Joyeux Noël

A happy holidays to all of you from all of the TWiTs. It's been an amazing year. When we began 2008 there were just two of us at TWiT LLC: Dane and me. Now, with the addition of Frédérique, Colleen, and Tony, there are five, and we hope to add two more staff members in the next few months. This year saw the creation of TWiT Live, our streaming video channel, and TWiT.am, our streaming audio. We added one show: Roz Rows, lost one, Jumping Monkeys, and created several live shows including TWiT Fit with Al Scardino, PC Perspective with Ryan Shrout, and Maxwell's House with Ray Maxwell. In 2009 we hope to expand our offerings even more with new shows, an XMPP text stream to complement the audio and video streams, downloadable high-quality video versions of many shows, and more ways to participate in the community of TWiTs. Our advertising agency, Podtrac, has done a tremendous job of finding us sponsors, and the support of companies like Audible, Citrix, Nerds On Site, Visa, Brain TonIQ, Scott E-Vest, and Drobo has helped us grow. We thank them, as always, for their support. Thanks, too, to our TWiT hosts, from John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, Wil Harris, Tom Merritt, Veronia Belmont and the many other distinguished journalists who grace our TWiT panels, to MacBreak Weekly's Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Merlin Mann, and Scott Bourne, to our individual hosts, Paul Thurrott, Steve Gibson, Amber MacArthur, Cammy Blackstone, Roz Savage, Dick DeBartolo, Randal Schwartz, Marc Pelletier, and Denise Howell. We are truly blessed with some of the most interesting minds covering technology. I especially want to thank all the community volunteers who moderate the chat rooms and forums, contribute music and design support, maintain the servers, and bail me out of the many scrapes I manage to get into. The community that has risen around TWiT is its lifeblood. It's the reason we work so hard to create the programming, and I know it's the reason you continue to watch, listen, chat, and post. Thanks for playing with us. Together we're creating a new kind of media. Many of you have also contributed financially to TWiT. These contributions have provided the capital we needed to build our live studio, expand our servers, pay the utilities, and all the other recurring costs of a growing operation. We truly couldn't do it without your support. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I know the pundits are predicting tough times ahead, and that some members of our extended TWiT family will be faced with hardships. For that matter, I don't really know what 2009 will bring TWiT, but I have absolute faith in our community. The bonds we have forged together will help us all get through this next year as they have through the past three. I wish you all a healthy, peaceful, and vital new year. I'm excited about the opportunities 2009 will bring. We'll be here for you, and I know you'll be here for us. Thank you for being a part of TWiT. We couldn't do it without you! Leo