Niall will continue to podcast almost weekly at Niall Kennedy's Podcast, connecting with a new guest each week to discuss the latest news affecting our online lives.

Om will continue to publish in hypertext form in the Giga Omni Media network.

This week's PodSession, Phased Redeployment, talks about the coming changes to the site. The podcast is 1 minute in length, a 1 MB download.

Om and Niall PodSessions subscribers will be automatically transitioned to Niall Kennedy's Podcast feed in the next week. No change is necessary on your end as feed aggregators and podcast applications such as iTunes will automatically switch over to the new feed.

Both Vista and Office boast major improvements over their predecessors, taking advantage of the computing and graphics power found in today's machines and creating a better connected experience over the local network as well as the worldwide web. Vista features major overhauls to networking, sound, and graphics devices and drivers, some of the essential components of any desktop platform. Windows Presentation Foundation delivers a whole new interaction layer for content and interactivity, making applications written for past Windows OSs appear even more dated.

Office 2007 received a major overhaul, replacing the familiar drop-down menu bar with graphical representations of the same tasks in what Microsoft is calling its "Ribbon UI." The new office productivity software will make your colleagues feel like dinosaurs based on new document outlining tools and fancy graphs alone.

All these changes come at a price of course, and software buyers will need to decide which of the 12 or more versions of Vista or Office best suites their need. Vista users can choose between Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, or Business editions of the software available in full, upgrade, or OEM varieties ranging from $100 to $400.

Are all of these new features exciting reasons to upgrade? Will consumers and businesses upgrade their operating systems or wait until buying a computer pre-loaded with the new OS? Will desktop gadgets and Internet Explorer 7 change the bridge between the desktop and our online lives? Has Om given up his MacBook Pro for a younger and sexier Windows laptop?

We answer these questions and more in this week's PodSession, Windows Vista launch. The podcast is 26 minutes in length, a 12 MB download.

This month's Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld conferences introduced the world (yet again) to new hardware and software that will redefine our digital home. Or will it? What do we want from our home media center? Should our toaster, coffee maker, and alarm clock be network aware, coordinating our morning routines? What are the current services and devices with the most promise, taking advantage of assets on the local network as well as in the cloud?

In this week's PodSession Om and I cut through the marketing hype and extended promises of the connected home, presenting our current realities and the most promising future services. This week's PodSession, Connected Home, is 20 minutes in length, a 10 MB download.

Years ago marketers moved their standard unit of web traffic measurement from "hits" to "pageviews" to better reflect the images, movies, and other sub-components of a page brought together in a single browser window to enhance user experience. In 2006 subsections of web pages became even more apparent, throwing off historical measurements of website popularity and customer engagement. From Ajax components to sidebar widgets and embedded movies, sub-components of a page came alive, creating what was often a better user experience while complicating the statistical measurement the web and its advertisers rely upon.

The lifeblood of the web, the advertising systems lining the pockets of online companies large and small, received significant upgrades this year. Microsoft launched a new online advertising product, AdCenter, and Yahoo! Search Marketing received an upgrade with the introduction of Project Panama. Google's AdSense product didn't sit still either, adding better understanding of advertising landing pages and tracking a sale from ad display through completed purchase with Google Checkout.

The technologies powering the web received a major upgrade as well. It was only a year ago when Om and I interviewed David Heinemeier Hansson just before the release of Ruby on Rails version 1.0. Rails continues to be a hot topic and serves as an inspiration for frameworks in other programming languages.

Om and I discuss these topics and much much more in this week's PodSession, Year-long trends in review. The podcast is 21 minutes in length, a 10 MB download.

Yahoo! is the biggest Internet brand in the United States and Japan as well as a significant player throughout the world. The Yahoo.com homepage, mail, and instant messenger are at the center of many people's lives, connecting them to the people and information they care most about. In the U.S. the Yahoo! brand might even be attached to your dial-up or broadband service through companies such as AT&T. Check your fantasy sports team, find a date, send e-mail, create your own cartoon impersonation, program your TiVo, download music, research your stocks, find a new job, all within the same web property.

Om and I evaluate the current and future prospects for Yahoo in our latest PodSesssion, Yahoo! for the masses. The podcast is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download.