Louis Pagan is a content producer and co-founder of Latinos in Social Media. As one of the first latino voices in the blogosphere with his blog Latino Pundit, Louis has now rebranded himself as an entrepreneur.

While he still blogs, Louis also owns a company called Lat3G Media and he has helped launched projects like the LATISM Heritage Tour. Being a Latin American guy myself, it was very fun to talk with Louis about the bond that unites all latinos and hispanics, as well as topics such as old and new media, and the “social” part of social media in the 25th episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!”

You can listen to the interview in its entirety on the Flash player below, and we would highly appreciate it if you check out our other shows by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes, and streaming it live every Thursday night on blogtalkradio!

Louis and I started the show talking about the fact that October 15th is the last day of Hispanic Heritage month, a tradition that has been around for many decades. Not many know this but Hispanic Heritage month starts on Septemeber 15th because it is the day of independence of many Central American countries, like my very own Guatemala. “It’s like a virtual month, right between the calendars,” Louis said as we spoke about the 4 weeks that have been designated to celebrate our heritage. “I don’t know if it’s the food, the culture, the way we look, the music, the way we dress, speak, we have a common bond and we connect on all different levels, it’s a celebration,” Louis expressed. (more…)

Bob Knorpp is the host of The BeanCast, a weekly round table podcast that gathers advertising and marketing thought leaders (aka actual ad experts) to discuss industry issues and current events. After many years in the ad industry, he started The Cool Beans Group, a marketing consultancy that provides B2B and B2C expertise in branding, strategic thinking, social media, and more. I had a great time talking to Bob on The Social Nerdia Show! and you can about our conversation, including 7 social media insights, below.

You can listen to the show in its unedited greatness using the BlogTalkRadio player, subscribing to the podcast on iTunes and/or streaming it on your mobile phone using Stitcher.

Podcasts are now everywhere and there is one for everything. Bob explained that “the competition (in podcasting) is really steep and there are so many choices… the chances of getting noticed are minuscule.” And yet, The BeanCast has made quite an impression on a lot of people in the ad industry. The show’s forward-looking slogan “The Best Marketing Podcast Anywhere,” is becoming a reality with every weekly show. With only a year and a half of being on the online airwaves, the show has gone from a water cooler experiment to an influential conversation that is a must-listen for anyone even remotely interested in marketing. As Bob told me, “you don’t need to build a huge audience to have impact, you just need to reach the right people.”

Reaching the right people is not enough though. To truly create an impact on a growing audience, Bob makes sure that The BeanCast is entertaining. “As much as I try to present a forum for smart people to present their ideas, my primary objective is to have an entertaining program.. that stimulates conversations.” The payoff of the show is a combination of information, entertainment and relevancy. And that’s probably why The BeanCast is one of my favorite podcasts: it showcases the thought-provoking views of experienced people in the ad industry, without being boring. (more…)

Doug Aamoth is the Reviews Editor for CrunchGear.com, a TechCrunch blog that covers gadgets, gear, and computer hardware. TechCrunch started in 2005 and CrunchGear was added to the network in 2006 when Michael Arrington expanded the site to include a blog that focused on gadgets. Doug has been with the CrunchGear team since 2007 and he now also hosts the CrunchGear live podcast on Wednesdays at 3pm Eastern.

Doug spends a lot of his time reviewing products so I asked him about some of his favorites. He mentioned the Acer netbook 751h and he also told me that he just got iPhones on a family plan with his wife. “It’s hard not to talk about the iPhone. It’s still so far ahead of other phones.” But not all of his reviews are about phones and computers. I’ve noticed that he often writes about random things and deals, from sandals with metal detectors to left-handed underpants. “We try to have something up at the very least every half other so it’s hard to fill a day some times.” CrunchGear as a site does about 50 posts and Doug writes about 5-10 per day.

A lot of Doug’s work is reactive. 10% of the time Doug contacts a company, while they will contact him the other 90% of the time. Doug wakes up every day without really knowing what he’s going to write about because about 90% of what goes up on CrunchGear is reactive. And reactive can mean hard work. “It’s not the picture that most people get of bloggers waking up at noon. I wake up at 7am and work full steam.. until about 9 at night.” (more…)

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins is the Managing Editor for SiliconANGLE, a collaboration blog that was founded by entrepreneur and PodTech founder John Furrier. I had a great time speaking to him about blogging, podcasting, old and new media on yesterday’s The Social Nerdia Show!, which you can stream below, stream on blogtalkradio, and subscribe to the iTunes podcast.

Before the term “blogging” was conceived, before Blogger became a huge success, and before WordPress was even an idea, people used to manually post updates on web pages full of animated GIFs, FastCounters and guestbooks. Regularly updating text on a web site on a regular basis, without the use of a CMS, is how many “bloggers” got started in the 90’s. Mark, who has been blogging at rizzn.com for about 11 years (check the WayBack Machine if you want) is one great example. Mark told me about his personal road to becoming a professional content producer, which included taking breaks, moving cross country in the age of desktops, and the fact that he became “addicted to the process… It’s more of a compulsion than a hobby.” AdSense is of course “not exactly a pay check” so Mark spent some time trying to figure out how to increase traffic and eventually live from his love for creating content.

Mark started podcasting after watching some Christian Slater movie (”Pump Up The Volume” maybe?). But, just as with blogging, it wasn’t really podcasting back then, unless you want to consider DIY recording of audio on a computer and distributing it with CD-Rs a podcast. Once the iPod came out and actual podcasting made it possible to easily distribute audio to the masses, Mark had already figured out the recording part of the equation. “The same show that we had 300 listeners across 7 different stations, we started putting it into podcasts and the first week we had 700 downloads. Nobody knew about it except for the people that happened to be in the podcast directory.” With daily shows and peaking at 300,000 podcast listeners, Mark’s podcast provided some income for him (even if it took 90 days to get it), but in today’s market, he believes it might be better to focus on text and video content instead of audio (at least from a monetizing point of view). Still, if someone really wants to podcast, sites like BlogTalkRadio and TalkShoe have made it much easier (and cheaper) than it used to be back then. (more…)

Kara Andrade from HablaHonduras and I have a panel up for consideration for the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival and we’d appreciate it so much if you guys voted for us and commented here on SXSW’s PanelPicker.

Labor Day is the last day to vote!

You can also help us spread the word by sharing this link http://bit.ly/votesxsw with everyone you know.

The title of the panel is “Here Come All the Latino Bloggers” and we intend to boldy go where few Latinos have been expected to go before. You might have noticed the lack of latino representation at everybody’s favorite interactive event in Austin, TX, but I am proud to announce that the Latino blogger, columnist, and citizen journalist has finally arrived.

Our panel will be about what is happening online and offline in Latin America, including Streisand effects, citizen journalism, jounalism 2.0, social injustice, and the digital divide.

The panel will also let you find out out more about the bloggers that are leaving a mark in the US and worldwide in the name of Latin America when it comes to politics, social justice, marketing, music, and technology.

By the way, here are some of the questions we hope to answer with out panel:

(more…)

These are Diegoliath’s Top 5 Movies of 2009. The “Creative In5piration” series is a showcase some of the things that can brighten your day and re-ignite your creative thinking. In this case, it’s all movies. Leave us a comment. Share your top 5 if you feel like it. 

1. District 9
If you haven’t seen this please shut your computer down right now and head to the theaters because this is probably one of the best movies coming out this year, and probably one of the best movies you’ll see in a long time.  It’s been up in the Twitter trending topics since its release a week and a half ago, if that means anything.  What makes it even better is that it’s the first full-length film by new-comer director Neil Blomkamp (who was supposed to direct the Halo movie). 

2. Where the Wild Things Are
Narnia and Domo Kun come together in what looks to be, like, the cutest film ever by Spike Jonze.

3. Inglorious Basterds
A war film by Quentin Tarantino. Enough said.

4. Zombie Land
Looks amazing and funny. I can’t wait to see Woody Harrelson come back from the dead, to fight the undead…

5. Paper Heart
Michael Cera plays the same character in every single movie he’s ever made. Paper Heart is no different.