On Friday, October 19th, I took part in a panel discussion about legal and ethical issues in new media along with professional blogging coach Mike Sansone and digital experts from the Des Moines Register and Meredith Corp. The event was part of the continuing ed program for Drake University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We talked a lot about blogs, wikis and how old media is adapting itself to remain relevant.

If you’re interested in listening to the whole thing, there’s a podcast available here. (iTunes required!)

The founder of Pandora.com will be speaking at the Fourth Street Theatre in Des Moines this Thursday evening. The event starts at 7:00 p.m. and is free to the public, so drop by if you’d like to hear stories about the Music Genome Project and surviving the dot-com implosion. See you there!

Click for directions (Enter through Java Joe’s)

Last Saturday I got the chance to roam around WIRED NextFest, an awe-inspiring showcase of wonderful new innovations at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It reminded me of visiting the Future World pavillions at EPCOT Center as a kid, in terms of giddiness for tomorrow’s tech. Below is just a taste of what I saw.

This is FogScreen, an ultrafine curtain of vapor that displays images from a projector. (Including your own face, when you get up close.)

Graphical displays from Hitachi’s Life Microscope. This watch-like device records data about your life rhythms and feeds it to your PC via Wi-fi, helping you to improve (and improvise upon) your quality of life.

Glad to see virtual worlds represented at NextFest. Here’s Second Life on display via Millions of Us, a group that helps organizations establish themselves inside virtual publics. (And, in classic Second Life fashion, the program crashed the computer and had to be restarted.)

One of those bad-ass Minority Report touchscreens!

Google Earth showed off their new Sky feature. You can explore, oh, a hundred million stars and two hundred million galaxies from your desktop. I always love meeting Google employees — there’s no other group of people more passionate about their work.

NASA was all over the place at NextFest, which I loved because I’m a huge space geek. (Space Camp class of ‘91! Woo!!) Anyway, here’s a rover driving over some delighted kids.

Here’s Zou Ren Ti (founder of XSM), who just happened to build a lifelike android twin of himself. Can you tell who is who?

This interactive display meshes your image with a patchwork of 500 YouTube videos. (They call it the YouTube Mirror.)

More coverage: NextFest is all that and then some: NPR report on BoingBoing.

On Friday I’m headed to Los Angeles to attend WIRED NextFest, a pretty sweet-looking event that’s being billed as our generation’s World’s Fair. On display are fantastic advances in communications tech, robotics, aerospace, security, entertainment, health care and — rumor has it — jet packs!!

I’ll be Twittering while at the event, and you can expect a full blog summary here next week. Adios!