The Mahalo Vlog Idol contest kicked off today at Mahalo HQ, sadly I wasn’t able to attend due to this death flu I came down with recently. Thanks however to the wonderful power of the internets, I was able to watch most of it online via our UStream channel. Looks like there was a great turnout and some really strong contestants. After watching the auditions, and getting to know a little bit more about some of them I’m going to pony up and endorse my favorites.

Lisa Brewster
http://www.sophistechate.com/

Lisa for one is smart as shit and just an overall interesting girl. Into photography, technology and whole mess of other various interests. She has basically zero experience podcasting/vloging but is a natural in front of the camera. When we talked about our next host internally we kept coming back to getting an unknown talent and helping her develop. I can’t help but think Lisa fits this bill perfectly. Oh and she beyond nailed it by researching the topic ahead of time, I don’t think any other contestant even thought of this! Of course using Mahalo’s Pinkberry page was a nice touch :).

Sarah Atwood
http://sarahatwood.wordpress.com/

I actually first heard about Sarah through Valleywag of all places. After some digging around its clear Sarah has a lot of geek cred. She has a lot of experience with video/lifecasting and has even done her own streaming of the process via seesmic. Has great hair and just seems like she would be really enjoyable and easy to work with.

Best of luck to everyone who made it to round two! Sunday they are taking the contestants to the 3rd St Promonade in Santa Monica for some “man on the street” interviews. Stay tuned to Mahalo Daily, the team is going to be showing clips from the contest through out the week.

*Update:

LAist has a nice video with 3 of the top contestants including my two picks! Bonny is great as well.