Several people are using Twitter to offer live, on-the-scene commentary on Steve Job’s 2008 Macworld Keynote:

• Tech evangelist Len Edgerly is twittering from the MacWorld keynote, offering an immediate take on the announcements.
• The Macworld twitter feed.
• Ars Electronica’s twitter coverage.

If anybody else on site is Twittering, let us know in the comments.

Thanks, too, to Mike Mills.

The new year feels as though it is off to a galloping start. Barely two weeks into 2008, and we’re bracing for the fourth or fifth batch of big announcements from the fourth or fifth big industry convention in two weeks. This week features the big auto show in Detroit, the music industry convention NAMM in southern California, and the much-anticipated announcements at MacWorld in San Francisco.

Before we rush into the next round of announcements, though, we thought we should take a final at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and highlight the experiences of the podcasters and new media gurus that were there.

There were some common themes in their comments.

• First, several mentioned that they thought that Internet technology was evolving to a point where indie podcasters could cover an event like CES just as well, in text, audio or video, as a traditional media network.
• Second, none were overly “wowed” by announcements at the show.
• Finally, they all expressed disgust at Gizmodo’s TV-B-Gone stunt.

Here are some of their thoughts and links to their personal coverage:

The BBC has announced that their controversial iPlayer on-demand video application has been downloaded over a million times, and that users have viewed over 3.5 million programs.
BBC research reveals that an average of a quarter of a million programs have been downloaded or streamed each day since 25 December.

Users, on average, watch each streamed program for just under 25 minutes, while the number of users choosing to stream content currently outnumbers downloading by a factor of eight to one.

Whilst the top ten most popular programs account for just under a quarter of all those consumed via the BBC iPlayer, programs that are ranked outside the top 50 actually make up almost half of the total consumption.

The BBC favorites that made up the top five most frequently streamed programs are

• the Doctor Who Christmas Special (BBC One)
• Extras Christmas Special (BBC Two)
• Top Gear (BBC Two)
• The Catherine Tate Christmas Show (BBC One)
• Christmas Day edition of EastEnders (BBC One).

iPlayer Users Exploring BBC’s Long Tail

The BBC research also suggests a significant “long tail” effect, with the BBC Four series Dance Britannia, a history of the evolution of dance, the documentary Factory: Manchester From Joy Division To Happy Mondays (BBC Four) and BBC Three’s The Real Hustle all appearing in the top 100 most streamed programmes.

“Attracting a million visitors, who’ve accessed over three and a half million programmes, within just two weeks is a wonderful start,” said Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC Future Media and Technology. “People who use the BBC iPlayer are spending nearly half an hour a day watching streams of their favourite programmes, suggesting that it looks set to revolutionise the way BBC Television programmes are viewed in the UK.

“Significantly, while the BBC iPlayer allows the public to catch up on their favourite mainstream BBC shows, it is also encouraging to see that nearly half of all programmes streamed or downloaded are placed outside the top 50, demonstrating how on demand services can bring niche programming to a wider audience.”

It seems that all the announcements from CES were gadgets with iPod docks stuck on them. The PowerDock for iPod from Griffin dispenses with the gadgets and just sticks extra iPod docks on your iPod dock.

Yes – everybody will know that you’ve got 4 iPods, but at least they’ll be charged when you need them.
Griffin will offer the PowerDock in two sizes. The four-port model seen will go for $70 and be available in April, while a two-port version will sell for $50 when it debuts in June.

For a long time, people have thought that getting the music industry to switch to DRM-free MP3s for music downloads would open the doors to a consumer-friendly world of digital music competition.

Now it’s starting to look like the music industry wil use DRM-free MP3s to enforce their traditional monopoly on what you hear, what you buy and where you buy it.

The New York Times reports that the mainstream music industry will be using the Super Bowl to undermine Apple’s dominance in the world of digital music. The labels have cut exclusive deals with Amazon to let the retailer not only offer all their music downloads as DRM-free MP3s, but at a better price than Apple.

In other words, they’re trying to use exclusive deals and monopolistic tactics to weaken Apple’s role in digital music so they control what you hear, where you hear it first and and where you buy it:

Behind this strategy is a growing desperation: sales of digital albums and songs are rising far too slowly to offset the rapid decline of the CD, the industry’s mainstay product. CD sales slid 19 percent last year; after adding in the 50 million digital albums sold last year and counting every 10 digital songs sold as an album, overall music sales were still down 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In trying to nurture Amazon’s service, the four major record companies have offered it one potential edge. One by one, they have agreed to offer their music catalogs for sale on the service in the MP3 format, without the digital locks that restrict users from making copies of the songs. (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-biggest company and the last holdout, signed on last week. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann).

All of the companies except the EMI Group still require Apple to sell their music wrapped in digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which is intended to discourage rampant copying. Some consumers say D.R.M. creates confusing problems, like a lack of compatibility between most songs and the devices sold by Apple and Microsoft. In fact, it was Mr. Jobs who, in February, called on the industry to drop its longstanding insistence on the use of the software, saying it had failed to rein in piracy.

Increased competition in the digital music world is good, but we’d like to see everyone operating on a level playing field. As it stands now, the music industry is set to use DRM-free MP3s to remake the world of Internet music into a “2.0” version of the old music industry – Big Four labels, RIAA, Wal-Mart and all.

Image: Salsa Puppets

The outline of Steve Job’s 2008 MacWorld Keynote, one of the most hotly anticipated speeches of the year, has reportedly been leaked to the Internet via Wikipedia.

We can’t vouch for the accuracy of this, and it’s most likely completely bogus – but it’s fun to speculate.

If the leak proves to be real, it looks like the biggest news items for new media will be:

• iSight cameras are getting 720p upgrade
• iPhone getting more memory, making it a better Internet video client
• New apps for iPhone, including RSS reader & Twitter client
• YouTube integration with iTunes, to allow for offline viewing.

HD iSight cameras would be big news, as would be integrating YouTube with iTunes, which could turn YouTube into a giant video podcasting channel.

We’ll know in 24 hours how much of this is legit.

Here’s the outline…..

The Association for Downloadable Media has invited its members to an ADM committee update meeting/conference call being held during this week’s MacWorld. All ADM members are encouraged to participate on the call.

The Association for Downloadable Media is an industry association focused on providing advertising and audience measurement standards for episodic and downloadable media (like podcasts).

Here are the meeting details:

Thursday, January 17 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern

Concurrent in-person locations:
San Francisco
Kiptronic offices
605 Market Street, Suite 1400

New York City
Porter Novelli offices
75 Varick St. (corner of Varick & Canal)
6th Floor

Remote Access through Blog Talk Radio

BlogTalkRadio’s VP John C. Havens will be moderating the call and also bringing up the text chat. Remote participants will be able to enter questions/thoughts via text chat.

VideoEgg, a video advertising network for online communities, today announced three new partnerships to expand its distribution of invitation-based video advertising. VideoEgg‚Äôs partnership with imeem, Metacafe, and Buzznet increases the ad network’s reach by more than 50 million unique users.‚ÄúThese sites are the new MTV‚Äôs,‚Äù said Matt Sanchez, CEO of VideoEgg. ‚ÄúBrands need to find innovative ways to get video in front of young consumers who are not sitting in front of the television. imeem, Metacafe and Buzznet are influential media brands with great momentum, and we are delighted to be partnering with them to deliver rich media advertising to their users in a respectful manner.‚Äù

Wallstrip creator Howard Lindzon has announced that the show is getting a new host, Julie Alexandria:

Don’t shoot the messenger.

We all love Lindsay. She rocks. She is Wallstrip. Blah blah blah 🙂 .

Now it’s Julie’s turn so just deal with it. Wallstrip is about stocks near or at all-time highs (for the most part) that I find interesting and my market thoughts. Lindsay delivered them perfectly. Julie will do the same.

More important for me, we are friends on Facebook and she follows me on Twitter. She is smart 🙂 .

She has guest hosted for us before and obviously the crew loved her. Scott our producer knows that I loved her too.

Lindsay is off doing her next CBS project so watch the show and see what it is.

Wallstrip is a video podcast that describes itself as “stock culture meets pop culture.”

Ever since Windows Vista came out and was pretty universally panned, Windows users have been worrying about upgrading.

Infoworld is doing what it can to help, though, by sponsoring a Save Windows XP video contest:

InfoWorld encourages you to contribute your own videos on why XP should be saved. (Although our plea is serious, why not have some fun at the same time, right?) To help meet the goal of spreading the word about the “Save XP” petition effort, we do ask that each video show the www.SaveXP.com URL.

We’ll post the best entries in our site’s video library through June 30, but if you get yours in by May 15 and we deem it one of the top three submissions we receive, we‚Äôll give you a Windows XP upgrade license. Videos must be in Flash, QuickTime, or AVI formats, at 320-by-240-pixel size.

Yes – it’s a pretty lame contest as user-generated video contests go. Make the best promo video in the world for InfoWorld’s SaveXP site, and they’ll give you an XP upgrade.

How about a copy of Leopard, instead? Might get some entries then!