Leo Laporte Banned From WWDC

Abby Laporte (Leo's daughter)

Funny, when people say they are going up to Leo Laporte's Twit.tv 's cottage, I had visions of a cottage in the wilderness, à la Red Green. No longer on TV, he could only afford to live in the middle of the forest, off the grid. Boy was I wrong.

The Twit TV may be in the wilderness by Silicon Valley standards, but he is in a high rent urban area by mine.


View Larger Map

But he is right, technically, it is a cottage. In the architectural sense, that is (note to self, start a tech podcast).

Anyway, Laporte may be headed to a real poor house, as he has been banned from Apple's WWDC. Reason: he live streamed the iPad announcement from his laptop. You see, Apple likes to edit the video, in case there are any Zuckerberg type mishaps  and they unveil a secret logo. Also, the second richest company in America (after Exon, thanks for asking), likes to skimp on paying for copyrighted music, so they like to edit those out. But Leo Laporte (who?) streamed the iPad unveiling live, and a whole bunch of blogs retransmitted it. And today he simply won't be in the room.

Room being the key word. Frankly, I had never heard of Laporte before I was forced to watch his stream because of a lack of alternative during the iPad unveiling. And I love tech news. According to him, his podcast audience is 250,000 ish per week. Is that worthy of a free seat at WWDC? Probably not.

Twit.tv is not the only alternative media "banned" from the room where Jobs will speak today (and undoubtedly unveil the best cell phone ever created by humans). Gizmodo, of stolen iPhone fame, will also be absent. But Engadget, the TMZ of the tech world, will be there. So, you know (insert Jobsian conspiracy here).

Just so you know, when I become CEO of the second richest company in the world, everybody will be invited to my product unveiling.

To pass the time until 14:00 Moncton time (10:00 Pacific), head over to All things D Digital 8 conference (aka, Rupert Murdoch's focus group) and listen to Jobs et al. speculate about digital flying saucers and jet-packs.

This post was quite US centric (although I did name drop Murdoch the Australian), so here are a couple of random non-American links.

-CBC
-The Guardian
-Altavistagoogle on the iPhone.
-Altavistagoogle on the iPod touch