Thanks Gunjian

Unrelatedly, I just learned that Gunjian Electric & Whalebone Corporation signed up for another sponsorship of the ScoobieCast. This means I can bring you another thousand hours of totally independent and unbiased tech conversations.

KEITH

Wow! Gunjian’s hard disk division has come up with something game-changing.

It’s built around a 10Gb hard disk – which means it’s already 2Gb up on the iPhone (j/k Steve – good to see that you link, unlike Engadget, which doesn’t link).

But it also has an LED to tell you when the disk is full, and a serial port. Gunjian has released APIs to allow other companies to integrate their devices with the KEITH (Kool Endogenous Information & Tips Handler).

Weight is only 4.2kg, and battery life is 4-6 hours of a single D cell.

My favourite feature: it can sense fear.

This short 49 minute taster is the pre-pre-announcement video, so it’s mainly some PR guy from Gunjian explaining how the company is going to use KEITH to position its hard drives as a “trusted budget luxury lifestyle” brand, and only 39 seconds of the actual product. The pre-announcement video, with a slightly longer demo of KEITH, won’t be posted until after it’s unveiled at the JamGadge conference next week.

Still, beats reading some rewritten press release, huh?

I’ve had enough of this whole debate about whether everyone should link to all of my posts or just some of them. Let’s bury the hatchet, OK guys?

Not everyone hates me. I’ve received some kind words from my friends Jonathan Sanderson (“He’d post a whole lot less if he edited out the dull bits” – thanks man!) and John Gruber, who points out this hilarious parody blog.

Introducing “Drinking with Dorks”

There’s a new sort of social networking event that a few people have tipped me off about. It’ s kind of like LinkedIn, except that you meet offline in small groups of about 6 people. You eat food and drink alcohol while talking IRL about the latest great Gunjian technology.

I think this “dinner party” network could be the next Orkut.

Check out the first episode of “Drinking with Dorks”, my new socianetwovodcast! This episode features Randy Socom, CEO-in-chief of NetWonkNews, Steve Llagerub, the man who invented the “refresh button” and is now acting CEO of RefreshWorks, and Mary Carey, meta-CEO of Dibble.

Dibble was only founded three days ago and today it announced a new business model: to monetise the ecosystem around the “dinner party” meme by selling advertising on spoons and placemats, so Mary had some particularly interesting things to say. You can’t really hear them because I found that leaving the microphone next to the candles isn’t such a good idea. Hey, when it comes to recording video, we’re all still learning.

If you want short “YouTube”-style videos, this is not for you, but there are brief moments of intelligible conversation about 34 minutes in, and later at the 3hr49 mark. I think Steve really nails why Google is in so much trouble lately.

Scoobie smear campaign!

Wow, Valleywag has accused me of being a paid shill for Gunjian Whalebone & Electric Company.

I’m not a shill. My exclusive video report on Gunjian was an objective piece of investigative journalism (it’s not my fault they make the best budget capacitors on the market!) but I guess in the spirit of “naked conversations” I should have disclosed a few things.

It’s all very simple. Gunjian is a sponsor of my employer, BubbleRapCasts Inc. But it does not sponsor my podcasts, allowing me to maintain editorial independence. In addition, BubbleRapCasts Inc is now a fully-owned subsidiary of Gunjian, but Gunjian has not bought me any cars or houses since the acquisition officially completed. Gunjian does allow me to have all the capacitors I need, but I don’t fit them in anything I personally use or look at them while uploading any of my video reports. I always bring my own sandwiches.

I think you’ll agree that disclosing this makes it clear that I’m just a regular guy, having conversations with a few friends and uploading them in full.

Compare this sort of transparency with what you get in the mainstream media, with their “adverts” and “features” and “advertising features” and tricksy “editing”. You won’t see any of that from me.

OK Denton you asshole?

Do bloggers have the right not to link to me?

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among the A-list blogs. Very few of them linked to my exclusive four-hour video tour of Intel’s new chip plant, preferring instead to briefly mention that Intel has invented a new type of chip.

Admittedly my video wasn’t very interesting at first, but if you look closely at the 2:13 mark, you can see a man in one of those bunny suits (think Intel ads rather than Donnie Darko!!!) walk past the window carrying some kind of high-tech tool. It’s not that clear because I dripped sweat on the lens again, but it’s there.

Even better were the interviews I got, which revealed that:

* computers are powered by silicon-based circuits, or “chips”
* these new “chips” are smaller and will go faster
* the “chips” are made in a “fab”
* Intel can’t say too much about it because it’s secret!

Why is no-one interested in my 4-hour video tour?

Engadget didn’t link. Gizmodo didn’t link. Michael Arrington pushed and pinched and hurt my arm.

Muslim

Oh yeah, I saw on memeorandum confirmation that Obama will be our first Muslim president, which I totally called last week.

Why doesn’t he have a MySpace or something for us to ask him about what being a Muslim is all about? Lame.

Meeting your heroes

An amazing day at the Bubble365 conference where I met my hero Robert X. Cringely. This is the guy who first predicted the Google Cube – you know, that TiVo/VoiP/iTunes replacement in a neat epoxy box that plugs into all your existing equipment and Google sends through the post for free… They don’t have those where you are yet?

I realized that he is better than me in every way and has a more expensive camera and sometimes shoots videos that people watch almost all the way through.

Thanks to Edimax for sponsoring my innovative trip to take some photos of trains, which had a peak reach of over 20 people! They even gave me some free CD-Rs which they have exclusively told me are better than everyone else’s! Buy them!

Only bloggers vote

I think we can all agree that getting the most blog links is going to determine who wins the next election. I mean, I followed the “white guy” candidate around for almost two days, before eventually some secret service guys asked me to leave. You can see the full completely unedited 40-hour video via my employer BubbleTalk – although I somehow had the “fun solarise” effect turned on for the first couple of hours of footage.

Anyway, that was the making of this Edwards guy, who I don’t think anyone had heard of before I discovered him.

That’s why it makes me so mad that Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to be checking her Technorati profile and joining the growing online conversation about her panties on blogs like my friend Estan Esterhazy’s “XBox and Stuff”.

Obama went with some other company to do his podcast and videos, the stupid asshole. And none of it’s in HD! I guess he’s lost my vote.

Racism is everywhere

You know what really pisses me off? It looks like Barack Obama is going to throw his hat into the ring. He’s in the running to become our first Muslim president, if I understand it correctly.

When I talk to people about it I do a clever little test – I throw in a racist remark to see if they’re racist. Sometimes I say that it’s too bad there’s still so much racism in the USA. Sometimes I just say that he looks a little dusky to be a good candidate.

It’s interesting to see people’s reactions. Not once has anyone directly called me on my racism. Oh sure, they’ll look a bit uncomfortable and change the subject, or call me a fat-faced dilletante idiot, but I get that all the time. Sometimes they’ll even agree that racism still exists in this country! Acknowledging the possibility of other people’s racism – what I call “stealth racism” or “racism by anonymizing proxy”- is the worse kind of racism of all.

I’ve done this test on almost ten of my top blog-chums – and these are the people who are going to decide the next election! I hear that even the black guy has done a website for his campaign.

I’m sick of people not realising how racist I am. How about you?

So tired

I’m just about done covering CES. Sorry about the polonium thing, but you try working 22 hour days getting exclusive videos with top technology opinion makers and see how it affects your ability to tell fantasy from reality.

I have lots of videos of my lovely blogfriends – I think I remembered to take the lens cap off for most of them this time. I will upload them sometime next week – my favourite is a 5-hour interview with the CEO of my sponsor, Gunjian Whalebone & Electric Company, where we tackle a range of topics including his firm’s new range of iPod cases, golf, whisky and how our kids are doing. Sure beats relying on the outmoded MSM for news, doesn’t it?

Loren Feldman gave me some crap about my videos being “long and boring”, but now we are friends so I guess he realised he was mistaken.

Also, what’s up with Apple not giving me a couple of days of Steve Jobs’ time to do an indepth vodiocast? Not talking to bloggers is just another form of racism. I have bought several Macs and I don’t think anyone can question my insight into the iPhone (apart from the polonium thing, and I already said I was tired) . Some guy who works for the old, dead media with their outmoded “fact-checking” got the scoop. Go figure.