The 14-year-old kids down in Hollywood were interested in cars, so they started a cool web site, Car-Parazzi, where they chase down cool cars and get video. Fun.

Her husband ran for President last time around (and probably will next time too). But, last week at the ConvergeSouth conference she sat down with Maryam for a 14 minute interview where she talked about being a geek, a mom, a cancer survivor, videoblogger, and more.

This was Maryam’s second interview. Maryam (my wife) stole my last job and she’s well on her way to stealing my current one too. That’s OK, she stole my heart too. At least Maryam will let me run camera.

Elizabeth was really a gracious interview and admitted that she’s now using a PC cause she had both a PC and a Mac and her Mac was the only one stolen. We didn’t talk about political stands or positions, by the way, it wasn’t that kind of interview.
Maryam has more on her blog.

Thomas Hawk says (and shows) it a lot better than I do.

I’m sitting here listening to Jonathan Klein talk with a variety of bloggers. Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, and Kristopher Tate, Founder of Zooomr, a photosharing site are here too. So is Marshall from TechCrunch.

Anyway, Jonathan just came from meeting with analysts and shareholders where he announced some bad news.

This is a business that’s seeing radical changes due to folks like Thomas. Thomas is an amateur. He gives his high-res images away for free, or for a low price if you want to use them commercially. He uses the same Canon 5D that other professionals are using. And, his images are often as good or better than the ones the pros are getting.

And Thomas is HARDLY the only photographer out there who is putting pressure on the professionals. Nikon and Canon are selling hundreds of thousands of digital SLRs every year, most of which go to amateurs or semi-pros who aren’t able to get their images onto Getty right now.

One thing. Go to Getty Images’ home page. Now go to Zooomr. And Flickr.

What do you notice? I notice a couple of things.

1) There’s a photo on the home page of Zooomr and Flickr, but not on Getty.
2) There’s a search box on Flickr, but not on Getty.

It’s interesting how cold the Getty site feels. Clinical. Which shows the bias of Getty. They don’t care about making the site entertaining, they want to make it easy for a magazine editor to find a photo and buy it.

Getty is the most profitable photo site and has many of the world’s best-known images in its archives.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly they learn from upstarts like Zooomr and Flickr.

One thing I learned is that most of the most profitable images on Getty are of celebrities.

I was just reading Jeneane Sessum’s post about the latest Ze Frank/Rocketboom dustup and she’s right, we need to measure stuff other than just whether a download got completed or not. She says we need a “likeability” stat. I think it goes further than that.

There’s another stat out there called “engagement.” No one is measuring it that I know of.

What do I mean?

Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.

Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.

So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser?

Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale.

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.

How could we measure audience engagement?

Is this something that Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab could do? If he could, that’d be a valuable company that advertisers would die to buy stuff from.

One of the nicest developers I ever met at Microsoft, Steve Lacey, surprised me recently when he said he was working at Google. Great to see him today. He, like almost everyone at Google, refuses to tell me what he’s working on.

It’s gotta be cool, though. After all, he was an important developer on Flight Simulator. Why leave a job like that if you aren’t going to be working on something cool?

Oh, while we’re talking about Google, might as well talk about Kevin Laws’ rant over on VentureBeat: The Google Myth goes “pop.”

Kevin misses what Google is doing.

They are building moats around those two businesses that Google has proven successful.

By investing in everything else, Google’s search engine has gotten business defensibility. Microsoft and Yahoo have largely matched Google’s search quality. But they aren’t gonna steal search traffic (or, more importantly, advertising dollars) from Google because of the investment in other things.

Also, what gets rewarded by the stock market? Existing market share or growth?

Quick, who had most market share in 1977? IBM and DEC, right? Did that really matter? No.

What matters is how fast each service is growing.

I guarantee you that Google Talk doesn’t just have 44,000 users anymore. Those numbers are old. Makes for nice stories, but won’t hold up in the end.

He ends up wondering if Google can hold onto its workers. I predict that Google not only is holding onto its workers, but is getting a lot more out of each worker than most other companies.

I’ve never met such enthusiastic employees. Oh, and I did interview the chef today. He says he tells all his chef friends that he has the best job in the world. This company is — by far — the most interest to watch from a business perspective.

Part of the reason for that is they are breaking lots of rules.

And some of these weird experiments will pay off. Just stick around and see.

Ahh, Giovanni Rodriguez links to a “making of a Scoble video” video. Yes, the camera was aimed at the cameraguy. Me. Transparency all around.

Google and Microsoft were both wonderful today. I got so many videos to get up. And while I was out today another 134 emails came in. I’m so deep in email deficit that I’ll never catch up. Sorry if I haven’t answered you back.

Last time I was at Microsoft I met with the Zune team and got this in-depth look at Zune (the iPod competitor).

I have some strong thoughts on Zune, but I want to keep them to myself until tomorrow. It’s better for you to just watch the video and give your two cents first.

What do you think now that you’ve had a good chance to hear from the Zune team? I asked all the hard question in this interview.

Everyone’s talking about Google’s new personalized search engine. Here Vik Singh made a personalized search engine of just tech stuff. He explains how he did it here. Much more on this over on TechMeme. Wow, the blogs are going nuts about this.

Well, I’m off to see the folks in Google’s Kirkland office, then I’m off to building 42 at Microsoft. Sorry for not answering my email. I’m in total email deficit. More than 800 unanswered. Sigh.

Really great visit with Zillow today. They are less than a year old. Their business plan called for having a million visitors by today. So far they have more than three.

Look for an announcement from them to show up on TechCrunch soon. Soon being within days. I don’t break news anymore, I just do videos.

Anyway, they have the nicest offices in the Web 2.0 world that I’ve seen so far. They are in the Wells Fargo building in downtown Seattle on the 46′th floor and have stunning views that wrap around all sides of the building.

They arranged each of their areas into “cul de sacs” around a window display.

Not many corporate offices can beat their arrangements and views.

Anyway, onto Google now.

Sometimes I wish I had more time to blog. Today is one of those times. Google’s new custom searches is awesome. But, in a few minutes I’m off to meet the Zillow team. Then over to Google in Kirkland, WA (Google Talk and lots more developed there). Then over to Microsoft to meet with the Expression team (the Web tool I derided a few weeks back). Then to a dinner with other Blog Business Summit speakers. I gotta get a haircut fit in there too. If you see me zipping by, say hi!

Second in a series. Oh, did you know that I have twice as many viewers who hate me than any other videoblog? It’s true. I read it on the Internet. You’ll have to watch Ze’s video about how to have a popular videoblog to get what I’m trying to say here. He also has some interesting things to say about videoblog traffic hype.
We’re on our way to Seattle. Have a good one. Group A is loading in Oakland right now.

I just read that Larry Larsen is going to run On10. Awesome. He’s been someone I’ve watched for a long time and he’ll make On10 a lot more interesting to watch! A real geek. You gotta see his home office (linked to above).

A very large version of the Cisco press conference is now up. We’re working on a regular smaller version. Whew. Someday I might write a book on all the mistakes I’ve made editing this sucker.

In the video you’re seeing Guido Jouret, Cisco CTO explain the system to a group of journalists. I tried to zoom in on the screen so you can see the quality and low-latency. For a videoconferencing freak like me this was a real thrill cause I’ve never seen this kind of quality until now.

It was fun watching this happen live — Jan taught Thomas a whole bunch of Photoshop tricks in less than an hour.

I have more than 20 videos in the can. This week is going to be slow cause I’m behind on editing. and I’m off to the Blog Business Summit where I can’t take my Mac. Sigh.

Allan Grinshtein, president and CEO of Immense LLC, just wrote me and announced that his company rolled out over the weekend what he believes as the first contextual video advertising on the Web: Walnuts.

First customer? Blip.TV, which seems to have a nicer home page than the last time I was there. Nice channels. More over on Immense’ site.

I had a lot of problems last night getting my videos done for the week. I’m still learning how to use Macs and Final Cut Express HD. Ryanne makes it look so easy, but she’s in India, so I’m left to fend for myself and things that took her microseconds to do took me an hour.

Yes, my busy life has caught up to me and now I’m behind. You’ll see my editing style is stark compared to Ryanne’s. Mostly that’s due to my ineptitude. Oh, well, you’ll have to live with it until she gets back or I hire another editor (one is coming in mid-November that I’m very excited about). Or both.

Anyway, to the topic of this post. I just was reading my feeds for my link blog and found these two:

Andy Abramson says: “To me the future of video is in the light and fleet, not in the big and costly.” Translation, he thinks Cisco’s new telepresence rooms are too expensive.

Tim Bray says: “this stuff is not that far from having slam-dunk ROI.” Translation, he thinks a good case can be made for spending the $300,000 on a room or two (Cisco, by the way, is putting in more than 100 corporate-wide).

So, who is right?

Both.

Andy is right. Most of us are going to use low-end video cameras hooked up to our computers to do videoconferencing, if we even try to do it at all.

Tim is right. If you work in a big company these things will save massive amounts of time and travel costs. Flying an exec across country can run $4,000 to $20,000 (they often don’t fly coach like I do, but business class, or, even more expensively, on a private jet which costs a LOT more than what JetBlue charges). It gets worse if you’re a billionaire like Gates or Brin. Then you have to figure in the value of your time. One such trip might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars alone. So, if you can cut down on a few trips a year you’ll pay for your telepresence room in no time at all.

When my video is up in a little while you’ll see just how lifelike this new room is. And how easy it is. You dial a phone number on a phone and it connects you. That’s it. No playing with cameras. No controls. It’s awesome.

But, if you aren’t a big company I’d stay away. The costs on these things will drop like a rock over the next five years as HD technology comes down and they get more adept at building these rooms.

UPDATE: looks like the video should be up by 2 p.m.

Roxanne, who does the Beach Walks videoblog, has a great set of guidelines for big companies who are sponsoring videos, podcasts, and other things online. Funny, I was just filming a little sponsor segment for Seagate when I came across this. I’m sending this to them.

Sigh, I thought this story was embargoed until tomorrow morning but I guess not. I should have known the rules. If PR says 8 a.m. on Monday that really means 6 p.m. Sunday night.

Anyway, I’m editing the video now and it’ll be up in the morning.

Cisco is the one doing the announcing. Here’s what I saw last week.

The PR folks led me into a room. I turned on my camera. I thought there were six people around a desk at first. I saw Mike Vizard, who is on the Gillmor Gang, among other things.

We say hi, but then I notice that the three people on the other side of the desk are actually on HD screens and aren’t in the room at all.

The desk is made to fool your eye into thinking the folks on the screens (if you haven’t figured it out yet, Mike Vizard was actually in New York, along with two others) are actually in the room at the same table with you. In an article about this in the San Jose Mercury News a Gartner Analyst said it was “like magic.” I agree. When you first experience this it is stunning.

There is lighting built in to make sure you look great. Microphones (using surround sound, so the voices come from where they are located on the screens) are built into the table.

The video tomorrow will show you a bit of how it feels to be in one of these rooms, but I’m watching and it doesn’t really demonstrate the experience. Being in this is unreal: like being teleported into a Star Trek movie.

Cost? $300,000 for the three-screen version, or $80,000 for single screen version, so this is only for really rich people or companies right now. More articles about the Cisco Telepresence system are on Google News.

I used to sell videoconferencing systems for Winnov. This is nothing like what you can get on cheaper systems. Tomorrow’s video will give you a lot more details.

Dave Winer just showed me an email that he’s involved in that shows that Google turned back on Google Checkout so that Ze Frank can take donations sell little duckies through Google’s service again.

Congrats to Shel Holtz (one of my favorite marketing bloggers/podcasters), C.C. Chapman (podsafe music pioneer), Neville Hobson (partner on Shel’s podcast), Joe Jaffe (advertising guru who wrote an excellent book titled “Life After the 30 Second Spot”) who joined together to create Crayon.

TechCrunch has the details and says they are claiming to be the first company launched in the virtual SecondLife. Neville Hobson has a post on Crayon too.