Spectacular Speakers

Having a Googler speak at your conference is always a good thing. Having one that can map the stars and act with animals is Circus-with-the-Stars-style-rad. We were lucky enough to pick user experience designer Jon Wiley's brain recently and discuss his colorful work history, as well as Google's secret to success. Spoiler alert: Less is more, if more seems less. Keep reading if you're confused.

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According to Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and recently announced Mediabistro Circus Keynote Speaker, zero will be our hero. He thinks the future will be one of free music, free air travel, free online services, free everything. And if we're lucky, free love. It's like Woodstock, but with less hallucinogenics.

Anderson, who is releasing a book in 2009, tentatively titled "FREE," gives us a sneak peak of what we're in for with his recent Wired article, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business."

Cue excerpt that speaks volumes:

"The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first."

The word "free" always gets our ears burning, so we're all very excited to see what Mr. Anderson has to say at Mediabistro Circus. And you should too.

You can check out the full Mediabistro Circus session schedule here.

While some of us hold down the fort in frigid Soho as we put the finishing touches on our Circus website, our founder, Laurel, is busy working the air-conditioned room at TED in lovely Monterey. For the time being, she's traded in the usual media party suspects for the likes of Al Gore, Isaac Mizrahi, Amy Tan, and Dave Eggers.

Rumor has it that right this very minute Laurel's unleashing her considerable charms (and a feather-boa lasso) on a couple of TEDsters as our final Mediabistro Circus presenters.

Stay tuned. This is going to be good.

Not to sound like a complete nerd, but the force is with Jim Daly, literally. Daly, one of the speakers at Mediabistro Circus, is editor-in-chief of Edutopia, the core of The George Lucas Educational Foundation. Yes, that George Lucas. Cue lightsaber sound effect.

Edutopia is dedicated to promoting innovation in K-12 education. They publish a variety of media in the pursuit of this cause,
including online video, books, and a magazine.

Magazines, specifically digital ones, will be the focus of
Jim's visit to Mediabistro Circus. He'll be talking about the transition from print to digital format. Edutopia magazine, as one might guess, is offered in digital format as well as paper (coincidentally, the digital version is powered by nxtbook media, one of the sponsors for Mediabistro Circus).

Additionally, Daly will also be part of a pre-conference web
cast, "Paper to Pixels" on March 20^th. We'll do our best at that time to extract any Indiana Jones spoilers he may have overheard around the water cooler in San Francisco.

When most of us notice the inordinate amount of crap on television these days, the limits of our dissatisfaction usually stop at water cooler grumblings, or perhaps the occasional angry letter for the truly scorned. Lucky for us, Jim Louderback took things a bit further.

Louderback, one of our stellar speakers at Mediabistro Circus, is CEO of Revision 3, the "Broadcast Network for the Internet Generation," dedicated to all the things cool people love: tech, comedy, music, comic books, and more. Jim, where have you been all our lives?

While it's incredibly easy these days to get lost in the scores of hit-and-miss user-generated content sites, the San Francisco based Revision 3 produces all completely original content, including Diggnation, a (very funny) show dedicated to, you guessed it, analyzing the week's most popular stories on Digg.com. We love this show, primarily because we had been wasting half our work days on Digg. Now Revision 3 does all the leg work for us.

Louderback will be speaking about online video, and what it's like running a cool-as-hell Internet broadcast network.

You know someone is destined to be part of the geek ethos when part of their childhood history involves building electronics in their garage. Like Gates and Jobs, Robert Scoble, one of our Mediabistro Circus speakers, was bitten by the tech bug at an early age, soldering motherboards with his dad, and helping to build Apple IIs with mom. Talk about your typical American family.

Scoble has certainly graduated from the garage, becoming one of the most recognizable names on the web, and something of a geek celebrity, complete with public spats with old flames. He's considered one the foremost authorities on blogging, and his own blog, Scobleizer, is a must read for any fellow technophile. He recently joined Fast Company to spearhead their online video operations, aptly named Fast Company TV.

If you're a fan of The Scobe, you've no doubt noticed one or two pictures of him around the blogosphere, sans shirt. Obviously, a physique such as his demands our attention. Lucky for us, he'll be at Mediabistro Circus talking about online video and his efforts launching Fast Company TV. Whether it's shirtless will be entirely up to him.