Sony’s conference begins today, August 18, 2009 at 6:00 PM in Cologne, Germany, 5:00 PM in London, and 12:00 PM in New York (click here to find out what time this will be in your area).  The GTPlanet News Blog will be updated immediately if/when Gran Turismo information is announced. Keep an eye on the clock, and your finger on that GTPlanet bookmark (we’ll be posting live updates on Twitter and Facebook, too)!

Just want to remind everyone that GTPlanet’s Facebook Page officially launched last week – if you’re on Facebook, please become a fan!  Much like our Twitter feed, you’ll find more interesting links, forum threads, and videos that didn’t make their way onto the main news blog here.  When you become a Facebook fan, some of our updates will appear on your main “news feed” for the site, just like those from your friends so you won’t miss a single bit of GT news.  As you can see, our Wall is also open, so feel free to use it to spread the word about your latest forum topic or competition.

While we’re on the subject of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, don’t forget to join our 1,300 subscribers on YouTube for all the latest video content from GTP.  Thanks for your support!

After years of waiting, we’re about to get a deluge of Gran Turismo 5 and Gran Turismo Mobile news from E3 2009. To help you keep up with it all, I’m happy to announce GTPlanetNews on Twitter – featuring breaking GT-series news from the E3 show floor.  Start following us now!

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only way to stay on top of GTPlanet – subscribe to our RSS feed (just drag this link to the bookmarks toolbar in your browser), or get each post delivered by email.   Our YouTube channel will also be the source of fresh GT5 and GT Mobile clips over the next few days, so be sure to hit the big yellow “Subscribe” button over there.  This is the week you’ve been waiting for – keep watching GTPlanet and you won’t miss a thing!

You know exactly what features you want in Gran Turismo 5, but how many people out there actually agree with you?  It’s easy enough to peruse our Gran Turismo 5 forum, but even the most popular ideas get lost in the sea of discussions and opinions.  That’s why we’ve launched ideas.gtplanet.net, a new type of forum that lets you submit and vote on the features, cars, and tracks that you most want to see in future updates to the Gran Turismo series.  The ultimate goal is to efficiently utilize GTPlanet’s large audience to communicate what we, the fans, are most looking for from Polyphony Digital.  To keep things organized, the GTPlanet Ideas site is divided into three categories, or forums:

• Most Wanted Game Features
• Most Wanted Cars
• Most Wanted Tracks

If you’re a regular in our forums, you may have seen this section of our site mentioned before.  Regardless of the “soft launch”, we’ve already seen over 10,000 votes for new ideas – now throw in some of your own, and let your voice be heard!

As we move into 2009, expect to see some nifty and fresh changes to GTPlanet.  The first is a transition away from our old video platform, and on to something you’ve probably heard of before: YouTube.  Hosting our videos with YouTube offers quite a few advantages.  If you have your own YouTube account, you can subscribe to GTPlanet’s channel and receive regular updates via email when we upload new clips.  The best news, however, is our ability to upload full 720p high-definition video, which we will be embedding here in our news posts whenever we can.

The channel, of course, is brand new, and if you are a regular reader or GT news junkie, there probably isn’t much that you haven’t seen before.  Otherwise, sit back and enjoy this bit of our video library in glorious high definition.  To see just how good it looks, take a look at this clip of Kazunori Yamauchi’s monumental presentation at the 2006 Tokyo Game Show, where he first announced many of the online features and functionality that we keep wishing for each day.  Check out the video after the jump, and remember -- if you’ve got your own clips that you’d like to see us feature on the channel, send us an email!

Those of you who have received invitations to Sony’s PlayStation Home service – listen up!  GTPlanet user Marky264 discovered that if you create a Japanese profile on your PS3 (learn how to do that here), the Tokyo Game Show 2008 “booth” becomes available.  Once inside, you’ll find the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue ‘racing pods’ that we first saw early last month.  Once aquired, they can be placed in your virtual ‘home’, and will surely play an integral role in private online race events in the future.  Learn more about how to find the racing pods and the TGS booth in Marky’s forum thread.