By Daniel Johnson, Sports Editor
Not many people know Luria Petrucci by her real name. Luria’s digital name, Cali Lewis, is a different story.
Cali is the host of Geek- BriefTV, a themed podcast that broadcasts tips and discusses computer trends to up to 1 million Internet viewers. Lewis and her husband Neal Campbell are among the many high-profile FilmFest Judges for the 2007 show and are best known for inventing the popular podcast.
The couple discovered podcasting in 2005 after hearing former MTV VJ Adam Curry discuss the Internet broadcasting medium on a National Public Radio discussion.
“He was being interviewed on NPR, so we just started soaking up the information and realized this was something we wanted to do.” Lewis said.
Campbell and Lewis said they laid out a basic idea for GeekBriefTV in November 2005 and released their first show on the Internet during the winter.
“We had never done anything before, so we bought our first video camera, just learned and did it,” Lewis said.
Lewis, the podcast’s producer and host, takes on the role of the International Director of the fictional Geek Intelligence Agency, or G.I.A. and uses her status to “brief” the agents on the latest computer news.
“Within three weeks we had grown so much that our hosting company was calling us to tell us they were gonna shut our site down because we were going over the bandwidth.
At that point the couple turned to podshow.com, a Web site that hosts a variety of podcasts and was founded by Curry.
“We knew we wanted to be with the podshow network so we kind of had a freakout moment.”
The couple e-mailed everyone they knew that had some kind of connection to podshow. com and Curry replied offering any way to help them out.
Now Lewis broadcasts on a daily basis, while she runs a blog designed to answer questions regarding the iPhone and personally responds to any comments or e-mails to GeekBriefTV.
“That’s the great thing about podcasting, individuals can say, ‘OK I’m gonna do it,’ and do it.” Lewis said. “Nobody has the power to say, ‘No you’re not good enough.'”
Campbell attributes the podcast’s rapid and continuing success to being in the right cyberspace at the right time.
“I think part of it was timing,” Campbell said. “We started shortly after Apple released their first video iPod and we were thinking people were going to be getting these for Christmas and there wasn’t a lot of content on iTunes for video.”
Now the couple spends their days and nights maintaining the popular podcast.
“We do this more than fulltime, we do it about 16 hours a day,” Campbell said. “We try to take one day a week off because the Bible says we should.”
Lewis says she doesn’t mind not using her real name and merely took on the pseudonym to enhance the show.
“The show Alias was big at that time so we just went for it,” Lewis said. “The whole G.I.A. thing was a good way to get people involved.”
And now GeekBriefTV will broadcast live from the ACU Learning Commons on Friday at 2 p.m. The couple said they are looking forward to what they expect to be the largest live broadcast in the podcast’s history, but also casting their vote as FilmFest judges.
“This sounded like a fun thing to do when [Doug Darby, FilmFest director] asked us,” Campbell said. “Any time you get to do something you’ve never done before that’s something we’re all about. The whole idea of students who want to produce media is something we really care about.”
