1	Jan
2	Feb
3	Mar
4	Apr
5	May
6	Jun
7	Jul
8	Aug
9	Sep
A	Oct
B	Nov
C	Dec

1	1
2	2
3	3
4	4
5	5
6	6
7	7
8	8
9	9
A	10
B	11
C	12
D	13
E	14
F	15
G	16
H	17
I	18
J	19
K	20
L	21
M	22
N	23
O	24
P	25
Q	26
R	27
S	28
T	29
U	30</code>
V	31

Mine was born on May 31, 2009…only a week before I bought it! Most of the dates I’ve seen are within the last half of May. When was YOURS born? Let me know in the comments!

PS:  And yes, I did set up a birthday remember for the lil’ guy.

1. Open the Mail application and go into Preferences and Accounts.
2. Under accounts, tap your Gmail account
3. Under Default Folders, change the trash folder to [Gmail]/All Mail

That’s it!  Since this hack usurps the delete functionality, I’d still prefer that Palm add a dedicated “move to folder” button.  This button could, for example, move the message to a “default” folder when tapped, or pop up a list to choose the one you want if you tap and hold.  Still, the workaround is preferable for those of us who can’t live without archive.

Update: Lifehacker commenters mentioned that the Pre does allow you to move mail to a folder, but for me this would take 5 taps: menu > move to folder > scroll, scroll (I have a lot of tags) > All Mail.  Like most hacks, changing the delete folder isn’t perfect but for some it may be better than the alternative.

In all fairness…I’ve been a Palm fan for years, but I’m not too brainwashed to say that there’s a place in the market for both. Pre and the iPhone each have pros and cons, and the Pre meets my needs the best. For me, having a physical keyboard, carrier availability, and choice of development platform are high priorities. YMMV.

Now with that said, WebOS and Synergy are amazing new technologies that are full of possibilities, but I fairly and lovingly admit that certain aspects of the Pre reinforce the fact that it’s a v1.02 device. Things you’ll love: everything about the hardware, how easily it integrates with online services, beautiful multitasking, gps navigation, and push email. Things you might not like: unoptimized calendar experience, short battery life, and limited application selection. The people currently best suited for the Pre are early adopters, users without advanced requirements, and linux hackers (I’m trying to find a way to SSH into my phone as I write this). Since there are so many people excited about this device, I hope to see Palm engaging the community to incorporate our feedback into future updates (which I expect within a month or two).

…that got a bit too involved, didn’t it? The Pre’s a great phone. Buy it, bitches.

Meet your new organizing team
To fill in for whurley’s and Giovanni’s unfortunate departures, Greg Stevenson and myself will be stepping in to help co-ordinate the various preDevCamp events around the globe.  Greg has already been hosting some webOS training sessions (pre-preDevCamps, if you will), and will be invaluable bringing this knowledge to the community.  And while I’ve helped plan a barcamp or two, I’m positively giddy for the chance to help build a stronger community and facilitate knowledge transfer on such a massive scale.  Combined with Dan’s experience bringing preDevCamp where it is today, I think we’re going to make a wonderful team.

New target date:  August 8th
The second major announcement is regarding preDevCamp’s target date.  Several cities have expressed concern about organizing events on such short notice and without guarantee that the SDK will be available.  Palm hears our cries about the SDK loud and clear, but there’s a lot more involved than just making sure everyone has a copy of the software.  We still don’t have a confirmed SDK release date, but I’m very optimistic that pushing the date back to August 8th will give Palm time to finalize these issues.  And while August is later than the expectation that was originally set, it’s still only 9 weeks after the launch of the phone (recall that the iPhone SDK was released 9 MONTHS later).  Also, 9 weeks is the same amount of time it takes to make kittens.  Coincidence?  I think not.

More content coming soon
Momentum since the phone’s announcement has ebbed due to a lack of developer-related news, but now that the cone of silence is being lifted we can start featuring content created by Palm and other preDevCamp members.  The goal here is to provide maximum visibility to emerging community leaders and create a repository of reusable presentations, therefore lowering the barrier to entry for someone interested in talking about webOS but might not be sure where to begin.  Plus, I plan on releasing a series of articles on how to recruit developers in your community, how to sell the event to sponsors, and share other experience I’ve gathered on how to host a successful conference.  Now that we have a target to shoot for, expect to see a lot more activity on the preDevCamp blog!

What you can do
Some cities are still moving forward with June 13th events, and my personal opinion on this is kudos to you for getting a head start.  There’s a lot of learning to be done in the next few months, so I encourage you to use this time to help create our public knowledge base.  Write a blog post on something you’ve learned.  Record a presentation and upload it to the preDevCamp slideshare group.  Get to know other developers and provide feedback for each other.  And don’t forget to keep your city’s preDevCamp blog updated!

Learning as publicly as possible will show the world that the preDevCamp community is leading the way to webOS enlightenment.  Are you ready?  Let’s begin.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the direction of social media and what it means to me, and I’ve found myself uninterested at best. So we share stuff. Big damn deal. There’s so much content being shared to me that I ignore almost all of it now, at least compared to what I was consuming a year ago. No offense to any of my contacts, but I’ve reached the point where enough is enough, and while all that firehose of content is still in my input stream, I’ve altered my patterns to only consume what’s relevant to my interests at that moment.

For example, tweets are skimmed while walking up the stairs (Confession #1: Or when I’m in the restroom. Hey, just being honest), but hundreds of messages may be ignored if I decide to do something more interesting for a weekend. Neglected RSS feeds pile up to the dreaded 1000+ mark. I used to have a level of background stress because I was “behind,” but after learning that I’m no worse off without this information, I now have no regrets using the “mark all as read” button with reckless abandon.

The content’s there, now make it relevant.

While too much content isn’t a bad thing (until you reach the point where you’re so unable to manage it that it becomes easier to ignore), I didn’t bring up the previous rant and confession to focus on content filtering. I think that’s a problem to be solved with some sort of relevancy engine, something that reads in your context, available resources, and attention profile, and feeds you the data that’s most useful to you at that moment. But even that intelligently consumed content can be made much more useful if I have a highly customized layer to help me organize my own meaning for that data.

But there’s bookmarking tools, you might say. And tags. With these tools, you can organize content however you want. To be honest, I could never get started using bookmarking services until just a few months ago when I started using Mento.info, because it has a nice balance between the metadata robustness of a bookmarking service and the relevant content highlighting of a tumblelog. (Confession #2:  the first service was actually ma.gnolia, but only for a few heavily-frequented topics. And all those links are gone now, bless ma.gnolia’s heart.)

Bookmarking services are flexible, but that also means they’re very generic. Their biggest flaw is that even when given the option of clipping content, you’re recording a copy of what someone else said or likes or thinks is useful. What if I like the author’s advice, but find that it doesn’t work for me 100%? Feedback can be shared publicly in comments, but they’re merely a footnote to the original content.

The first step of social media was to make everything public; the next step is to make it more applicable to your individual situation.

I’ve come up with an idea I call a personal information layer. This data layer is a different concept than annotation as found in services like Diigo, where users’ adjustments float like post it notes. The personal information layer should look and interact just like the original content, but customized to the preferences for an individual user. Recipes are a good example. I may like much more sage than the original author called for, or perhaps my oven requires an additional 10 minutes cooking time. The content is way more valuable to me when I can alter it according to my taste and needs.

Remixing is hard enough now. What happens to copyright in an Internet like this?

This question felt a lot easier to deal with when I was trying to keep the data in the personal information layer truly personal (read: private), but it just won’t work that way (Confession #3:  also, I loathe the idea of building another social graph). Even individual adjustments to public content is useful data, so there’s value in sharing it. But this will be harder to defend than deep linking and reblogging…this is making potentially minor changes to someone else’s otherwise verbatim content and collecting it all under your own name. Simultaneously collecting and customizing data is another step towards the ideal Internet, but at what point does Emeril’s pie recipe become Brittany’s pie recipe? What’s the significance if it was Kathy’s version before Brittany saw it?

I can’t predict how the Internet community will respond to any of these challenges; I don’t think anyone can until a demo is released in the wild to see how people react. And of course, I wouldn’t go through the trouble of documenting all these questions and ideas if I didn’t have a hell of a use case I hope Dave and I have time to experiment with over the summer.

What’s a DevCamp?
We haven’t had many developer camps in San Diego, but they’re like a BarCamp centered around creating applications on a common platform or language.  Users just like you will lead sessions covering everything from basic functionality, differences between the Pre and existing Palm devices (and the iPhone!), brainstorming sessions, and lots of group hacking time.  From what we know about the Pre’s webOS so far, applications are written in super easy HTML and CSS, so just about anyone should be able to get up and running after an intro session to the webOS SDK.  But even if HTML ain’t your style, we’ll need people to come up with application ideas and help test the code other people create.  Palm will also be releasing an emulator, so you can still participate even if you can’t buy the hardware before the event.  If you’re a creative type and have been getting excited about the Pre, you need to sign up now!

Help wanted!
If you’re interested in throwing conventional organization out the window and helping find a venue and some sponsors, don’t forget to check that pretty little volunteer box on the registration page so I’ll know to get in touch with you.  If you’re interested in sponsoring, contact me and Giovanni Gallucci.

Watch the preDevCamp San Diego blog and the @preDevCamp twitter account for further information, and start spreading the word now that San Diego’s going to kick some webOS development ass sometime in the next five months!

It all started when I received a message on Flickr inviting me to participate in a photography contest on a saltwater aquarium site.  I have a ton of great images from the California Academy of Sciences that I could submit, so decided to check it out.  The rules are pretty standard, but the following declaration they requested gave me cause for alarm:

I YOUR NAME certify that I am the author and sole owner of the material I am submitting to Aquariumslife.com. I understand and agree that Aquariumslife.com may use my material anywhere on Aquariumslife.com. I understand and agree that Aquariumslife.com may resize my material if needed. I understand and agree that I remain the owner of the Copyright of all material submited [sic] to Aquariumslife.com and that a Copyright notice will be add [sic] to my picture.

Copyright notice will be added this way: ⓒ YOUR NAME 2008.

This immediately reminded me of Flickr users who go out of their way to add those copyright notices to their photos and specify that all rights are reserved, do not use without permission, etc.  I respect that some people need to maintain extremely tight control, but being so limited in how I can share these works (and link back to them) drastically reduces their art’s value to me.  The copyright symbol is a mark of disgrace, and I want nothing to do with it.

I mentioned my predicament on Twitter and got some enlightening (and memory jogging) responses.  I remember now how copyright is automatic and exists for all creative works.  It means that you have control of the work, but the copyright (and the copyright symbol) isn’t what makes someone a creative dictator or anarchist.  The license is what specifies how others can use the work.  That license can be all rights reserved or one of the Creative Commons licenses, but the copyright still exists.

I think why this was a point of confusion for me is because I’ve never seen ⓒ specified on a photo without the intent of all rights reserved, and I didn’t want the stigma of a more restrictive license just because of this contest.  I wrote the organizer back to say that I would prefer that my photos not be watermarked at all, or to use CC-BY-SA if they must add something.  I may be over-drawing the line, but there’s no shame in defending your principles.

What is @sdjobs?
@sdjobs is a Twitter account that publicizes Internet technology jobs in the San Diego area, keeps the community updated on the job market and layoff announcements, and offers general job hunting tips.  I’ll also provide some much needed sanity checks by pointing out how unreasonable some job descriptions are.  Searching for a new job is never easy,  and I want to help keep San Diego’s spirits up and let people know that they’re not alone.

Why Twitter?  Why not just start a mailing list?
Because Twitter is a notification system built inside a social network.  With Twitter, users have more options for where and when they receive updates.  A casual job hunter may only want to check the web page every once in a while, but someone trying to get an interview for a competitive position may want to be updated as soon as possible.  Mailing lists only send email, requiring the user to search for third party tools to get this kind of flexibility.

How you can help
Even if you’re not looking for a new job, one of your friends probably is or will be in the near future.  The best way you can help is to be prepared with leads and advice…and let me tell ya, it’s way hella cool to watch someone’s face light up when you send them a job lead.  And I am but a cat herder, so I can only do so much without you cats sending in job openings at your company and relevant content that you stumble upon.

I picked Rosie the Riveter as my icon to communicate a very specific message.  As the global economy begins it’s death spiral, local communities will have to band together tighter than ever before to support ourselves during the impending collapse.  No government bailouts can help us more than we can help each other.

We can do it, San Diego.

When I came home from work tonight, I noticed a strange burning smell. It got stronger as I walked towards my apartment, and soon I heard a smoke detector going off. I walked around a bit to pinpoint the source, and sure enough I found an apartment that had a funny burning smell (no smoke or flames).

I knew I had to do something but wasn’t sure what the appropriate course of action was, so I called Dave and asked him to txt me the number of the San Diego fire department. But that number only works during business hours, so I decided I had no choice to go ahead and dial 911 (which I’ve never had to do before). I told the dispatcher what was going on, and just a few minutes later there were SIX fire trucks pulling up. I didn’t say it was an emergency when the 911 system prompted me and told the dispatcher there wasn’t even any smoke, but apparently the fire department doesn’t mess around.

Turns out there had been a pot left on the stove, so they turned it off, squirted some stuff to help “eat” the smoke, and vented the apartment out with a fairly big gas powered fan. No harm done.

What bothers me though, is that while talking with the other neighbors who came to see what was going on, a couple of them had heard the alarm and smelled smoke, but didn’t take action. Middle-aged, seemingly intelligent adults. Now I admit I didn’t know exactly what to do at first, but at least I knew not to ignore it.

Tomorrow I’m going to mention this incident to the onsite manager, and ask that they send out a flyer that outlines who to call in different kinds of situations, what constitutes an emergency, list of phone numbers, etc. I used to have recurring nightmares of my house burning down when I was a kid, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to live in a complex where neighbors are too uneducated or too apathetic to show stewardship for the building we all share.

PS: What’s foreshadowingly creepy is that I just remembered that I was listening to NPR’s Performance Today show on the drive home, which happened to be a fire-themed episode (and had some great covers of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire).

The premise for I Did Stuff lies in the belief that we’re tracking so many aspects of our life now that computers need to not only make sense of this data for our own use, but also use it to deliver status on demand. One common example I’ve used is that of the “reverse twitter”…basically to combine Google calendar, IM status, and whole host of other data sources into one remotely queryable interface. And anyone can ask this interface “Where is Dave?” and receive a response like “Well he isn’t in front of IM, but he has class in 10 minutes, so he might be in transit. But his phone is on the charger, so he either forgot his phone or is oversleeping.”

Which was a great idea a year ago, and as far as I know still hasn’t been done. But since then, this idea has grown into so much more. Not only do we want to create an AI who can infer status for others, we want it to learn more about us than we know ourselves.

A few months ago I decided to try a little experiment, which was inspired by a conversation with Tantek in which he stated that RSS feeds aren’t even a part of his personal communication stack…everything he needs to know he hears from his social graph via twitter. Frustrated that I had just declared RSS bankruptcy, I wondered if I was spending too much time keeping up with what other people were doing…time that could instead be invested into bringing my own ideas to fruition. Although all blogs other than those of a few close friends were cut out of my daily reads, what came to be known as the TechCrunch Experiment was born. And although initially liberating, I quickly found that my particular social graph wasn’t feeding me enough of the right kind of data items to keep me motivated; after a few months, I found my new idea generation rate (or at least my idea improvement rate) went almost to zero. My creative juices ran dry when operating in an RSS free vacuum.

This makes sense because I then realized I build my Twitter contacts around keeping up with peoples’ lives, and had built my RSS feeds around keeping up with news. So even though I didn’t end up being able to save time, I’d say it’s still pretty good to know what fuels you, right?

For a more recent example (recent = correlated today), I occasionally have a problem with not eating. More along the lines of forgetting to rather than an eating disorder, but we all have our vices. I’ll not eat well for a few days and get lethargic and depressed and wonder wtf is wrong. Now this sounds like a fairly simple correlation, but with everything else going on in life it can be hard to notice if you’re not paying close attention. So I today I purchased a cheap glucose monitor (along with not-so-cheap test strips, jeez) to track this one dimension of how my diet affects my energy and moods. All I’ve learned over the past 24 hours is that I just need to EAT, but seeing concrete evidence of this reinforces the consequence of my actions, plus gives me a scale to rate how well I’m doing.

Something like this could be tracked in the personal unit testing system, but the value in this data is more than just binary passing or failing. Lifetracking, lifestats, personal informatics, lifestreaming 2.0…call it what you will, these are MBO’s for life.

These examples represent only a few possibilities, just imagine how many factors influence your mood and performance! Diet, weight and exercise, weather, what time you went to bed, where you are, who you’re spending time with, the projects you’re working on, your social connections (and growth rate), what blogs you’re reading, the music you’re listening to, what applications you’re using, the conferences you’re going to, how long it is until payday…or if you’re Brynn and Chris, the last time you had sex.

This data is already being recorded, we just need a smarter way to use it.

Which is, as they say, a bigger algorithm.

More and more I’m noticing health-conscious people say “I don’t eat soy” with the same self-righteousness with which vegans inform their more barbaric friends that they don’t eat meat, saying that something in soy mimics estrogen and can have noticeable effects on the development of children, especially males. Being as distrustful as I am of the American food system, I bookmarked this snippet for further research.

A quick search informed me that the concern is caused by phytoestrogens, which are plant compounds that are molecularly similar to and therefore can have similar effects as estrogen. Flax seed and other oilseeds contain the highest total phytoestrogen content, followed by soy bean and tofu. The benefits of these foods have been touted in the health food circuit for years, and soybeans have been a major staple of the Chinese diet for oh, five thousand years. And they seem to be doing just fine.

Yes, “science works, bitches,” but the history of nutrition science has proven time and time again that it cannot match the knowledge and efficiency of thousands of years of eating. Any Michael Pollan reader can tell you that the problem with nutrition science lies within the name of the practice itself — based on the way scientists need to remove or control every variable besides the one they are testing, they are forced to take nutrients out of the context of food and food out of the context of culture, removing systems that have evolved with us ever since humans started eating. Why should I suddenly (and by suddenly, I mean within the last 100 years) need a scientist to tell me what to eat?

Now here’s where I confess that this post started as a simple tumblelog link to the wikipedia page on phytoestrogens that grew into a rant too long for Tumblr’s description field. I don’t have the answer that could explain why our recent scientific development has never slowed the Chinese down, but I think the point I’m trying to make here is that I don’t care.

Or maybe I’m just trying to validate why I shouldn’t feel guilty about my brand new soymilk maker.

Edit: Further research has uncovered that Kaayla T. Daniel, the author of the “answer” article linked above, has also written a book with the same title. A number of helpful amazon reviewers have uncovered that Daniel and her publisher are both very closely associated with the Weston A. Price association, which includes raw milks and high meat consumption among their advocacies. The reviewers are quite critical of the author’s apparent lack of objectivity, but I found the site to be largely in line with a lot of my current ideologies (avoid products of food science, choose local organic etc etc etc). A number of reviewers also replied that Daniel has cited poorly formulated and cherry picked studies to create a very one-sided argument against soy. Reader beware.

This is the joy of Creative Commons for me…artists helping artists who only want to make people happy. Remix and enjoy!

Edit: Just noticed that another photo from the same set was published as well. Wow. :)

Individually wrapped awesome on a stick, originally uploaded by Lisa Brewster.

So ever since Dr. Horrible’s SingAlong Blog came out, Dave’s been flouncing around like a hero singing “A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do.” So much that I decided it was going to be his birthday theme. At first my plan was to order a Dr. Horrible themed cake, but that proved rather problematic to arrange from San Diego. Fortunately, I found an awesome website called Veronica’s Treats that will print whatever you want on cakes, brownies, and cookies and ship anywhere in the US. The only shippable cakes were rather small, and I wanted something he could share, so the sugar cookies on a stick were perfect.

Ordering was really easy. Select the item you want, customize a few color choices for icing, ribbons, and sprinkles, then checkout. Reply to the order confirmation email with your image attached. I finalized my design in photoshop first, but you can also send in a photo that they can spruce up and add text to. A live preview would have been nice, but I have no complains with my results trusting a human to tweak for best cookie-printing results.

Shipping was true to schedule (I picked standard UPS ground), but best to submit an order a couple of weeks before you need them if you’re trying to have them in time for an important event.

And the cookies tasted awesome, so as long as you can bear watching someone eat your precious design, you can be comfortable actually serving these to guests who still value taste over novelty.

Since I’m still in withdrawal from having to send back my N95 that got me addicted to Qik, I’ve been squirming like crazy ever since new mobile vlogging service 12seconds.tv went into public alpha yesterday morning. I got my invite today, and immediately fell in love. While Qik is great for interacting with viewers while streaming live events, 12seconds really is an easy, mobile twitter for video. As someone who has interesting content to create but no time to muck around with video editing, 12seconds takes the pressure off even more by only allowing “12 seconds” of content. The brief time limit also has the benefit of removing inhibitions to vlogging, since posters don’t feel intimidated by the need to engage someone’s attention for minutes at a time.

Oh, and you don’t have to have any kind of special software to record video. If you’re using the website, a standard flash application will allow you to record from your webcam. But what’s cool is that when you’re out and about, any Internet enabled cell phone that records video can send your update to a special email address. Everyone can use this.

So even though you only have to be interesting in 12 second bursts now, you still want people to watch these vidlets. You can follow friends within the system and automatically update twitter when you’ve posted a new video, plus there’s pages for all recent and popular videos. Users can leave comments, but there’s no way to reply with your own video (yet, I assume). But 12seconds already understands that the more people use these posts off their site, the happier their users will be and the faster their site will grow. They’ve developed two sizes of blog widgets that you can use now, and one would assume FriendFeed integration is coming soon. I’m trying to pull my 12seconds RSS feed into my recently resumed tumblelog, but not having luck yet…I’m sure I can hack something up. =]

Verdict: There’s definitely room for both Qik and 12seconds, at least in my mobile toolkit.

Adelle (she’s another Zivity model) and me at Cyan’s “French Fries Non-Stop” birthday party at Frjtz in San Francisco last weekend.

To spare you the drama of wondering what happens in the video above…I didn’t make it to the next round.  But that’s ok!  As I’ve said before, in the past few weeks I’ve learned so much about myself, my abilities, and where I thought my limits were that I wouldn’t trade that knowledge for all the followers on twitter.

This experience has changed how I approach my life, and for that reason alone this contest is a personal success for me.

And support!  God, I would have turned around and went home before even making it to the Mahalo offices on the first day if it wasn’t for my dear friends who really and truly make me feel like I’m selling myself short for not following my dreams (yes, that’s quite cheesy…deal with it).  Specifically, I couldn’t have done anything without my partner in crime and vegan ice cream hunter David Horn (actually, he’s the sole reason why I’ve eaten anything since April), Brynn Evans for being one of my favorite people on the planet, Alex Kawas because months ago he planted the first seed of thought that I should shoot for an opportunity like this if it ever came up, my amazing role model and mentor Cyan Banister, Patrick Crowley for keeping me sane, Declan Fleming for being the absolute best at finding something nice to say about me, Larry aka ConnectedGeek for stepping in as my Chief Strategy Officer, and my mother for keeping me more informed on how the contest is progressing than even the Mahalo production staff.  You all mean the world to me.

You know you can count on your friends, but what I never counted on was the support from hundreds of people who were activated to form the Lisa Nation.  My twitter follower count has gone up by something like 200 people, there are 57 people in the fan club ConnectedGeek started, at some point my website went up from PR4 to PR5, and my original contestant photo got almost 70 responses all in my favor.  This is many orders of magnitude more attention than any other contestant has generated so far, which has left me both shocked and flattered.  I mean, really…wow.  Thank you.

So now we’re all left with a bit of a problem.  A lot of people were rooting for me in this contest, but I don’t want anyone to feel let down or lose interest just because I’m out of the running.  Someone else still has to win, and from what I know public opinion will matter for the final round in some capacity.  So who should we vote for instead?

If you spend any length of time around me at all, you’ll quickly learn that I care a lot about this little concept called community, especially in San Diego.  Community means nothing if you’re not supporting and promoting those in your network, so my choice for the next host is an easy decision to make.  Kristina Allison also comes to Mahalo with no podcasting experience, but she’s a rockstar so that’s ok.  Referred to as the “dark horse” in previous rounds, the judges saw a fight in her that was worth investing in to see what she could do in the next round.  And as you can see in the video above, Kristina has pulled to the lead and definitely started to kick some ass.  San Diegans and netizens alike, I encourage you to join me in supporting Kristina as she produces her own Mahalo Daily episode this week.  Stay tuned for updates on where the voting will take place!

As for my own plans, seeing that people are inspired by the ideas I want to evangelize has in turn inspired me to seek out other opportunities to connect on this level even more.  The whole reason I joined this contest was to take my career in a drastically new direction, and because of you guys I can see that future starting to take shape.  I may not be materializing at Mahalo, but this girl still has a few good cards tucked in her stocking.

My interview for round two was published last night! I’m the third contestant…just look for the girl with the Microformats logo. This is the first time I’ve even watched my segment, and it’s unbelievably exhilarating to see myself fitting into this kind of role. It’s felt like ages since I last filmed up at the Mahalo offices for this, and now I’m so excited again that I can’t wait to go back!

What do you think? Let me and Mahalo know in the YouTube comments.

Screw the learning and the sharing and the open and all that new age Internet crap. This is what barcamp is really all about.

One of the shirts Patrick is donating to the Schwag Swap at BCSD tomorrow.

But almost as soon as I got in my car after today’s shooting was over, I realized that we’re all forgetting to mention a critical component here.  The perfect host balances not two skills but three - podcasting, geekiness, and the ability to make the Internet take notice of the Mahalo brand.

That being said, I would like to hereby announce the official launch of my campaign for Mahalo Vlog Idol.  However, I am but one girl and can’t conquer alone, so I need your help to change the future of the Internet forever.

I need a Lisa Nation.

As one person yourself, you may be wondering what you can do to help.  Troops, this is your rally point.  Leave a comment on this Flickr image telling Jason Calacanis and the world that I’m the only logical choice to fill Veronica’s shoes.  But don’t stop there…keep the whole web buzzing with discussion regarding the search for a new host.  Use whatever social networks you have at your disposal with an extreme lack of prejudice.  Follow me on Twitter.  Start a Facebook group.  Write haikus and recite them on YouTube.  Tell the world how the search makes you feel on Get Satisfaction.

But what about IRL?  It should go without saying that I think schwag is a fabulous promotional technique, so I’m having 1000 of these stickers printed up:

Put one on your laptop, your moleskine, your car, your cat, whatever.  Just do something with them and make sure they go on Flickr with a lisanation tag (and mahalo and vlogidol).  I’ll be sending these out in a special package for all Startup Schwag subscribers ASAP, and I’ll send a free sticker to anyone who sends a SASE to the address listed below.  Is this cheating?  Maybe, but it’s a tool I have at my disposal and I’m damn sure going to take advantage of it.

I’m bringing my A-game, and I’m going to have the whole Internet with me.

For the stickers (and maybe some other random schwag I’ve got lying around if I get randy about it), just send a self-addressed stamped envelope to this address:

Since SASE is a two-way communication, feel free to send me stuff and I’ll post it on my own flickr stream.  And yes, this is my real home address.  If you come stalk me, I can and will say ugly things about you on the Internet.

Venture forth, my countrymen.  I did my best to win your hearts over the weekend…the power lies in your hands now.