You can help in three ways:

1. Moderate: We need people to choose which channels get featured on the German home page, as well as check to make sure that newly submitted channels work in Miro, are legal, and aren’t pornographic.
2. Translate: We need people to help improve the German translations of Miro’s site, content guide, and application. To get involved visitwww.getmiro.com/code/translate
3. Recommend: If you have favorite German podcasts or video sites that should be included in the German player, please let us know!

Please comment on this post if you want to be a German moderator or if you have recommendations for German channels. Thanks! If you aren’t primarily a German or English speaker, don’t worry — this is just the first of many community efforts to come.

Also, Holmes and I were in Berlin last week at Re:publica and had a fantastic time. Thanks to Markus Beckedahl for bringing us into the German participatory media scene!

Update: Please join the DeutschMiro Mailing List!

Here’s an amazing audio clip of a guy admitting he’s paid to fill a seat:
[audio:http://www.freepress.net/audio/download/38237/Comcast+Seat+Fillers.mp3]
download mp3

Free Press originally reported the incident , and posted photos and audio.

(Digg this Article!)

Update: Comcast now admits that they paid non-Comcast employees to hold spaces at the hearing.

The shill audience is being organized beforehand with instructions and yellow pens.

Many of them fell asleep during the hearing.

They were identifiable by their yellow highlighters.

The other big addition is much-improved MySQL support – basically, all of your data can be stored in MySQL. This is great for larger sites, or sites that want to plug BM into their CMS or other tool, but if you’re running a site without much data, stick with the non-MySQL for now.

There are a bunch of bug fixes and other smaller improvements. In the future, expect to see a much-improved theme system as well as a new version of the BitTorrent code.

Thanks to all of the coders who submitted bug fixes and all of the users who have given us feedback – it’s been great!

So, here’s a quick overview of the different ways in which you can make your own DTV channel. Already the DTV Guide features over 150 channels, and DTV is only available for Mac… when the Windows beta of DTV comes out, a lot more channels will jump into the fray. Why not stay ahead of the curve and get your channel rolling now?

First, remember that you don’t need to be using a Mac in order to submit your channel to the Guide — pretty much any RSS feed with video enclosures can be submitted here. Second, remember that you don’t need to be a videomaker yourself to have a channel — you can make a personalized mixtape channel of interesting videos from around the internet. Some options:

1. If you have your own website, the easiest way is to install Broadcast Machine, which was designed to dovetail neatly with DTV. It’s a quick and easy install, it usually takes about 15 minutes– and then you and others can post video to your channel as easily as blogging.

2. If you don’t have access to a web server, or if you have a hosted website on a free service such as Blogger, you can still create your own channel for zero dollars and zero cents by following the steps laid out by the generous folks at Freevlog. Freevlog features very clear tutorials — in QuickTime video format — walking you through setting up your own video blog, for both PC and Mac. Good examples can be found at the videoblogs of the Freevlog maestros, Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi. As they point out, this process doesn’t require any specialized technical knowledge or HTML — following their tutorials, I’d guess you could start from scratch and submit your channel to the DTV Guide in about an hour (!!).

3. Finally, let’s say you’re just interested in making a mixtape of video clips from around the net. You can do this using either Broadcast Machine or the Freevlog suggestions, but an even faster way is to make your own del.icio.us page, put the bookmarklet in your browser to bookmark videos you like, and follow these simple instructions on using DTV to scrape your del.icio.us page and make an awesome channel.

Look for a more detailed walk-through on these options soon, and in the meantime, feel free to hit us with questions or comments anytime at feedback at pculture.org.

We’re very excited to be working with the four organizations mentioned in the announcement, and a number of other groups as well who we’ll be announcing soon. These groups all share the recognition that DTV will be an innovative new way to launch their video into the world, establish a foothold in the new medium of internet TV, and engage with their audience. But at the same time, the PCF video platform is free and independent, and we look forward to an explosion of new content as video publishing online becomes easier and more affordable. In other words, we’re excited for a lot of individuals and organizations to pick up Broadcast Machine and DTV, and we expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Introducing four of the early adopters of DTV: the independent cable channel Current TV; the new music video channel for exclusively independent artists, TeleMusicVision; the amazingly cool childrens’ public access TV show, Pancake Mountain; and the fastest-growing labor union in the country, SEIU.

We look forward to watching their DTV channels in the not-too-distant future, and we look forward to seeing thousands and thousands more DTV channels from videobloggers, independent video producers, citizen journalists, NGOs, documentary filmmakers, and more… get ready for internet TV, free and open to the public.

Don’t forget to check out the press page to get the latest blog chatter around the video platform and to check out the PCF Technorati profile.