net@night (Audio)

net@night is an archived TWiT series built around two people comparing notes on the internet as it happened, Amber MacArthur in Toronto and Leo Laporte in Petaluma, California. Tom Merritt sits opposite Amber in the 'mint.com' episode. Conversation comes first. Small talk gets room to breathe, like a Toronto heat wave easing toward fall, set against a California climate with only two seasons: raining and not raining. Then the headlines land, and the episode listings show how wide they run: Facebook's rewritten privacy policy and its move into movie rentals, YouTube acquiring NextNewNetworks, Google's Chrome OS event and a Google Doodle, TechCrunch starting a TV station, the end of Vox. Big events get the same treatment. SXSW 2011 has its own episode, 'SXSWasted', and its listing also points to how social media and the internet helped Japan in a time of crisis. The Oscars arrive through Dana, cheered on air for tweeting and posting photos from his seat at the ceremony. The attitude toward anything new is curious rather than gullible. A TechCrunch TV clip gets credit for booking strong guests, then a wince at the sound and the studio. A short film shot on an iPhone 4 and edited on the phone in iMovie draws real admiration, with the fair note that it helps when the filmmaker knows his angles. When Tumblr went down for close to a full day, the talk turned to dependence: maddening for people who rely on it, a shrug for everyone else, just like Twitter in its early days. The verdict was that Tumblr needed a failure page with some of the fail whale's charm. There is warmth in a stretch admiring Craig of Craigslist for keeping the site simple, turning down buyers and steering his money toward good causes. Guests appear by name in the listings, among them Guy Kawasaki with his new book, 'Enchantment', and Leah Culver on Convore. Smaller services get a look too, from mint.com to TweetWarp. The titles themselves lean playful: 'SXSWasted', 'A World Without Email', 'In the Backseat with Amber'. Some episodes sign off with a stray find from the web, such as a comic 'South by Southwest Blues' song about startup hype that gets a delighted reaction, or a very long promo for a Norwegian TV show. The mood shifts between warm, dry and excited, often inside a single story. Heard today, net@night is a quick, friendly record of what the web was buzzing about in 2010 and 2011, told by two people who plainly enjoyed the telling.