For some reason I ended up on a plethora of podcasts this week! Here’s the rundown for your listening and viewing enjoyment:

Sunday: This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, Steve Gillmore, John C. Dvorak and Patrick Norton. We talked about all sorts of news, including SXSW (and Twitter, natch) as well as some unfounded rumors involving Revision3. Which leads us to…

Tuesday: Tekzilla! I love guest hosting this show, mostly because it means I get to hang out with Patrick and Roger all afternoon.

Thursday: The Instance Episode #100! I was honored and delighted to be on the 100th episode of my favorite podcast. Scott and Randy had folks on air that have made appearances or recorded special pieces for the show over the last 100 episodes, so it was like a big homecoming.

Friday: I went down to CNET for an in-studio recording of Buzz Out Loud. It was nice to be back in the BOL chair, even if I let Tom run the production side of things (it’s been a while, I’d probably break it). They live stream on ustream.tv now too, so I was able to record it. Not too exciting to watch us talk, I bet, but you get to see me chug some coffee.

And on Monday and Wednesday I recorded upcoming episodes of Mahalo Daily, so it was quite a full week.

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I received a beta invite to Bitstrips today, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to break into the web comic world. I’m kidding, of course (we’ll leave that to the people who actually have talent, like Scott) but this new social network and comic drawing site is a lot of fun to play around with. You can create characters (the customization is really good) and save and share your strips for other users. I don’t actually have any friends on there yet, but it seems as though people can also edit your comic (instant collaboration!).

I wish there were more ways to embed the comic, but maybe I just haven’t found that option yet. I’d like to be able to show all three panels at once instead of scrolling through panes. You can save a jpeg version of it, and then post that image, but that’s kind of a workaround. The site is in private beta right now, but they’ll be going live during SXSW (and also “comic blogging” the event, which should be hilarious).

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It’s a sad but true fact that there are far fewer women working in the technology industry than men. I’m not just talking about journalists and bloggers; there are significantly fewer programmers, designers, and startup founders. Last year I was on a panel in Denver, the New Media Summit, and I met a lot of people involved with a program called TechStars. It’s a mentorship-driven investment fund, which gives out seed capital to a select number of startups. Some of the founders are straight out of college, and the advice that they got from other entrepreneurs and angel investors is invaluable.

However, out of the 302 companies that applied last year, only 7 had one or more women on their team. Only one of the finalist teams had a female on board. This year, those numbers are even smaller. What gives? Yes, this is an isolated event, but the ideas I saw last year were really great, and it bums me out that more ladies aren’t taking part.

Anyhow, this is a great chance for men and women alike to learn how to build their startup, but it would be great to see more women represented! If you’ve got a great idea, there’s still 34 days left to apply.

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The Mahalo video team is here at GDC (Game Developers Conference) covering the event with Joystiq! The Mahalo Games team is pumping out tons of pages about all the games we’re covering, and we’ve been shooting constantly for the last day and a half.

Today’s Mahalo Daily is a feature on the Independent Games Festival, happening here in the West Hall of Moscone.

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