Earlier this week I hosted a Podcaster meeting for this area. I wanted to get to know the Podcasters and maybe strike up a good conversation. You never know who can help who, right?

Anywho I found out about OpenEverything – a meeting of everything ‘Open’. Mostly in a technology realm, but Open can be applied to many other areas. Music, Art, Science, Ferrule….

Now I was planning to be watching the PodcastAwards today, but this was an all-day event. I figured I’d go, then slip out around 30 minutes before the awards and catch both. However, I got so enthralled with the event, I decided to stay. It was only too bad I couldn’t make it when the event started because they had the Berlin event hand it off to us via web conference.

I got there when they were talking about the “Boundries of Open”. We discussed where Open can be applied and why it’s needed.

In the afternoon, we had some break-out groups. The first group I attended, we talked about Media and Journalism. We talked about funding for media sites and issues like Plagiarism of news articles.

The second break-out session was about Art, Content and Property. We talked about sampling, remixing of songs (like that at Girl Talk) and the places one can go to get music that is not illegal to download.

The last session turned into a open discussion of issues. We talked about how Voting systems in the US might be better off in an Open environment. We also talked about Open Records, especially data from sites like Twitter.

All in all it was a great time. I am really glad I went. I met some great new people and got some new ideas about Open. The next #OEMad will be in May. All info is at http://openeverything.wik.is/Madison%2c_WI.

The rest of the week I’ve been pretty much sick and kept my work limited. LIVE Show was a new format as we had a panel on the show. Brian Westbrook and Rick Morgan joined the show as we talked tech. This week we’ll continue with the same format, so watch for who’s coming on the show.

Podcast was a little weird as the recording was not up to par. Normally I would re-record if I felt it wasn’t 100%, but this week I had no ambition, so there is a little clipping. Don’t worry – if it sounded horrible, I would have pulled it outright.

The first official Video review came out this week. We reviewed the XShot camera extender. Pretty cool little item. Next week we’ll have another cool item to review.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully this cough is the last remnants of the 2 week illness. Then it’ll be back to normalcy.