Hi all! Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Mike Fabio and I'm the Google Liaison to the Google Lunar X PRIZE. And while that moniker doesn't necessarily mean what it says, my essential role here is to build and maintain all of the new media outreach programs of the Google Lunar X PRIZE. As you can see on our site (and elsewhere), we are slowly building up our presence on the googlelunarxprize.org Team Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Ustream.tv, and lots of other places as well. We're just in the infancy stage of this enormous project, and as things progress, you'll be sure to see lots of fascinating content.

But in order for these technologies to work, we need engaging material to work with. Each of the teams competing for the Google Lunar X PRIZE is required to have an Embedded Public Outreach Liaison (EPOL). This is the person responsible for aggregating and posting the various blog entries, YouTube videos, or images that a team might generate.

At the 2008 Team Summit in Strasbourg, I had the opportunity to meet each of the EPOLs for the teams, and to train them in how to use our blogging system, and how to post rich media content to their own sites. You may have seen a recent flurry of postings after the Summit, due in no small part to our having received a generous gift from Google: a set of Flip Video Cameras. The teams had a blast recording video of the Summit - and also some slightly hilarious videos of me :)

Here's my own personal favorite Strasbourg moment:

As always, stay tuned. We've got a lot of great things in store. We want you to be a part of the action, so we're developing a YouTube video contest, some great educational material for teachers, and maybe - just maybe - a newly designed and easy to use website.