This Week in Tech
Host(s)	Leo Laporte
Website	http://www.twit.tv/
Update schedule	Weekly
Launch date	April 17, 2005
Genre	Podcast

this WEEK in TECH, casually referred to as TWiT, and formerly known as Revenge of the Screen Savers — is a weekly podcast (and occasional videocast) of the TWiT.tv network [1]. Hosted by Leo Laporte and many other former TechTV employees, it features roundtable discussions and debates surrounding current technology news and reviews, with a particular focus on consumer electronics. As well as having been ranked #1 on Podcast Alley[2], Yahoo Podcasts, and the iTunes Podcast Directory (where it records around 315,000 downloads a week), it has also won two Podcast Awards, as both the "People's Choice" and as "Best Technology Podcast". Image File history File links TWiT.jpg‎ Licensing This is a logo of an organization, item, or event, and is protected by copyright and/or trademark. ... Leo Laporte in 2005 Leo Gordon Laporte (born November 29, 1956 in New York City, New York) [1] is a technology broadcaster, and author. ... This page as shown in the AOL 9. ... April 17 is the 107th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (108th in leap years). ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The webcomic genres are the types of themes a webcomic can take. ... An orange square with waves was introduced by Mozilla Firefox to indicate that an RSS feed is present on a webpage. ... An orange square with waves was introduced by Mozilla Firefox to indicate that an RSS feed is present on a webpage. ... VODcast is an emerging term used for the online delivery of video on demand content via RSS enclosures. ... TWiT.tv is a podcast network run by technology broadcaster and author Leo Laporte. ... Leo Laporte in 2005 Leo Gordon Laporte (born November 29, 1956 in New York City, New York) [1] is a technology broadcaster, and author. ... TechTV is also the name of a closed-circuit television network based in Ruston, Louisiana TechTV (May 11, 1998 – May 28, 2004) was a 24-hour cable and satellite channel based in San Francisco, California featuring news and shows about computers, technology, and the Internet. ... By the mid 20th century humans had achieved a level of technological mastery sufficient to leave the surface of the planet for the first time and explore space. ... Consumer electronics is electronic equipment intended for use by everyday people. ... iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple Computer on January 10, 2001 at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco,[1] for playing and organizing digital music and video files. ...

Format

Following the show's number, title, sponsors and theme tune, Leo Laporte typically begins an episode of TWiT by introducing the week's panelists one-by-one. Light conversation often takes place about panelists' recent projects or work, before Laporte's reading of the week's major technology headlines. Panelists respond to each headline with "round table" comment, discussion and debate, however often drive conversation to different and sometimes unrelated directions. This causes the length of each episode to vary, sometimes considerably, from show to show.

Panelists

Further information: This WEEK in TECH panelists

Regular panelists and recurring guests include John C. Dvorak (now famous for his controversial analysis and demeanor on the program), Roger Chang, Robert Heron, Patrick Norton, David Prager, Doug Kaye, Kevin Rose, Alex Lindsay, and Wil Harris. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from an article revision dated 2005-12-11, and may not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Roger Chang was a segment producer and on-air contributor for TechTV. He appeared regularly on Call for Help, and sometimes filled in for host Leo Laporte. ... Robert Heron was a lab guy on the TechTV show The Screen Savers. ... Patrick Norton on the set of , circa 2006. ... David Prager is one of the key members of the Revision3 Corporation. ... Robert Kevin Rose (born February 21, 1977 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA; better known as Kevin Rose, also known as the dark tipper for giving hacking advice, etc) is best known for founding the social-bookmarking site Digg and as former co-host of the TechTV show The Screen Savers... Alex Lindsay, chief architect of Pixel Corps, has been involved in computer graphics for nearly 20 years. ... Wil Harris (born September 20, 1982) is a technology writer and entrepreneur based in Oxford, UK. He is the Editor in Chief and co-founder of the Bit-tech enthusiast website and also contributes to sister title TrustedReviews. ...

History

The programme began when Laporte recorded a one-off "roundtable" discussion between himself, Patrick Norton, Sarah Norton, Kevin Rose, David Prager, and Roger Chang at the 2005 Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld Conference & Expo is a trade show dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform with conference tracks held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January. ...

Having published the show on his blog to an incredible public reception, Laporte decided to rename his original recording "episode 0" and turned the round table concept into a weekly downloadable audio file, or 'podcast', featuring more cast members from his former TechTV programme The Screen Savers. The first episode was posted on Monday, April 18, 2005 as "Revenge of The Screen Savers", but was temporarily renamed "Return of the [BEEP]" [3] in response to a cease and desist letter sent to Laporte by copyright-holder Comcast. In episode 2, Laporte announced a contest in which listeners could suggest a new name for the show. One listener suggested This Week in Geek, which inspired Laporte to create with the eventual name, This Week in Tech, or TWiT. Image File history File links This is the old This Week in Tech logo, from when it was still called Revenge of the Screen Savers. ... An orange square with waves was introduced by Mozilla Firefox to indicate that an RSS feed is present on a webpage. ... April 18 is the 108th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (109th in leap years). ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Cease-and-desist is a legal term meaning essentially stop: It is used in demands for a person or organization to stop doing something (to cease and desist from doing it). ...

The weekly show was recorded with all of the hosts staying at their respective homes and talking via Voice over IP (mostly using Skype). Episode 9, which was supposed to have been released on June 13th 2005, was released 6 days late due to technical and scheduling issues. The delay caused one subscribing listener to write a complaint, to which Laporte posted both an edited and unedited version of the show as a way of highlighting the amount of editing involved. An overview of how VoIP works A typical analog telephone adapter for connecting an ordinary phone to a VoIP network Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through... Skype (IPA pronunciation: , rhymes with type) is a proprietary peer-to-peer Voice over IP (VoIP) network founded by the entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, also founders of the file sharing application Kazaa. ...

Starting around episode 10, Norton began physically coming to Leo's office during the taping. Upon Rose's announcement that he was moving to San Francisco, Laporte suggested that all of the hosts should get together to record the show and, starting in episode 21, began recording in front of a live studio audience. This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ...

Video

The first filmed episode, TWiT 21, was recorded at the San Francisco Apple Store on September, 4, 2005. Kevin Rose's Revision3 crew recorded the show, later releasing the first ever video edition of This Week In Tech. Episodes 22 through 24 were recorded at Noonan's Bar and Grill in Larkspur Landing, California, but whilst Revision3 continued to provide hosting and bandwidth, Alex Lindsay's Pixel Corps began to regularly video installments of the programme. All together, they have filmed the show 17 times: 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 57 and 58. Nickname: The City by the Bay; Fog City Location of the City and County of San Francisco, California Coordinates: Country United States of America State California City-County San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom Area    - City 122 km²  (47 sq mi)  - Land 121. ... The Apple store on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago The interior of an Apple store. ... Robert Kevin Rose (born February 21, 1977 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA; better known as Kevin Rose, also known as the dark tipper for giving hacking advice, etc) is best known for founding the social-bookmarking site Digg and as former co-host of the TechTV show The Screen Savers... #REDIRECT Revision3 Corporation This sandbox uses a very effective approach to familiarize users and editors with Wiki functions. ... Larkspur is a city located in Marin County, California. ... Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... #REDIRECT Revision3 Corporation This sandbox uses a very effective approach to familiarize users and editors with Wiki functions. ... Alex Lindsay, chief architect of Pixel Corps, has been involved in computer graphics for nearly 20 years. ... Pixel Corps is a self-proclaimed guild composed of development personnel in digital media. ...

Distribution and licensing

All episodes are licensed under the Creative Commons attribution share-alike noncommercial license, and are distributed via direct download from the TWiT.tv website (of which a new version was launched on July 13, 2006), or from Apple's iTunes Store. There is no download charge from either source. Version 2 of Some Rights Reserved logo No Rights reserved logo The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. ... A share-alike copyright license clause requires that any improved version of the work be shared on like terms with everyone else—that is, share and share alike. ... Creative Commons, some rights reserved. ... July 13 is the 194th day (195th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 171 days remaining. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... The iTunes Store (known as the iTunes Music Store before September 12, 2006) is an online music service run by Apple Computer through its iTunes application. ...

The show is available in four formats: 64 kbit/s MP3, 32 kbit/s MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis. Occasionally however these bitrates vary if a stereo version of the netcast is produced. The files are distributed via several means, including direct downloads with bandwidth provided by AOL and via BitTorrent, a preferred method since this puts little strain on the official TWiT server. ... MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format, designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. ... Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy digital audio compression scheme. ... Vorbis is an open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph. ... AOL LLC (formerly America Online, Inc) is an American online service provider, bulletin board system, and media company operated by Time Warner. ... The BitTorrent logo BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol, and of a free software implementation of that protocol. ... Wikimedia servers architecture The term Web server can mean one of two things: A computer that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, which are known as Web browsers, and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are Web pages such as HTML documents and...

The sponsorship deal with America Online was announced on July 4th 2005, following the server demand that resulted from the release of iTunes 4.9's built-in podcasting directory. Since the new TWiT website was launched, the TWiT Torrent server initially preferred by Laporte has ceased operation. Some of the video episodes can be located from Google Video and the iTunes Podcast section, but many remain not hosted anywhere. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ... For the United States holiday, the Fourth of July, see Independence Day (United States). ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple Computer on January 10, 2001 at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco,[1] for playing and organizing digital music and video files. ... Google Video is a free Google service that allows anyone to upload video clips to Googles web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge or through Google Video Store for a cost that they can set. ... iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple Computer on January 10, 2001 at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco,[1] for playing and organizing digital music and video files. ...

Funding

Laporte stated in episode 3 that the show would always remain free and without advertising. However, due to ongoing costs as a result of TWiT.tv's constant expansion, a roadmap for the introduction of podcast and web-based advertising was announced during episode 45 of This Week in Tech. On 5th September 2006, TWiT.tv officially became one of the first major advertising-supported podcast networks, sponsored initially by both Visa and Dell. Listeners have always been invited to support the network by means of an automatic PayPal subscription or one-time payment, however this granted access to an exclusive TWiT forum from episode 40 onwards. Listener funding has been used to purchase radio-quality microphones and digital audio-recording devices for the hosts, and as a means to finance compensation for podcast contributors. Visa or VISA has several meanings: Look up visa in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Visa (document) — a document required to enter a specific country. ... Dell Inc. ...

"Scare"

On October 22nd 2006, a blog posting surfaced on the TWiT.tv website to announce two weeks of absence for This Week In Tech. Laporte explained that the break was partly due to an upcoming technology cruise, but stressed that it was also the result of the show's panelists deciding to all 'play hookey at the same time.' It became apparent that the latter had raised serious concerns with Laporte when he proceeded to declare the show as being 'on life support with the heart monitor flatlining.' The posting became one of the week's top stories on Digg having attracted almost 500 comments in less than 4 days. On October 26th 2006, Laporte posted a follow-up to his original article, titled "OK OK!", in which he said that he, "had no idea what a storm [his] little sentence would generate," confirming the fact that he was merely, "tired, dispirited and trying to figure out how to do the show without any contributors." Following e-mail communication with the panelists he also promised the continued recording of This Week in Tech so long as listener demand remained strong. Digg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

External links

• This Week in Tech on TWiT.tv
• 'Inside Twit' blog
• Leo Laporte's blog