Now it’s here. At TWiTLive.com, Leo Laporte is streaming 25 hours per week via (for now) Stickam. Leo’s video is nothing more than letting us watch his many podcasts live in production: TWiT, Security Now, Net@Nite, etc. It’s still rough around the edges — only one camera is running so far — but it’s already very entertaining. They key is that Leo, as always, transcends the technology. He’s committed to the same broadcast quality he brings to audio podcasting. It’s not just his own professionalism, but the production values as well: excellent content and guests, good lighting, good video and (of course) excellent audio. The low-quality audio from most LifeCasters is irritating and tiring. I can leave Leo’s show running all day.

In fact, I already do leave Leo’s show running all day. I work in a home office, and until recently I’ve always had CNN or MSNBC on the TV while I work except when I’m recording or mixing audio. I’m not sure why. Maybe I just miss having other humans around the workplace. Well now I have Leo and his guests to keep me company, and it’s great. Just as TWiT will be remembered as an audio podcast milestone, TWiTLive is already a breakthrough in streaming video. It leverages everything Leo has done during his distinguished career. It’s not the rebirth of TechTV, it’s something much better.

The new sites will be extremely dynamic with nearly everything loaded at runtime via Ajax widgets, some nested within other widgets, sometimes three-deep. Even with all the HTTP requests, the pages are so much simpler and built with so many fewer lines of code, the new site is noticeably faster.

Placing a widget on a page is about as simple as it gets. For example, the following HTML is all it takes to display the most-popular recently published shows for a channel:

<div class=”cnWidget mostPopularRecent”></div>

My widgetLoader looks for <div> elements with className ‘cnWidget’. In the above case it then makes a prototype.js Ajax call to /widget/mostPopularRecent (which is rewritten to mostPopularRecent.php in our case), which then returns the content of the <div>. Dirt simple!

For widgets that require arguments, I just include the values as a Json string within the <div> such as:

<div class=”cnWidget selectedTopics” style=”display:none”>
    ["software","blogging","opensource","security"]
</div>

Redesigning the pages takes nothing more than moving the widgets around and changing the CSS. And in version 4.1 I hope to have a drag-and-drop tool for adding and moving widgets.

I first met Tom about 13 years ago when he was working in venture capital. We worked together to start an online business, but it never happened. Years later, Tom and I were both happy the project never got off the ground for a variety of reasons. We remained friends and sometimes shared a meal when he was in the Bay Area. As the Pop!Tech announcement says, Tom was one of those incredibly healthy and active people we all figure would outlive the rest of us. Alas, he passed away at the age of 56. He is already missed, and will be for some time.

Help me out here. What package(s) do I want and why? Download Eclipse separately? Multiple versions of that, too. TIA.

And in case you missed it, check out our new Premium Edition RSS feeds — without the promos, pitches and music.

• We released a new feature, Slideshows.
• A few minutes later, Paul Figgiani reported a bug when using Safari. Instant QA.
• I used Twitter to ask “Are there any tools for debugging JavaScript and the DOM under Safari?”
• Phil Windley and Coty Rosenblath replied within three minutes.
• With their suggestions, I found the problem five minutes later.
• Not knowing why my code didn’t work on Safari, I asked The Google about “xml load in safari” and found an explanation seconds later.
• I coded a fix, tested it and published it via Subversion to our public servers a few minutes later.

Elapsed time from bug report to fix: less that 20 minutes. Okay, so that’s not unusual. We’ve all fixed bugs that quickly. But I never opened a book. I used a tool (Safari developer tools) I’d never even heard of. I learned and deployed a workaround to a browser-specific issue I knew nothing about. And I had support from three other people located in different timezones in near real time and for free. Without the Internet, this process would likely have taken weeks and a relatively formal QA process: test, document, research — and how would I have ever found the solution? — fix, test, release. Rapid development is an understatement.

Today, The Conversations Network published our first slideshow from a third-party conference. For no particular reason other than our internal production schedule, it’s the presentation by Jane McGonigal, Lead Game Designer at Institute for the Future, at last year’s O’Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference (ETech). Let us know what you think. And expect a lot more slideshow-versions of programs as we’re able to get access to presenters’ PowerPoint and Keynote files.

• Total ratings to date: 65, 881
• Mean per episode: 38.5
• Median: 17
• Most-rated episode: 1,041 ratings
• Episodes rated per day: 60
• Ratings made per day: 78
• Distribution
  • Episodes with only 1 rating: 70
  • Episodes with 2 ratings: 77
  • Episodes with 3 ratings: 95
  • Episodes with 4 ratings: 61
  • Episodes with 5 or more ratings: 1,410
  • 40 most-rated episodes: >200 ratings each

The numbers tell us that ratings aren’t terribly useful in the short term such as to understand the quality of episodes published within the past week, but they are quite valuable for the long term.