Gary Vaynerchuck, host of the popular video podcast Wine Library TV, visited Des Moines this weekend and spoke at East Village Books.

Gary V. is a new form of celebrity, self-made through tireless enthusiasm, infectious energy, hard work, and the ability to leverage powerful social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. He actually interacts with the community he’s built — Gary typically receives 1,000 e-mails a day and he takes the time to answer each one personally. This is refreshing, especially in a media landscape that likes to package, produce and force-feed us “celebrities” that have zero relevance other than attending parties and appearing in garbage reality programming.

It was a pleasure hearing Gary’s thoughts on building a business and his full-throttle obsession with changing the culture of wine. After his talk and signing at the book store, some of us from the Des Moines TweetUp crew kidnapped Gary and went out for food and cocktails. (Above is a quick video interview that I captured in the back seat of Rob Jensen’s Camry.) Podcasting News also has a fantastic, in-depth interview that you should check out.

Thanks again to @garyvee for visiting Des Moines!

As the flood waters rise here in Des Moines, I am keeping a close watch on IowaFlood.com, a website that aggregates content from various citizen journalists and mainstream media outlets.

The site was created by Andy Brudtkuhl (of 48Web) within just a few hours, built with Yahoo! Pipes and Wordpress. Content is pulled automatically from various sources — alerts from NOAA and the National Weather Service, tagged photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, hashtagged chatter on Twitter, blog posts, articles from outlets like WHO-TV and the Des Moines Register — and all woven together into an incredibly robust, informative news experience.

The cool thing is how seamlessly old media and new media are working together. IowaFlood.com pulls in RSS feeds from the Register, meanwhile, a Register employee on Twitter is hashtagging his tweets with #iowaflood to ensure that his newspaper’s updates are correctly pushed to IowaFlood’s front page.

This creates a nice blend of reporting from authoritative media sources and human, block-by-block coverage that armies of citizen journalists can easily pull off. Thus far, IowaFlood.com has received over 16,000 visitors, generated over 1,000 posts, and survived one database crash — mostly due to word-of-mouth.

If only we had the internet back in 1993…

UPDATE 6/13: On Friday afternoon I went out and grabbed some video of the Des Moines river nearing it’s highest levels since 1993.

UPDATE 6/21: At Thursday’s Des Moines TweetUp, I asked Andy a few questions about the logistics behind building IowaFlood.com on the fly.

Good communication between employees is vital to all businesses, large or small. E-mail, unfortunately, often falls into the “bad communication” category. Tone is misinterpreted, context is lost and messages go missing.

That’s why today many companies are experimenting with internal wikis and private social networks to improve communication among their team members. Think of this as just an evolution of the corporate intranet.

By adopting the social features that have made online destinations like Wikipedia and Facebook successful, businesses can transform their stagnant, one-way intranet into a bustling expressway of shared thoughts, insights and collaboration.

Here are a few quick pointers for initiating a wiki project within your business:

• Start small. Choose a team within your organization to start using the wiki — not everyone at once.
• Develop a strategy to roll it out internally. (Hint: Don’t announce it via e-mail.)
• Give the wiki time to evolve. If users aren’t taken by it immediately, keeping pushing ahead, keep the faith and keep training.
• Determine what success is. Reduction of e-mail volume? Better communication? Knowing your goals ahead of time will allow you to justify the project later on.

If you’re ready to get started, there are multiple resources available, ranging from free, hosted services such as PBwiki, all the way to enterprise-level applications like SocialText. Good luck on starting up your wiki!

There’s a common perception that integrating video content into your website can be expensive. However, this isn’t the case any more — video-to-web is fast, easy and affordable.

Showcasing your product with video creates a much more intimate connection with your website visitor than just a photograph, diagram or list of services. Probably the best example is BlendTec’s "Will it Blend" video campaign, which illustrates the blending power of their products on objects such as iPhones and marbles.

Additionally, if you use a video-sharing application to host your content such as YouTube or Blip.tv, your video is instantly shareable in a peer-to-peer fashion. These services allow you to cast a wider audience net outside of your own website.

So how do you get started?

1. Equipment. Depending on the final quality you’ll need, you can hire a freelance videographer to shoot it, or simply create your own content with affordable digital video equipment such as the Flip cam.
2. Get it on the Web! This is much easier than it sounds. There are many video-sharing websites out there to choose from — I mentioned YouTube and Blip.tv earlier, but there’s also Viddler, Veoh, Revver and many more. It’s a snap to upload your video file to any of these websites and they will take care of file hosting and bandwidth for you, usually for free.
3. Integrate it. All video-sharing applications allow you to easily embed your video content into your website, blog, or social network profile. Typically this is as simple as copying and pasting a snippet of code.

In summary, there’s no reason to drop $10,000 on an expensive video shoot for your website. With the right tools and a little curiosity, you’ll be on your way to integrating video in no time.