I trust technology more than I could ever trust religion, government, and because I have a bit of Aspergers, I trust technology more than I trust in personal relationships. The constant purpose of technology is to work to improve life and solve problems. After technology, the thing I love is show business. I cherish the idea of people working to entertain.

In the last 100 years, we’ve seen technology transform transportation and manufacturing. In the last 60 years, technology created new forms of entertainment. Big, strong companies with expensive equipment and distribution systems worked to build bridges between content creators and content consumers. In the last 20 years, technology has begun to disintermediate the big, powerful systems of content distribution that produced physical products like books, records, cassettes, CDs, video tapes, DVDs and films. Change is hard and the established power of the entertainment industry wants to protect territory that no longer exists. Entertainment executives are like kings in a castle building motes to protect rejected authority.

It’s hard to let go of systems that worked well and made money. Trust me! I know how hard that is! Ultimately businesses created to produce, sell and distribute analog media products will have invent new business models or go out of business. So far the entertainment industry has been willing to spend massive amounts of money to try to stop technology. With PIPA and SOPA, they got close.

The entertainment business is holding on too tight and focused too much on the good ‘ol days. The sooner they embrace and work with the evolution of technology and the inevitability of change the sooner they’ll enjoy opportunity provided by innovation. Tech doesn’t want to compete with entertainment. Tech wants to invent new possibilities. The dispute over SOPA and PIPA shows tech culture has matured enough to have political muscle, but tech culture doesn’t want to have to deal with that nonsense. It’s an inefficient distraction from the work that matters.

Technology will ultimately win because technology constantly evolves to break through barriers and limitations. The culture that creates tech routes around anything or anyone who says no, don’t, stop, or can’t. Resistance is futile.

There are a couple major challenges I have being on camera. So far, my biggest problem is bringing enough energy to my presentation. My natural speaking voice is very soft. I kick it up when I talk to strangers. I have to kick it up even more when I talk through a camera. It’s a matter of practice. I’ll get there quick enough. The other challenge for me is a tendency to talk with my hands. People found it distracting on episode 1, especially since my hands don’t necessarily relate to what I’m saying.

In episode 2, which I’m editing now, I calm my hands. It turns out, though, there is some degree of correlation between how much my hands move and the amount of energy I put in my voice. It will be interesting to see if anyone notices that.

When you watch the first episode, I hope you’ll be reminded of the spirit and humor of GeekBrief.TV, and I hope you’ll get a sense of where I’m going with the show. I’m starting with a look back at some of my favorite gadgets, in different categories, from the last year. Tomorrow, I’ll start covering CES remotely the way we did with GeekBrief.TV.

I’m a pretty harsh self-critic, and I have to read the advice Ira Glass from This American Life gives to creatives from time to time …

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” -Ira Glass

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

The first few episodes of The Gadget Report will have flaws, but they’ll give you a taste of what I’ve imagined. It will take a bit of time to work out a workflow that isn’t interminable. I like making extremely produced shows. That takes a lot of time. Episode 1 took at least 20 hours to post-produce. I’m building template elements that are already helping me speed things up. My goal is for it to take six hours from writing to upload. It may take months to get to that point. I expect to release an episode approximately every other day.

If you haven’t seen the first episode of GadgetReport.TV, please watch it now and help me spread the word. Subscribe and give thumbs up at Youtube, and then subscribe in iTunes once it’s available there as a podcast later this week! I appreciate you giving it a shot and need your help in matchmaking the show with the audience that will enjoy it!

The script and transparent .png files of gadgets I cover will be available at GadgetReport.TV / episode number, so for example the script and images for episode 1 of The Gadget Report is at GadgetReport.TV/1.

Robert Scoble saw it and said, “WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW.”

As we move toward the next election, the paid pundits on the left and the right tell us it’s going to be Romney V. Obama, even though very few Republicans give a damn about Romney. I gotta say it’s weird for me because I’m a social liberal and a fiscal conservative and that’s what Romney’s record suggests he is too. I just don’t believe him. He comes across as 97% inauthentic. I’ve experienced enough of that in my personal life to know it when I see it.

The other night, I decided to watch the Republican debate. I put out a few tweets and then got one back from someone pretending to be named Jen Littlefield. The twitter names is jPENNAME!!! This person may tweet again, but hasn’t tweeted sense he or she tweeted,

@nealcampbell are you looking for an actor or a president. Why do people always want their candidates to sound like Dr. Phil. Geesh.

Now think about that for a second. This woman or man posting as a woman is defending a Republican presidential candidate by dissing actors? Most loyal Republicans believe our greatest president was Ronald Reagan. I think that account came from the Romney campaign, and I think it’s 100% fake.

I responded to @jpenname with two tweets:

@jpenname your twitter account is as fake as Romney. Let fake fail always.

and

It’s not so surprising that Romney’s campaign would use fake twitter accounts to make his campaign even more fake @jpenname.

The thing I like about new media is the push for authenticity. Everything else can be laughed away.

Here’s the dream for any new media producer. When we’re able to shoot in 4K and get that video to anyone who wants to watch it on a mobile phone or IMAX sized screen within minutes (even better live), then we have a real revolution.

I read about a company today on Techcrunch called latakoo. The story is a group of journalists joined some tech guys to fix a problem. We’ve got gear to shoot amazing footage. Moving that footage from one part of the world to another without lots of quality loss or lots of time to wait makes what we do frustrating. Latakoo says they’re solving that problem.

The best way I can explain how cool this is is to give you a hypothetical case study. With GeekBrief.TV, we never covered CES by going there. It’s expensive to go, and I’m a cheapskate. I was only willing to go if we could get the expense sponsored, but that wasn’t possible because of our deal with Mevio. We covered CES by making several short episodes of GeekBrief.TV based on news coming out of CES.

Here’s the deal, though … there were lots of people attending CES that would have gladly served as GeekBrief.TV corespondents. There was no way to get high quality video from Vegas to Dallas in an amount of time that would have been good enough to make the kind of show I wanted to make.

Latakoo has built a system for moving great quality video from source to production quickly.

I haven’t tried latakoo, but what I read about them sounds like just what wasn’t possible when we were covering events remotely. I hope to have an opportunity to work with this company on a future product because they’re meeting a need in a really important way.

Marc Andreessen offers answers questions from a Stanford audience about topics from the state of VC and the stock market, to Facebook’s market dominance, to the rebirth of consumer electronics.

The film is about Josh Harris. Harris made a lot of money in the early .com days. He had a vision for Internet TV back when most of us were still on dial-up. He started a company called Pseudo.com and when his personality made investors uncomfortable, he moved on to invent lifecasting. He and his girlfriend lived in a loft with cameras and microphones everywhere until the experiment cost them his money, their relationship, and maybe some sanity.

For about a year before we launched GeekBrief.TV, I studied attention economics in an effort to understand how to share information people can get from a wide variety of sources in a way that is special enough that they would want to get it from us. As a shy, retreating, bookish couple, we had to stretch outside our comfort zone in order to accomplish our goal. It helped immensely that Luria has that special something when she’s on camera. Stretching beyond what felt comfortable enabled us to accomplish what I thought we could.

Tools of social media give us all access to the world any time we want it. It’s then up to us to choose how much we live in public. As Luria and I walk through the pain of ending our marriage, it feels improper to talk about the personal stuff and disingenuous to say nothing at all. Our goal is to make it through this gracefully. I’m inclined to share my personal pain because it has helped me to read other people’s stories. Anytime I do that though, I have to do it in a way that is respectful of Luria’s desire for privacy. It’s tricky so my default is now set to Not Share.

Everything we’re going through is new. I’m sure we’ll both make mistakes. I’m more sure I’ll make more mistakes than she will. I’m not convinced it was the right thing to announce this on our blogs. I just don’t know, but one thing she and I both believe is that the geek world is better than the cool world because geeks are concerned about perfecting our tech while accepting one another just as we are. Beyond that, living in public is a tricky proposition, so if you choose to do it, it’s probably best to proceed with caution.

Writing the show hasn’t changed much except that Luria writes much more than she did when she was here. It’s been interesting to see the different types of stories she chooses than me. I tend to write about gadgets. She tends to write about tech news and Web services like Google Docs. The Brief we will release today is about stuff we both wanted to cover. I wrote some of today’s show yesterday, some this morning and she wrote some to. Because of Google Docs, it’s always been easy to collaborate on a script.

After the script is done, Luria shoots it herself. She has our lights and the camera and the teleprompter. She shoots in front of a green screen in one take with one fixed shot and then she transfers one HUGE file to me, via FTP. The uncompressed footage is typically 4-8GB per episode. Sometimes it takes five hours, and really, that’s the biggest downside of the setup.

I have all the editing gear. As I download the file, I do preproduction graphics that will be used in the episode. When I have the file, I drag it into Final Cut Pro. It usually takes less than an hour to edit. Occasionally, when there are unusual graphics or video features in a particular episode, it takes longer.

I compress the show into three formats using Sorenson Squeeze. It does an excellent job, but it’s slow (and expensive). Then I upload the four formats to Mevio and post to the GeekBrief.TV Web site.

Except for news that needs to be more timely the workflow has worked well. It’s always fun to trouble shoot our way through new challenges.

When you start a business you love, you may be tempted to put 100% of your time and energy during waking hours into making it a success. Cali and I have done that with GeekBrief.TV. Even when we took time off from the show, we used the time to work on parts of the business you don’t see. We took that quote, “Find something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” to heart.

The problem is, people aren’t designed to only work. We need rest, and we need play.

Yesterday morning I was listening to the audio version of My Life in France by Julia Child and I got a life lesson. She wrote,

In 1963 I was shooting four episodes of The French Chef a week while also writing a weekly food column for the Boston Globe. In the Fall, we were scheduled to take a break from TV work and had planned to visit Simca and John at their rambling farm house in Provence, but as November hove into view, we began to regret it. The quicksand of my cookery work, Paul’s painting and photography projects and all the mini bits of upkeep and improvement that 103 Irving Street required were sucking at our feet.

‘I just don’t know if we have the time for a trip to France right now,’ I sighed.

Paul nodded, but then we looked at each other and repeated a favorite phrase from our diplomatic days,

‘Remember! No one’s more important than people.’

In other words, friendship is the most important thing–not career or housework or one’s fatigue–and it needs to be tended and nurtured. So we packed up our bags and off we went, and thank heaven we did!

Throughout the last five years we’ve produced Geek Brief, we had similar opportunities and intentions to travel, but we always made the other choice. We prudently decided we should use that time to work on the business. Sure it would be great to go to Italy. I want so bad to go to Scotland. Hey, we should go to Japan and see all the crazy gadgets and have real Ramen! Instead, we opted for the more prudent choice. We stayed home and worked on our business.

Rest and play are the other side of the work coin. You can’t just breath in. You also have to breath out. Lot’s of people look at our story and think it is inspirational, but I hope people will learn from what we got right AND from our mistakes.

Take real breaks. Leave the Mac at home or at least in the hotel room. Enjoy life with friends and enjoy the beauty in the world. Otherwise you’ll just wear yourself out and burn yourself up.