Elanso

Earlier this week, TalkShoe CEO Dave Nelson did a pretty decent (and refreshing) post on reasons to still love audio podcasts. Of course Mashable Conversations listeners (and most Mashable readers) are pretty familiar with our love for the audio format, but there’s still a fair amount of naysayers out there who Internet video is killing the radio star.

It isn’t that we think one form is superior to the other - in fact, we’re pretty in love with both forms of Internet media entertainment. That’s why we’ve been working on a plan for putting together a number of consistent video podcast series here at Mashable. We’re not yet on a consistent release cycle, but we wanted to put a new feed in front of you so that you knew where to tune your podcast clients and DVRs over to once we flip the switch on it.

Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here.

If you tune into the feed now, you’ll presently be directed to Pete’s interview with Chamillionaire (embedded below). Keep it indexed in your readers, though, because more video interviews are in the pipe from Pete, Kristen, myself and Adam Ostrow. For those of you still in love with audio, don’t worry, that version of the show won’t be going anywhere, and will still contain a lot of unique content not found on the video feed.

Why are you in love with audio, though? Maybe you share some of Dave Nelson’s thoughts on the topic:

1) Voice is a much richer form of communication. Text does a poor job of conveying emotions, even with smiley faces. I want to actually hear that you’re enthusiastic, or sad, or sarcastic, or whatever. Hey, our DNA has been wired to TALK across 100,000 years, whereas text is a newfangled tool we haven’t yet fully mastered.

2) Voice is immediate and CAUSES new ideas. How many times have you been talking with a group of people and had totally new ideas emerge — ideas that were not from any ONE person? It’s the wisdom of crowds, to cite a great book.

3) It’s easier to talk than type. No explanation necessary, or at least I don’t have the time to write one out here.

4) (This is the most IMPORTANT one) There’s a big difference between our eyes and ears. When we read text or watch video, we can’t do much else, at least not competently. But when we listen, we can still do almost anything else.

For all my various criticisms of what goes on in podcasting, these are just a few of the reasons I keep at it. A couple more reasons? When I get great interviews like I did earlier this week.

Keith Richman, the CEO of Break.com, last week and speak frankly about the state of the business and where things are headed. This is a very valuable chat to listen to, no matter which side of the online video production business you aim to be on. While the business of online video remains very lucrative for a lucky few producers and a wonderfully successful place to put your advertising dollars, for the vast majority of producers and advertisers, it remains a very difficult minefield to navigate.

Keith and I talked not only about the goals and aim of the ROI council, but the state of the indie producers, and when we’ll start to see that boom for them that bloggers see today. For some, that boom is now, with some of the top paid producers on Break earning several thousand a month.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

In one of the more popular podcasts in recent memory, I had a chance to speak to founder and CEO of New Relic, Lew Cirne, a bit about his organization and exactly where these rumors of unscalability for the Ruby on Rails platform come from.

Rails is known for it’s succinct programming style, where one line of code can be very powerful, and perform very complex tasks. It’s this simplicity that can also be a trap for developers who accidentally can trigger enormous processing tasks with what look like very efficient lines of code.

New Relic’s software as a service offering can analyze these code bits and give exact and graphed out details about what sort of computing time-sinks may exist within the code, and offer suggestions of more efficient ways of executing that same statement.

All in all, it’s a very interesting proposition - if you’re a developer in the Rails environment (or anyone curious about how Rails applications work behind the scenes), you definitely want to catch this episode, as Lew drops some very interesting knowlege on the topic.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Another great conversation was one that I had with Canaan Ventures partner Izhar Shay. I was contacted excitedly by the PR folks over there about a company they’d just invested in, something called Prime Sense. This precocious company seems intent on bringing into existence that technology seen most prevalently in Minority Report - that gesture based stuff.

The way it was described to me was that their intention was to make interfacing with entertainment consoles and personal computers as seamless and natural as interfacing with other human beings (think Minority Report, without the goofy Nintendo Power Glove).

I’ve seen a number of attempts at gesture based interaction, though, and most of them fall flat. The problem, generally, is in the object recognition. To fix this, Prime Sense has done a lot of work in what is essentially compositing and green screen technology. During the development process, they’ve as a side-effect of their work created what Shay described as professional level green-screen technology that will be made available for consumer level prices.

This has the net effect of putting in the hands of independent video producers the technology that has generally been only available to folks with the budget for a $10,000 lighting set-up and a $5,000 Tri-Caster. This is definitely one company to keep an eye on, and definitely one you want to hear more about.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Twing is a relatively new forum search tool that launched back in mid-March. Kristen recently reviewed them, and came to a lot of the same conclusions I did this week, as I sat down with Scott Germaise on an episode of Mashable Conversations this week and gave it a good once over:

As I said at the beginning of our conversation, too, I’m not typically excited or enthralled with vertical search offerings in general, but just sitting down and playing with some ego searches and some brand searches for Mashable, I was able to find a wealth of conversation that previously had been undiscovered by any of my present brand-management feeds I have set up.

Interestingly enough, through their category selection process and the natural self-policing nature of forums, they’ve also a remarkably spam free set of results.

Scott explained a bit of why that is, and gave me an in-depth tour of the features and history of the website, which you can hear in the embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

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