Somewhere deep in the dairy capital of the world lies the Midwest Test Facility, where one man churns out so much tech copy that his word count rivals cheese as the state's biggest export.
Charlie White puts out 12 stories daily for the popular tech blog Gizmodo (www.gizmodo .com), where he is associate editor. About every other day, he writes a long article for DigitalVideoEditing.com, which is geared for advanced movie makers. In all, White estimates he puts out a whopping 500,000 words annually.
And because he has so much free time, White recently started doing a podcast on the weekends. It's at www.coolnessroundup.com.
All this work starts daily at 6 a.m. at White's home (which he has dubbed the Midwest Test Facility), in suburban Milwaukee.
"About three years ago, I custom-built this home so I could work here and test equipment," White explained. "I have a special theater that I built here. It's shaped like an octagon so sound has nothing to bounce off of."
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The longtime public television producer left "big media" in 2000 to write for DigitalMediaNet.com, a conglomerate of Web sites "for professional (video) content creators." There are how-to articles, product reviews, and a wide range of information about tools for working with video.
Of all of them, his favorite is the Gizmodo gig.
"It's the most fun, by far," White said. "It's the most high-profile. I get a chance to play with all the latest and greatest equipment. Sometimes I get a device, hold it in my hands, and say 'nobody in the whole world is looking at this yet.' "
The high-traffic Gizmodo covers all-things consumer electronics, and often posts photographs and descriptions of new products months before they are released.
The blog covers everything from cell phones to televisions, from news of exploding Dell laptops to news of exploding Apple laptops.
Gizmodo ranks fourth on Technorati's (www.technorati.com) list of 100 most popular blogs. According to White, Gizmodo, which features just five writers, currently averages 12 million visitors per month. One day last week, the site pulled in 500,000 Web surfers.
Gizmodo puts out about 50 new stories per day.
So what Web sites do the Gizmodo guys turn to when tracking down the latest tech news to cover?
If he told you, he'd have to, well, explode you.
"I'm actually contractually prevented from telling you which 150 we've chosen," White said. "We don't want our competitors to know where we're getting our juicy stories."
White does say that he relies on an RSS reader to gather the latest stories posted by the 150 go-to sites in list form. Which means as soon as new stories are posted by the designated sites, his RSS application downloads them, like an e-mail. This way, no bookmarks, no Web browsing, just reading.