Christian Long keeps the excellent Think:Lab blog, which is all about new approaches to education. Today he found two great videos. One is an inspiring teacher’s answer to what he “makes.” The second is a video about whether we are paying attention and asks teachers some interesting questions.

More goodies like these over on my link blog. Oh, and FeedDemon just added the ability to share items with other people, er, do your own link blog.

It’s funny who you run into at Google Developer Day. Today I met Anand Iyer. He’s a Microsoft evangelist in Silicon Valley and he’s been empowered to help startups out, like Zooomr, if they have troubles. I love that he put his phone number on his blog and said to call anytime.

Real Networks new Real Player now will take YouTube videos offline. Here’s an interview I did with Real’s Vice President, Jeff Chasen where he gave me a demo of the new player (coming soon, I’ll let you know where it’s up). I also gave him heck for Real’s past sins, including difficul-to-find player downloads, tons of additional software ties, and more.

The new player adds a little icon above videos on YouTube and other services like Blip.TV. It makes it easy to download Flash and other kinds of videos to the Real Player so you can keep them, watch them on planes or other places you’re offline, and more.

Here’s the official press release.

If you want just the facts, Rocky did an Editor’s Choice where he put up just the highlights of the interview and demo (takes less than five minutes to watch, where the full interview/demo takes about 24).

Why would Real do this?

It’s a lot better experience to watch a video in the Real Player than on a Web page (you can make it bigger, if it’s offline it won’t “stutter” anymore if you’re on low-bandwidth connections).

What about DRM? Yeah, they won’t allow you to download DRM’d stuff (he shows off in the video the experience that happens when you hit a video from, say, a movie company that doesn’t want you to download the Flash video).

You can also use this to burn videos to CDs or DVDs. Jeff thinks this is a “poor man’s” Apple TV since most people have DVDs hooked up to their TVs now.

UPDATE: CNET also wrote it up, and Andy Plesser has a different video about the new player.

…is coming at noon today over at ScobleShow. I’m leaving for the Google Developer Day right now and am not sure I’ll be able to get online to post something about it here. I’ll try but my EVDO has been giving me trouble.

UPDATE: It’s up, Real Networks announced a new player today that takes YouTube (and other Flash) videos offline.

Here’s Bret Taylor on my new video camera talking about Google’s Gears. He manages developer products at Google and we have a seven minute conversation about Google Gear, the new developer API that lets Web developers build offline applications.

Why did I put this up on Blip.tv? Because I used my new Sanyo Xacti video camera and am experimenting. This is a little shaky, sorry about that.

Ryan Block of Engadget has been doing an awesome job from the D conference. Here’s his notes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together.

I love how Bill Gates started it out: “First, I want to clarify, I’m NOT Fake Steve Jobs.”

Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate are in the Zoho datacenter. You can watch them here. Sun Microsystems also is sending over a loaner server with 42 terabytes of storage. All to help Zooomr get back up and running. Thomas Hawk left a long comment with an update on Zooomr’s situation. Don’t know who Zoho is? I interviewed them a couple weeks ago and their evangelist, Raju, is the one who’s helping Zooomr out.

Sometimes Silicon Valley bums me out with all the greed and talk about getting great valuations and all that. It’s nice to see companies help get customer data back up and live.

If Mike’s Red Shorts aren’t your thing, maybe you’d like Wired Blog’s fun rundown of interesting things you can see in Google’s new Street Level photography.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch holding up his new red shorts on 1938 Media.

I’ve noticed this several times and thought I’d bring it up.

TechMeme seems to penalize bloggers who link to other bloggers. Most bloggers believe that a major part of how TechMeme decides which is the most important story is to count links. That isn’t true in following mine, and other people’s results.

I believe there’s a “linking penalty” on TechMeme. At least it seems that way after doing my own link counting.

Let’s say there’s three stories.

Story A links to B and C.
Story B only links to A.
Story C doesn’t link to anyone.

Who will be most popular at TechMeme? Often times “C” will be. But shouldn’t “A” be? Since that’s the one that has the most inbound AND outbound links?

In my experience it won’t be and that often C, who didn’t link, or get linked to, will often be the top pick.

Why is that? Because I think Gabe wrote an anti-gaming algorithm which looks for bloggers linking to each other. I believe his algorithms are penalizing bloggers who often link to each other.

Here, look here at the story about Google Gears on TechMeme.

There are currently five articles that are showing up as headlines on TechMeme (this was the order that they appeared at time of writing — being higher is better).
1. By Artur Bergman on O’Reilly Radar. (His article doesn’t link out to other bloggers who covered this story).
2. By Nick Gonzalez on TechCrunch. (Nick links to me).
3. By Martin LaMonica at CNET. (His article doesn’t link out to other bloggers who covered this story).
4. By me. (I link to both Artur and Nick’s articles).
5. By David Berlind at ZDNet. (His article doesn’t link out to other bloggers who covered this story).

Now, how many blogs are linking to each?

Artur has three links, according to Google’s Blog Search at the time I wrote this article. (No outbound links).
Nick has five links. (Nick links to me as his only outbound blog link).
Martin’s has zero links. (No outbound links to other bloggers).
My blog has eight links. (The most links!!! and I link out to two other bloggers, so most inbound and most outbound links).
David Berlind has no links. (No outbound links to other bloggers).

So, lesson learned. If you wanna be the top dog on TechMeme, don’t link to anyone else but get them to link to you.

Or, is something else going on? I’m sure Gabe will say that most of the eight people who linked to me don’t count to his algorithm because he only looks at what the seed bloggers (folks who’ve been hand picked to be counted) are linking to. That might be true, but I’ve looked at enough result sets now to start a theory that there’s something else other than a straight counting of links going on.