The Buzz Crew will be attending South by Southwest Interactive this year and as such, there are a handful of Buzz-related engagements! Here's a list of our appearances. If you are attending SXSW, make sure to RSVP for the events in advance. If not, have no fear. Most of these events will be streamed live as well so check it out online!

Buzz Out Loud/Squarespace Meetup (click here to RSVP)
Saturday, March 13, 2010 @ 5:00pm CT - Malverde (400 W. 2nd St.)
No SXSW badge required to attend.
Join us for a rockin' SXSW Buzztown Meetup sponsored by Squarespace! The whole crew is going to get together for some serious drinks and eats at one of the coolest Austin spots we could find. Expect some surprise guests and, of course, some non-stop Buzztown fun! Get there early, as the early birds will receive awesome BOL swag courtesy of Cafe Press. (hint: you can wear them)

Buzz Out Loud live from SXSW (details)
Sunday, March 14, 2010 @ 12:30pm CT - Radison Hotel Austin (111 E. Cesar Chavez St.)
SXSW badge required to attend.
Stop by or tune in live for a special Sunday episode of Buzz Out Loud from SXSW! Guest hosts include Nicole Lee and Cali Lewis!

Buzz Out Loud on NomX3 (click here to RSVP)
Sunday, March 14, 2010 @ 3:00pm CT - Manuel's Mexican Restaurant (310 Congress Ave.)
No SXSW badge required to attend.
We will be appearing on the NomX3 show where attendees are encouraged to come along and ask questions during the show. Doors open at 2:30pm CT so get there early and eat some grub with us! If you can't make it in person, the NomX3 crew will be streaming the show live as well.

Buzz Out Loud live from SXSW (details)
Monday, March 15, 2010 @ 12:30pm CT - Radison Hotel Austin (111 E. Cesar Chavez St.)
SXSW badge required to attend
We will record and stream this Monday episode live from SXSW as well! Guests hosts include Veronica Belmont and Ben Huh!

Email: The Next Frontier (details)
Monday, March 15, 2010 @ 5:00pm CT - Hilton Austin (500 East 4th St.)
SXSW badge required to attend
Molly will moderate this panel that centers around the evolution of Email as well as the innovation that's right around the corner.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has a pretty busy Outlook calendar. The government's recently announced National Broadband Plan promises 100-megabit service to 100 million people by 2020. The plan may propose offering free broadband access for low-income users, or at least setting aside some part of the spectrum for it. Meanwhile, Genachowski's going to have to convince the courts that his agency has the authority to regulate Internet service providers and even wireless telecom companies at all--and he's presenting the National Broadband Plan to Congress next week. So, you know. It seemed like a good time to sit down and have a Conversation.

I'll be interviewing Genachowski in Washington D.C., and I'm looking forward to having more details about the agency's broadband intentions and asking about longer-standing issues like his war on wireless exclusivity (where are we on that?), Net neutrality, how to handle content regulation in an online-video kind of world, and much more, I'm sure.

What do you want to ask the FCC chief? Post your questions in the comments and I'll bring them with me to D.C.!

Let's say you're getting rid of your game console. Maybe you think you're too grown up. Maybe you bought a better one. Or maybe you just need to make rent. Whatever the case, you need to wipe your data off of it. Game consoles these days carry sensitive information like addresses, passwords, and even credit card information.

Here's how to secure each of the three major game consoles before you sell them.

Let's start with the Xbox 360. If you're upgrading to a new Xbox 360, you'll need to get the Hard Drive Transfer Kit, which is included with some newer Xboxes or available for around $50. Using it is an involved process of moving your data, then moving your data licenses. In the end, though, you will erase all the data on the original drive.

If you don't care about transferring content, it's much easier. Go to the 360 dashboard, go to system settings, choose memory, press Y for device options. Select format the drive. And confirm it with yes. The drive will reformat, and you'll see the default setup screen.

On to the Nintendo Wii.

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Cell phones still dominate CNET's most-popular list. Well actually, they're the entire list. But it's interesting to see where they fall. Remember, these lists aren't based on our recommendations, but on the number of times people visited the reviews page.

And there is a lame prize this time of course, so watch the show, and then post your answer in the comments below.

Last week's question: What was the name of the Linux computer sold at Wal-Mart that was sued by Microsoft for brand confusion with Windows? Answer: Lindows (though technically, each machine had its own model number, so that answer was also accepted if correct).

Tom and Rafe talk about eReaders and help you decide which one you should get.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

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You know how it goes--before your movie, there are 10 or 12 previews, commercials, ads for Blu-ray, and FBI warnings that can take forever to get through. And some DVDs even prevent you from skipping the previews, even if you press the Menu button.

Here's a remote-control trick to skip past those annoying ads: simply press the Stop button twice, and then Play. So, Stop, Stop, Play.

This trick should work on any DVD player, and hopefully it will keep you from wasting your time watching previews you don't wish to watch.

This week, we travel the schadenfreude route again bring you a Top 5 worst list. Yes, we realize the oddity of something being top and worst at the same time. Just live with it, Captain Literal. Once you see these five names, you'll understand why we had to do it.

And, as usual, there is a lame prize question. Watch the video and answer the question in the comments below. If you are one of the first 10 people to get it right, you may be randomly selected to win the lame prize. For some reason this excites many of you--and that makes me smile.

Last week's lame prize answer: YouTube.

Google is always adding nifty ways to get information faster, like typing define before a word to bring up a dictionary definition or doing multiplication for you.

To help you stay a search master, here are five of the hottest search tricks to bust out of the Google labs.

Need to know the hours of the museum you want to visit? Type the word "hours" as part of your search, like "San Francisco museum of modern art hours," and you get the hours it's open right there in the results, without having to click through to the Web site.

Tracking a real-time event, like an election or sporting event? Search for the term you're looking for info on, then click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" in the search options. You get a full page of the latest posts on the topic from around the Web as they happen.

The suggestion box has been around for a while in Google, but the company recently added some more information. Try a weather search. Before you even finish typing, you may have the weather report ready for you in the suggest list. Just look down.

Google has also expanded public transit information, so you can plan your route fast.

Let's say you want to visit the Metreon in San Francisco. Search Metreon. Then click the public transit link. It will come up with all your options and you can enter your starting location to plan a route.

Finally, an oldie but a goodie that not everybody knows about. Do you need to track flight status for yourself or a loved one? It's easy, just type in the airline, the word "flight," and the flight number. You get the status in the drop-down suggestions without having to click, or if you do click they're right at the top.

There are a bunch more where these came from. Share your own with us in the comments below.

I've already written about how the International Olympic Committee tries to cleanse all unauthorized references to its logos, the word "Olympics," and attendant innocent words like "Games" and "Winter" and "2010." And I wrote about the endless Olympic Internet spoilers, thanks to NBC's incredibly asinine scheduling. But the longer they're on, the more chances the IOC gets to act like jack-booted thugs and the more chances NBC gets to blow coverage both online and on TV, until I think we've all come to the same, inescapable conclusion: the Internet hates the Olympics. And you know what? The athletes deserve better than this.

Let's look at This Week in IOC Shenanigans alone. The Committee went after Verizon and Red Bull for mentioning the Games (sue me) and/or specific athletes on Twitter. It ordered a blogger to remove video of luger Nodar Kumaritashvili's death, claiming copyright violation, even though he shot the video himself. It ordered Uvex Sports, a sponsor of skier Lindsey Vonn, not to use her name in a congratulatory note on its Web site. It even ordered a charity Web site founded by Olympic snowboarder Hannah Teter...yes, no, seriously, I'm about to say this, not to use her name on the site for the duration of the Games (sue me).

It's so bad that, as a caller on today's Buzz Out Loud episode pointed out that NBC's own Nightly News podcast isn't allowed to use Olympic footage, presumably because they didn't pay the 17 bajillion dollars in blood money the IOC demanded for multimedia rights.

Add that to NBC's coverage plan, which seems to be based on the assumption that the Internet doesn't exist, and you've got an Olympic season that, as Linda Holmes puts it for NPR, "manages to annoy absolutely everyone." You already know this: hours-long delays in coverage, bizarre decisions to show terrifying country-themed ice dancing in lieu of hockey, and so on and so forth. It's been a joke for those of us on the West Coast. I already know what happened in today's hockey game, I knew what happened in this weekend's hockey game, I've known most of the U.S. medal winners in advance, and I've watched a heck of a lot fewer hours of Olympic coverage than I otherwise would have.

Beyond the spoiler problem, though, there's the ludicrously poor online streaming options from NBC. They're only showing curling and hockey live online, and in an age of cable cord-cutting, they're still restricting that live streaming to cable, satellite, or IPTV subscribers. What on earth? As a result, Yahoo.com and ESPN.com are trouncing NBCOlympics.com, despite having no officially sanctioned video of the Games (sue me) available! Why?

The site is an overproduced mess, video highlights are impossible to find, and even those awesome live streams of curling and hockey are just that: blank, un-narrated live streams of curling and hockey that are darned near unwatchable to all but the most rabid of fans.

How is this possible? Between the IOC and NBC, the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games (SUE ME) are the biggest Internet punching bag to come along since the Twitter Fail Whale. If, and that's a big if, you still care about watching the Olympics at all, I recommend a few of these alternatives, like CTV's online channel, or the BBC's live coverage (if you're not into using a proxy to spoof your IP, their live text coverage alone is better than what you'll get at NBC). And for those Web sites and nonsponsoring companies that might want to refer to the Olympics somewhere on the Internet, here's a list of top-secret code names for the elite cadre of athletes the IOC and NBC seem to give a hoot about:

• Morrimpics
• Snames
• Pantouver
• Mincey Ronn
• Tron Flight
• Dani Stavis

And while we're on that subject, if I were an American Olympic athlete, I'd feel more than a little horrified and betrayed by this parade of over-commercialized claptrap if I'd spent my entire life making insane personal sacrifices, enduring near-constant and often horrific injuries and bearing the pressure of pleasing an entire country. Especially if what I got in return was to turn the rights to my own name over to the IOC, and to be utterly ignored like poor Julia Mancuso who, when she won an unexpected silver behind Vonn last week, could barely get 30 seconds of mention from NBC, which picked its storylines early and is sticking to them, by God.

So, really, we can boycott the broadcast and bitch about the spoiler tweets all we want, but we're just the spoiled, demanding spectators. The people who are owed more are the folks who actually have an Olympic dream. Hopefully they'll demand better next time.