Lots of famous people here from Kevin Marks (geek at Technorati) to Jerry Zucker. Jerry’s a famous Hollywood director. More than 250 people are here. Tons of video cameras, geeks, and videobloggers. The show starts soon, more reports coming.

Lots of great videobloggers here, from Andrew Baron who runs Rocketboom, to a Yellow Duckie who is here for Ze Frank.

List of nominations are here. We’ll keep you in touch throughout the night.

7:24 p.m.: it’s getting started.

7:32 p.m.: Jerry Zucker is on stage, explaining how he got started with a half-inch videotape machine back in 1970. If you don’t know who Jerry is, he’s on Wikipedia. Was the co-director of the movie “Airplane.”

Introducing WangYou Media. It’s basically a Chinese YouTube. The CEO just sent us a highlights clip for the Vloggies tonight (by the way, I hear a famous Hollywood director will be there). Lots of fun stuff. Too bad we can’t get translations of the site and a fast mirror over here. You can certainly see why Google and YouTube are gonna have a tough time going up against sites that are developed locally inside China. The Chinese search engine Baidu is giving Google a run for its money inside China and on CNBC the other day the CEO of Baidu said they are looking to expand outside of China.

Long term this is going to be a fun competition to watch. What’s at stake? A market of billions of people and if either of these brands can break out of the Chinese markets — even more.

Andrew Bourland notices that the way to build an audience is to do short videos. Beet.TV is kicking my a&&.

But, as Kathy Sierra teaches us, it’s not all about size of audience. I used to get that request over at Microsoft all the time.

See, you assume I’m going after a mass audience. If I were I would have posted my “Surfing porn shootout: Firefox 2 vs. IE 7″ post already. THAT would have gotten a mass audience. Of course it would earn me a divorce, too.

Instead I post long videos of Thomas Hawk shooting pumpkins. THAT will NEVER get a mass audience. First of all it’s only going to be interesting to people who care about photography and, even worse, only to those who have digital SLRs.

Same thing when I get a startup or a team from a big company on. How many people REALLY care about RSS readers, for instance? Not many. Probably less than 1% of the overall market.

I’d love to have the passionate ones. That’s who I do my show for.

We start out with almost getting kicked out of the pumpkin patch, but it definitely gets better from there. That’s the third part of the second photowalking. Definitely the longest, but that’s cause photographer Thomas Hawk has a thing for tractors. I’ll let him explain.

Oh, Dave Winer, I agree with you that Thomas does great work. If you wanna see how, just come along with us on a photowalk!

It’s like “Diggnation meets Canon.” Nikon makes an appearance too, thanks to Podtech salesguy David Alpert, who was tagging along.

Oh, and at the end Thomas shows off his new Moo Cards (photo business cards). Those things are cool.

Here’s the complete Half Moon Bay pumpkin patch photowalking Tour so far:

Part 1, cleaning his sensor.
Part 2, discovering the pumpkins
Part 3, tractors, pumpkin pie, and more.
The blog post by Thomas explaining all this with links to 60 high res images we made while shooting this video.

Talking rabbits? Can’t wait to meet them! They say they are coming to the Vloggies tomorrow night. Ze Frank is having someone dress up as a yellow duck. Hey, I think I’ll fit right into this crowd!

Last weekend Maryam and I got to visit several Washington State wineries. That was fun and good. But then Tim Reha turned on his recorder and got me doing the “butter knife scratch.” I’ll never live this down. I’m sure it’ll be on Valleywag by the end of the day.

Anyway, with a weekend of parties coming up due to the Vloggies being in town, this is a valuable lesson to remember. Getting drunk with videobloggers is even worse!

Over on Valleywag there’s a hillarious video about YouTube done by Colbert. Said the same thing as Messina, but a whole lot funnier!

Over on PodTech our India tech channel is getting some real good stuff. It was weird hearing Chris Messina on that channel, being concerned by “crowdsourcing,” (where we provide the labor, but do it all for free or near free) but it all makes sense when he started talking about BarCamp India. Ironic that Chris is an advocate for open source (he worked on the Flock browser team). Interesting conversation.

I was just reading Mike Arrington’s note about dealing with PR agencies and such. If you aren’t a journalist or a blogger with an audience you have no idea what Mike is talking about. I get hundreds of emails every day, many of which are from people, companies, and PR firms asking me to blog stuff.

I absolutely hate dealing with this stuff. For the most part I just simply don’t. I don’t respond. I learned that answering email causes even more email and I simply don’t have time. All I did yesterday was dig through email and I barely made a dent. That’s why I’m up at 2:40 a.m. editing videos.

Anyway, it’s a real problem for a small company (or even a big one) to get noticed in today’s world. I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve given up.

One thing, though. If you have a product or a blog or something else you want my readers to try out (or for me to try out) leave a comment here, do NOT send email! That way everyone can get pitched and my readers can help me sort out what’s important to dig more into with my video camera.

Steve Safran has an interesting article on podcast math and talks about various metrics that podcasting and videoblogging content owners use to measure the size and engagement of their audiences.

I’m trying to come up with new ways to measure audience that goes way beyond whether someone downloaded my content to their machine. I have tens of gigabytes loaded here that I haven’t watched or listened to, and I bet I’m not the only one.

I’d rather go with engagement than just downloads. I believe advertisers will eventually get wiser and pay for audiences that’ll do things, not just download files with an automated client.

Anyway, most people don’t care about this, but anyone who makes content sure better be engaged on this issue cause it’s where the money will come by 2010.

Oh, and he wants you to “endorse your fruit.” His way of telling you to get out and vote. Both in yesterday’s video.

I love that we can share videos like this with each other. Batman geek cracks me up. Has media changed? Yeah. Try to convince a big-city TV station to distribute something like this. No way, no how.

But now we can get a global audience for our goofy videos. Yeah!

Simon Phipps, who is Sun Microsystems open source ombudsman, gives a different point of view on the Microsoft/Novell deal.

Andy Beard notes that I’m stealing people’s content for my Google Reader link blog.

Absolutely! And, if anyone doesn’t like it, they can send me email and I’ll remove them from my feeds.

But my email lately has been much different. Turns out that these blogs are getting hundreds, and even thousands, of visits from my link blog.

Whoa? The full content is over there, so why would anyone click through to read the full blog?

Well, for one, I’m not printing everything that, say, TechCrunch puts up. So, if you are a new reader and are following my link blog you’ll probably want to click through to good posts to subscribe to the full feed yourself.

Second, if there are comments, or you want to comment on a post, you’ve gotta visit the full thing.

Anyway, what are the rules? Most people who use RSS know that they are giving permission for their feeds to be used in a non-commercial way. My link blog doesn’t have ads on it so fits inside the model of a non-commercial use.

I TOTALLY disagree with Andy that RSS was designed to be private. That’s TOTALLY FALSE. Ever since I can remember RSS is about PUBLIC uses of syndication technology.

First and second parts of our pumpkin walk with photosharing service Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk is up.

This was the pumpkin patch walkaround where he made about 500 images in just over an hour with about 60 professional quality images coming out of that. His blog explains more.

I love how we see Maryam and Patrick for a split second. Heheh.

Oh, and love how Thomas was wearing a “Diggnation” t-shirt. I wonder if we’ll get onto Digg with this? Seems like anything that mentions Digg gets on Digg pretty quickly.

Speaking of Digg, my blatant begging seems to have helped get the Google Reader video onto Digg. It’s hanging out on the second page right now, but that’s pretty good! 289 Diggs along with one guy saying I’m incompetent.

Damn, there’s always one guy who says the truth, isn’t there?

Speaking of the truth that hurts I pay Shelley Powers a compliment about her photography in this video — you’ll have to watch the video to see why that hurts. I love her photography.

Last night Buzz Bruggeman stayed at my house. He had a book with him. I should have taken pictures of it. It was about 400 pages thick. It included tons of photos and other things from PopTech, the conference he had just attended. He told me every attendee got a personalized book. 500 or so.

It is simply the coolest conference swag I’ve ever seen. Google did the same thing from the Zeitgeist conference last year, but the PopTech one was better done and WAY faster (attendees had them within a few days of getting home).

Anyway, the rest of us don’t get a book, but we do get a Flickr music video that was played at PopTech.

Today was a day of working at home. Damn I have a lot of email. I didn’t get to my editing. Sigh. Anyway, glad the flowers showed up. That’s called “survival” for a married guy. Heheheh.

My Ford let me down, though. $600 for a 30,000 mile service, $500 for new brakes and rotors. $500 for new tires. And I have a bent wheel (I have no idea how that happened) that needs replacing too. Sigh.

Yeah, I’m paying a premium because it’s a Ford dealership, but not much. I’ll take it around and try to save a little bit on costs, though (Silicon Valley is expensive, keep that in mind). Maryam wants me to buy a new car instead. That’s called spending $20,000 to get out of a $2,000 problem.

John Battelle did the homework and learned that Google’s official statement is that the CIA story is untrue.

If you worked at a big company how would you fight rumors or stories like these? After all, it all started with someone saying something that can’t be verified as true or false. We don’t know the guy’s reasoning to start this story off. Maybe he is shorting Google stock. We don’t know. But we do love a juicy rumor. After working inside a big company I tend to believe the big company more than the rumor mongers, but I do realize that most people won’t take Google’s word on a story like this. So, not sure that Google or any big company really can do much to kill rumors like these.

I remember hearing in the hallways back when I worked at Microsoft that Novell had some patents that were going to force Microsoft to pay attention at minimum and would force it to negotiate. I didn’t have much knowledge at the time, but it’s pretty interesting to see the announcement that’s going on right now — looks like the hallway chatter was correct. One IM’er just wrote me and said “feels like hell is freezing over.”

When a big news story like this hits, where do you go first? I go to Google News. There are already tons of stories there.

Dana Gardner is blogging it live.

More on TechMeme.

If you get to lots of conferences invariably you’ll meet Paul Mooney. He’s been to many of the world’s technical conferences and here he showed up at a political debate with his camcorder. One problem. That pissed off one of the candidates. Ahh, a good ruckus makes for good stories. Congrats Paul!

Well, not quite my brain. If he had done that he would have found a lot of Merlot-curdled fuzz.

But he did steal my OPML file to make a widget. Go ahead, steal my OPML. Just don’t take Maryam or else I’ll be a lonely loser instead of just a loser.