http://live.pirillo.com/ – Every day brings new viewers to our live chat. A recent visitor asked about her new laptop screen not being bright enough. She has reportedly changed her settings in the laptop control panel, with no luck. She wrote in to ask my advice, so let’s see what we can do to help Tifferz!

Every laptop brand is different in some ways from the other. They may have different hardware, they could have slightly different configurations. Just as they vary in these ways, they also can have different levels of brightness to the screen.

There are unfortunately only a couple of things you can do to adjust the brightness on your laptop. One method is discussed in this video, and again on Yahoo! Answers. Each laptop should have a small button with the letters fn. The letters on that key can vary by manufacturer. Usually you can find this button on the lower left corner of your keyboard. Pushing this button along with the one that has a picture of a small screen and an up arrow (found on the F4 key usually) simultaneously will adjust your brightness.

Another nifty little trick is to simply plug the laptop in to a power source. Many laptop screens will become a bit brighter when the machine is plugged in. If these two options fail you, make sure your video drivers are updated, and try moving the screen to a different angle.

There are several tips and tricks found right on Lockergnome.com that can help you get your LCD monitor adjusted to your comfort and convenience.

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LCD Screen Brightness

For the most part, I think I’ve found a pretty good groove with video production – and this week has been off-the-chain with interactivity. I believe it’s largely due to the new nature of the Ustream player that plays automatically – certainly does help the numbers. The hardest part is coming up with new questions or semi-evergreen discussion points every day – but it’s fueled and funneled through the chat room. Thankfully, Lordkat has been pushing the recordings through HeySpread and TubeMogul, which should actually be a function of the original production point (Ustream.tv, though they seem intent on keeping the video in their own archives for the moment, which drive little to no traffic on their own).

Five short-form, targeted Q&A videos a day sounds like a lot to consume, but I assume that most of our viewers will come in through Google searches (and not necessarily YouTube or podcast subscriptions, although I’m currently on the Tech tab in the iTunes Podcast directory front and the media archives are doing quite well on their own).

Someone called HowTube added me as a YouTube subscription today, so (like always) I took a look at their membership page. Turns out, this is someone who works for YouTube – and they’re kicking off a special channel just for producers like me (or you, perhaps):

I recently switched from being a “Guru” to a “Director” because I wasn’t finding any Gurus showing up in the featured sidebar throughout the site. Not sure if that impacted my subscriptions any, but I can tell you they’re certainly up! Nobody’s vetting the Guru list, so at this point it’s pointless to label myself as such (at least, in an official capacity).

Oh, and I can tell you that these videos are helping people. One guy stopped by the chat room tonight to ask for the discount on Parallels I was promoting a few months back. I gave it to him, and he was thrilled that he searched Google for more information and stumbled upon the video I recorded months ago. ;)

Even better: when I was talking to one of the sponsors for Gnomedex, I asked him if he had seen the videos we had been producing every day. He said something along the lines of: “You mean the ones with GoDaddy, TechSmith, Dell, and AMD?” Precisely. Even as someone who wasn’t even at the level of a casual subscriber, those brands were stamped into his mental rotation. That’s the value of video. That’s the value of branding. That’s priceless.

Video How-to Guru

Doing It is really doing it, apparently – generating over 75,000 unique page impressions for a single post today. Our post on How to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper got Fark’ed, and now that link is leaking out into other social news services. We went from zero to sixty in a matter of hours, and it looks as though that momentum will carry us through to future farkable finds. Yes, we’re expanding our search for the wackiest ways to do things – be that in video, audio, or plain text format. Since anybody can contribute to the site, you’re welcome to join us in our quest for the holy grail…

How to Get 75,000 Page Impressions in a Day

Dave Winer just released The DocNography Tool Howto, after a successful round at BloggerCon. Great minds think alike! While we won’t be using the OPML Editor for our mind mapping management, we will be using MindJet MindManager – projecting it onto a screen at the front of the room, and then making the files availble for anybody to download and view. It’s really too bad that MindManager doesn’t export OPML quite yet. I first fell in love with the idea back when I saw Marc Orchant put it into play at the original MSN Search Champs summit. He took our groups ideas and transformed them into a visually stunning, organized cloud of information.

Mapping the Mind