CNN.com/LIVE Blogger Bunch

CNN.com/LIVE Blogger Bunch, originally uploaded by stevegarfield. CC BY-NC-SA

I was on CNN.com/Live live today talking about Columbine, Gun Control and President Obama's trip to Latin America.

It was a neat experience. I producer called in five minutes before air and we connected via Skype. The video stream coming to my MAc was choppy so I turned on my Panasonic Toughbook to see the stream. There it was nice and clear, but hten the producer told me to shut that one off since it was sucking up all my bandwidth.

Going into the segment, I thought that they were going to ask me about what bloggers were saying about the issues, so I did some web surfing and brabbed some relevant posts. Searching around like that brought me up to speed on the issues, but in the end, what they wanted to hear were MY thoughts on the issues.

I think I did a good job on gun control by referencing the violence in the streets of Boston and how illegal guns need to be taken off the streets.

I can't tell you how much fun it was to compare and contrast the Bush foreign poicy of Axis of Evil with Obama's let's talk policy. I loved that!

Twitter
It was also fun to be able to post to twitter live and see responses. That is the future.

Technical Behind the Scenes
I was wondering how the anchor would moderate a remote conversation between four people.
I used Skype on a MacBook Pro, with a Canon GL/2 connected via a Firewire card, and an audio-technica AT2020 USB mic.

Update:

Here's video from the second part of the segment.