes del.icio.us

Tweetpeek – You can create a group Twitter feed with Tweetpeek.

Twitku – Mashup of Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce public timelines. You can also post from its interface.

TwitterNotes – You can create notes on TwitterNotes using Twitter and tagging your notes.

I got turned on to the disqus comment system by Shey Smith on his most excellent blog, http://sheysmith.com and got really motivated to install it when I heard Leo Laporte and Amber Macarthur rolling in the aisles over this on their net@nite podcast broadcast live today.  It helped push me more that Dave Winer, grandaddy of rss and blogs, is using this as well.

Disqus brings video comments, along with a community of commenters, better comment formatting, and much more.  And the wordpress plugin install was as easy as could be.

It’s http://sheysmith.com

Today he’s talking about tomorrow’s twit out and friendfeed and social networking.  He’s doing an amazing job on this blog and it’s become a daily read.

And he turned me on to disqus!

Disqus was the topic on today’s net@nite with Amber and Leo and at first glance it’s something you don’t need, as Leo observed.  But, on closer examination, it’s a great comment system for blogs that integrates video and ties comments in to social networks.     And best of all, it connects you to a community of blog commentors like Shey Smith.

Were you at SXSW and want to keep the experience going and stay in touch with others you met there? Here’s how! I put out a tweet to request that anyone in our “network” who has a del.icio.us account and is willing to share their del.icio.us “name,” to please send it my way and I will compile the list. This way, we can add each other to our del.icio.us networks. One of the drawbacks of all these social networking sites, is the separate interfaces, usernames and such. We are all hoping for the ultimate Mashup of social networking one day.

I’m very excited to get this ball rolling and even more excited to explore all the great bookmarks that our friends who are hot on sxsw are sharing. If you would like to be included, just post a comment here with your del.icio.us “name” and I will add you to our network or send a direct message to http://twitter.com/sxswtwit . Then, just follow these easy steps:

1. Go to del.icio.us (sign up for an account if you don’t have one already)
   
2. Click on Your Network (top left)
3. On the right-hand side, in the text box, type in sxswtwit
4. Click ADD
5. Now sxswtwit will appear in your network beneath in blue
6. Click on sxswtwit
7. You are now in sxswtwit’s bookmarks, but there are none… BUT WAIT
8. In the gray box at the top, it reads:
   

   All sxswtwit’s items (0)
   sxswtwit is in your network, view sxswtwit’s network

9. Click on VIEW sxswtwit’s network

That’s where the magic happens. There you see all the bookmarks shared by everyone in the network, which can be a little messy OR you can look over at the right. There you can click on each member’s name and look at his/her individual bookmarks. You can even add each member to your own del.icio.us network. As more members join this sxswtwit del.icio.us network, you’ll see them added.

Right now, the only member is http://del.icio.us/springnet (me) but that will hopefully change soon. Join now!

Great idea you say? Well, all the credit goes to GeekyMomma who thought it up for her edtech network and the above is practically word for word from her blog post.

Add your name to the comments below and you’ll be good to go or just send a direct message to http://twitter.com/sxswtwit

The second ball that Leo has hit out of the park is the adoption of Wordpress over SixApart’s Vox.  Wordpress is a much better, imho, blog platform.  it’s what I use here as webmaster of this blog. 

I listened to Leo and Amber’s net@nite podcast and gleaned that Leo doesn’t feel the trademark issue is relevant any more and, besides, twitter is where all the action is and has been for a while.

Here are Leo’s top ten Top 10 Reasons Why he’s Twittering Again

With Jaiku you get bells and whistles.  You can create your own little mashup by adding your twitter feed (yea, you can have your cake and eat it too), your del.icio.us feed, your blog feed and any other rss feed that suits your fancy.

This was the gist of the net@nite podcast with Amber Macarthur and Leo Laporte.  Leo had to leave twitter because his lawyers told me he had to because his “twit” (This Week in Tech) podcast is too close to “twitter”.  But he made it clear he isn’t going to pursue any action against twitter, in fact he’s going to try and work out a mutual exclusivity agreement.

Twitter won’t podcast.  And Twit won’t twitter.  I guess that’s fair.

Here’s your link to the Amber and Leo net@nite podcast:

Sez Leo:

The problem is the name. I wish to heck he’d named it Tweeter, or Tooter, or anything but Twitter. Twitter is so close to TWiT that I’m afraid it’s really confusing. And it hasn’t helped the confusion that I’ve been such a fan of Twitter. I’m sure half the people there think we have some sort of relationship. But we don’t. And the proliferation of programs like Twitbox and sites like Twit This are not helping things much. So let me repeat…

Twitter has nothing to do with TWiT.

And, I’m afraid, I can’t have anything to do with Twitter, either. It’s just fueling the confusion. Fortunately, there are several similar services including Groovr, Dodgeball, and Jaiku. After a cursory glance at all three Jaiku seems to have the best mix of features for me (I’m too old to be groovy, or hooking up) so I’m moving to Jaiku. (In truth, it offers a much richer set of features than Twitter.) My handle is ChiefTWiT. Hope to see some of you there.

“According to tracking site Twitterholic, the top 10 twitterers have thousands of people following them—a literal cult of personality. Paul Terry Walhus, a gray-haired Austin coffee-shop blogger who has 8,789 friends and 1,722 followers, is currently the most popular person on the site. His latest tweet: “5:33 am cst L:78704 starting work week … full plate today … toast, mango yogurt and coffee w half and half.”

I’m floored!  Thanks for the shout out Slate!  What can I say?  I guess I’m going to have to dig deep and come up with some incredible blog entries now.

But twitter itself has exploded like a supernova overnight, going from 600 tracked on twitterholic to 13,000 last night. I’d guess it’s over 15,000 as of this red hot second. I talked with the twitterholic folks and they agreed with me that it’s like dealing with a runaway train. The site itself it under a crushing bandwidth load.

Twitter is great. It’s sms messaging and web messaging all rolled in to one package and it operates like a miniblog. It let’s you know what everyone is doing quickly.

Finally, the promise of real social networking is at hand. The last few days have been changing days in the life of the net.

I’ll have a lot more to say about twitter.

Here’s a blog past from my twitter friend Alex Nesbitt “buena vista” that’s typical of the kind of enthusiam and fervor there is for twitter. Direct quote follows.

1. It’s meant I’ve kept in touch a little more with one of my dear friends I was neglecting. In fact I’ve even seen him more partly because we’re both twittering. Here’s a couple of random examples…

“Dana Power, a computer programmer from Raleigh, N.C., says her brother who lives in Texas introduced her to Twitter so they can stay in touch: ‘I hardly ever corresponded with him, but with Twitter, I can see what he is doing at a given point in his life,’ she says. ‘It makes me feel more connected to him somehow.’”

Leisa tells a nice story about Twitter helped her get to SXSW.

2. I’ve loved watching the community create it’s own ‘rules of engagement’ and I’ve been facinated by all the blog posts I’ve read on this phenomenon; Like David Armano’s at Logic + Emotion. There are thousands more…

3. It’s a cross between IM and a mini blog – you can access it from both PC and mobile terminals so it’s easy and accessible.

4. I control it. I can twitter as often as I like. I can choose who sees me and who I see. Ican be public or secret. I’m a Twit!

5. It’s a growing ecology. Expect mash-ups with google earth and flickr soon. There’s already Twitterholic.com – expect ‘Twitterholics-anonymous.com’!

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention twittervision which is really blowing the lid off everything. It’s television for the twitter age, on a google world map it shows you every tweet from every twitterer in real time. All twits, all the time. Mind boggling, the whole twitter phenomenon.