TWiT's going to Dragon*Con. Be there with us live!

TWiT's Brian Brushwood and Tom Merritt are headed to Dragon*Con in Atlanta Georgia, September 3-5, streaming live from one of the biggest SciFi/Fantasy/Geekfests in the world.

Tech broadcaster Tom Merritt joins TWiT
'Buzz Out Loud' anchor moves to This Week in Tech network; TWiT also names CEO

4/19/2010

Petaluma, CA -- The TWiT netcast network has hired Tom Merritt to bring several news- and geek-oriented shows to the channel. Owned by longtime tech broadcaster, president and Chief TWiT Leo Laporte, the five-year-old company sees Merritt, his experience and following as the next step towards becoming a full-fledged 24-hour technology network.

Merritt leaves a position as co-host/co-creator of the popular daily tech news show "Buzz Out Loud" and the shows "The Real Deal" and "Top 5" on San Francisco-based CNET/CBS Interactive, where he has worked since 2004. He also currently co-hosts several independent geek and culture podcasts, including "FourCast," "Current Geek," "East Meets West" and "The Sword and Laser." Merritt has frequently appeared on TWiT's namesake show, a Sunday tech news roundtable with 175,000 viewers/listeners (as ranked by Podtrac).

"TWiT is a pioneer doing Internet video and audio right. Their live streaming, coverage depth and loyal and intelligent community have always impressed me," Merritt said, "I'm really excited to join Leo and the whole TWiT team."

"I've always seen TWiT as a place where great content creators could come and bring their visions to life," Laporte said. "Tom has my highest respect as a journalist of unquestioned talent and integrity, yet he also brings a broad knowledge of various tech-, science-, and geek-centric topics that are unmatched. We're thrilled to have him join the TWiT family."

When I first started doing podcasts under the TWiT banner it was little more than a hobby. How that hobby has grown, from two audio-only shows in April 2005 (The Tech Guy radio show and "this WEEK in TECH") to over 15 shows plus 40 hours a week of live video streaming. TWiT is now a full-time business employing seven people at the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma and a dozen more contractors all over the world.

The best thing about TWiT is the community that surrounds it. I'm always looking for ways to give the community more ways to participate. That's why we have two chat rooms and two forums and now, an official TWiT Wiki. We'll be dumping every bit of information we can scrape up into the wiki, and I hope you'll help. The software is Mediawiki - the same software that Wikipedia runs on - so it should feel pretty familiar. You'll need to create an account with a verified email address before you can edit pages. That's to discourage spamming; I promise to keep the email private.

A happy holidays to all of you from all of the TWiTs. It's been an amazing year. When we began 2008 there were just two of us at TWiT LLC: Dane and me. Now, with the addition of Frédérique, Colleen, and Tony, there are five, and we hope to add two more staff members in the next few months.

Something went wrong when we posted Security Now 163 today - the show was cut in half. I've pulled it down for now and I'll repost it first thing tomorrow morning. Please accept my apologies.

UPDATE: It's been fixed. Download away!

On Friday evening we had a catastrophic failure of the web server that hosts TWiT Live, the TWiT Army Canteen, Leoville.com, and this site. The RAID 5 controller died, and when it did it marked all the disks unusable. Support personnel at Softlayer, our hosting company, weren't able to recover the disks, so they did the only thing they could do: replaced the controller and reinstalled the operating system. We're in the process of restoring all the sites. TWiT.tv

Ever since we started this thing three years ago listeners have been asking us when we'd do some video shows. The problem has always been that there's not much to see. I'm in Petaluma and the TWiTs are spread all over the world. We did a few live TWiTs on video but they were less than satisfactory. The audio was terrible, it was difficult to get everyone together, and it wasn't very compelling visually.

I'm leaving tonight for Australia on the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop Adventure 2008: Tasmania!