The new year feels as though it is off to a galloping start. Barely two weeks into 2008, and we’re bracing for the fourth or fifth batch of big announcements from the fourth or fifth big industry convention in two weeks. This week features the big auto show in Detroit, the music industry convention NAMM in southern California, and the much-anticipated announcements at MacWorld in San Francisco.

Before we rush into the next round of announcements, though, we thought we should take a final at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and highlight the experiences of the podcasters and new media gurus that were there.

There were some common themes in their comments.

• First, several mentioned that they thought that Internet technology was evolving to a point where indie podcasters could cover an event like CES just as well, in text, audio or video, as a traditional media network.
• Second, none were overly “wowed” by announcements at the show.
• Finally, they all expressed disgust at Gizmodo’s TV-B-Gone stunt.

Here are some of their thoughts and links to their personal coverage:

Todd Cochrane, of Geek News Central and Blubrry and CEO of Raw Voice, is still posting fresh clips from the hours and hours of video he (and Slashdot’s Andy McCaskey) shot during CES. You can find lots of video and commentary from Todd here and here .

The other podcasters I spoke with didn’t give specifics of the grueling all day, all night reporting, but it must’ve been simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Todd says, “we busted our butts did not get much sleep– in fact, from Monday to Thursday it was a whole 14 hours for me.”

Todd also “tweeted” that CES is the “ultimate weight loss event: 8 pounds in 7 days!”

John Furrier, Founder of PodTech, worked with a team of podcasters and bloggers to do marathon live streaming coverage of CES on Mogulus.tv. PodTech, along with hard drive maker Seagate sponsored new media haven BlogHaus at CES. After he got back from CES, John told me that:

CES was a zoo but it represents the entire ecosystem so it’s worthy it to go through. My observations..bloghaus concept of a new press corp again worked great and video coverage was out in force. Tons of videopodcasters. I’m sure there was a boat load of downloadable media.

To me the big thing is HD is everwhere and will put pressure on all aspects of computing to devices. My opinion from this CES is that there is a ‘lag’ in innovation in areas where the benefits of HD show weaknesses in vendors. AMD Intel Car companies, home networking, connectivity… HD highlights big limitiations in those areas. TV display size continues to amaze me.

On a personal note, I walked away with the conviction that we can now cover events with new media or social media tools better than CNN in about 1yr. All the technologies and tools are coming into place..

Although there was no big smashing news (other than blueray) the show had some very telling signals coming out of the event.

Paul Colligan, early proponent of podcasting for business and author of The Business Podcasting Bible, has his roundup of what he saw at CES.

One of Paul’s take-aways was that podcasting isn’t he buzzword that it once was, and that podcasting was getting absorbed into the new media mix:

I think the big “take home” came after deconstructing the panel presentation.

We realized that telling Podcast-only stories is getting harder and harder to do as more and more people aren‚Äôt making their stories Podcast-only… Very quickly we‚Äôll be telling new media stories that had a Podcasting element –

Loic LeMeur, French serial entrepreneur whose current project, online video community seesmic, is in pre-Alpha development, posted daily video highlights from the show:

• “Day 61” (of Seesmic).
• A funny recap with references to a meeting with French beauty corporation L’Oreal