Anthony Zaragoza has been missing out of cons the last few months when his series “Con Goer” wrapped up in October, though production stretched to the opening of season 4 in January. Over the past few months of post-production, Anthony and the Con Goer crew achieved a lot of attention, including nominated for best video podcast and a video journalism award.

The opening con for season 4 was selected a while back from season 2 production. The convention is called MagFEST, a music and gaming festival. Since the summer, the team have announced to attend the convention. Vidgle will also have a vendor’s booth on the convention floor throughout the weekend.

Jenthony Enterprises, parent company of Vidgle, declared on Tuesday that Anthony will not be attending MagFest due to an emergency leave from business travel. The rest of the production and booth team will still be attending. This will be the first “Con Goer” production that the director of “Con Goer,” Anthony, will not be on location.

Anthony also cancelled a trip to a media conference in Manhattan. In that conference, he was a selected guest to speak about the social media, streaming media, and more. In addition, Anthony cancelled his trip to the State of the Net conference later this month.

Replacing Anthony’s director position at MagFest is reporter and producer Fred Cain. For over the past 4 years of Vidgle’s operations, (3 in public), Fred has been a great partner with the director Anthony. Most of the conventions “Con Goer” attend are approved by Fred.

“Con Goer” began in 2006 as an audio podcast on WRAJ Internet Radio, the sister website of Vidgle, covering conventions of anime, science fiction, fantasy, and beyond. Today, the podcast changed its format to video in 2008. In 2010, the show was featured in Miro Guide and was selected as best video podcast in the 2010 Podcast Awards. The audio podcast of “Con Goer” is returning to WRAJ Internet Radio later this year.

Anthony will be speaking and moderating for the fourth year at the International Intercollegiate Broadcast Systems (IBS) Conference in New York City next weekend.

Once again, Anthony will speak about streaming and podcasting at the 70th annual conference. In addition, he will be talking about Web 2.0 and how college radio stations can operate on open source software.

Since 2002, Anthony has operated an online media empire which attracts 100,000 users a month. Currently, Anthony is general manager of WRAJ Internet Radio, an online internet radio station and audio podcast network, and Vidgle, a video podcast portal with its own original series.

For more information about the IBS conference, go to www.ibsradio.org. Check website for schedule.

Don’t call me foolish, but when it comes to batteries forget about. I can complain for hours about how batteries are so untrustworthy. My 3 year old PowerBook G4 12″ laptop battery is having a charge issue, its a long story of what’s going on but I have a sense of what’s wrong. The old battery that I had up till 2006, which was recalled, was good, it sometimes lasted a good five hours if I had the backlight low and nothing else on (including wireless, Bluetooth, Audio, CD/DVD, etc.). And now, the battery that I had for two years has been acting funny now for the past few months. And as you see on top, thats right, a ten hour charge, but its not actually true. The battery doesn’t want to charge when in use, including sleep mode, which results the kernal reports to the OS that it would take 10 hours (in Mac OS, the charge time length variable can’t be any higher than 10 hours). Then out of no where, the battery thinks its fully charged, and when you use 16% of power from the battery, it will lose its charge. From my knowledge, it seems to be a dead cell. At this rate, I think I’m going to need to order a new battery. Also something that I ran into last night, it seems like I can’t burn CDs with this issue. I’m getting an error that I have never ran into before, which says that there is not enough power to power the laser to write onto the CD.

May be this is a sign for a new laptop?

I am waiting for the next operating system to come next year, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, until I get a new laptop. My current laptop will become a Final Cut Pro and audio production laptop so that podcast episodes on WRAJ and Vidgle can be produced on the field, which will mostly be used for the Con Goer. I was quite surprised of how many audio and video podcasts were using my laptop model to produce the shows. However, most of the podcasts have upgraded this year to a newer Mac laptop model.

Here are a list of conventions I’m planning to go to for 2008:

• IBS Radio Conference – New York, NY: Hotel Pennsylvania ( March 7, 8 )
• Anime Boston – Baltimore, MD: Haynes Convention Center ( March 21 – 23 )
• I-CON – Stony Brook, NY: Stony Brook University ( April 4 – 6 )
• Renaissance Fair – NJ ( ? )
• Sign Business & Digital Graphics, Printwear Show – Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Convention Center ( June 21 )
• E3 Media and Business Summit – Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles Convention Center ( July 15 – 18, CID )
• Otakon – Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Convention Center( August 8 – 10 )
• MangaNext – Secaucus, NJ: TBA ( TBA )

Some of the conventions, like Anime Boston, is not giving me a press pass because they believe we don’t cover that much anime. We are hoping by 2009, we will be able to get press passes from all conventions because of the reporting we are doing at all of the anime conventions we are covering with Vidgle this year beginning with Anime Boston.

I truly enjoy going to conventions, I’ve been going to different type of conventions since I was 5. I’ve been to bus shows, trade shows, sign shows, radio conferences, anime and sci-fi, and more. I’ve meet many people, especially at the Live365 conferences in 2004 and 2005 in California. By 2009 or 2010, I am planning to have a radio and internet conference covering podcast, internet radio, and other streaming technology. I’m also in full support for Jon’s idea of our own anime convention which is cheap, small and at a great location. I hope to get those two conventions alive by the beginning of the decade.

Picture above: Justin Taub, Peter Iengo, and Angelo Cannella attending the IBS National Radio Conference in New York City in March 2007. More pictures from the convention are here.