I’ve been sitting here in the San Jose Convention Center where Google’s sales and operations team have been having an in-house event. Al Gore spoke yesterday and a bunch of bloggers were on a panel today. Anyway, random Googler’s have been coming by all afternoon while I’ve been using the wifi to keep up on the comments and Twitters coming in thanks to my redesign.

So, a few YouTube engineers have come by and I keep asking them if they are working on live streaming features. They are very aware they are getting outrun by streaming services like Ustream, Stickam, Justin.tv. They are more worried about cell phone videos like Qik, Flixwagon, Bambuser, and Kyte.tv. They tell me they see tons of people at concerts using their cell phones to record video and know that’s a big market that they’ll need to serve. Funny enough, several of them mentioned Seesmic and Seesmic’s new video comments. Since those are only five days old now, it’s surprising that they’ve gotten on the radar screen so quickly. Yesterday Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, told me they are seeing huge growth and have hundreds of blogs who’ve already deployed those new comments.

The employees quickly add “you didn’t hear it from me” and aren’t willing to tell me dates or other details (the devil is in the details) but it’s clear that YouTube’s leadership realizes that they’ve slipped behind in innovation and are going to start putting out some new stuff to keep its brand fresh.

Looking forward to it. YouTube has a huge audience compared to all these other newer services, so it’ll be interesting to see what they do in response.

“Finally,” Om Malik just told me after I told him about my redesigned blog that just went live. We were just on a panel discussion talking to Google’s sales team.

Some things you’ll notice: a prominent FriendFeed component. I’ve really become addicted to FriendFeed. It’s the best place to watch my interactions around the Internet. More and more of my time has been spent on places like Qik, Twitter, Google Reader, Seesmic, Upcoming, Flickr, YouTube, and commenting on other people’s blogs. In this redesign, done by a team at FastCompany’s offices in New York, we’ve featured many of those in my navigation bar too. UPDATE: Haewon Kye did the redesign and it’s getting mostly good reviews — more than 100 comments in about an hour on various services.

I’ve also added an advertising panel, so I’m sure that’ll start some discussion.

Sorry for being gone so much lately. Now you can see my calendar, and see just how busy my life has become. Plus, something about Twitter is more fun. Trying to say something in 140 characters does have its charms.

I’d love to know what you think. We’ll do tweaks over the next month or two as well.

What else should I add along the side?

UPDATE: TechCrunch says my sell out is complete.

Today Minggl came to my house and showed me their latest toolbar that joins Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace together. That’s pretty darn cool, although I can’t get it to work on Firefox’s newest betas (you gotta stick with old Firefox).

I’m trying it out on IE, and it is definitely the start of something interesting. What if such a toolbar could replicate all your photos between Flickr and Facebook? That’d be cool and a good way to defend against getting kicked off of Facebook.