We tried to pull off a video TWiT on Friday, but the Gods of travel conspired against us. Today, however, Leo Laporte was able to pull together a quorum and hosted a great show with me, John C. Dvorak and Patrick Norton. Hope you enjoy it.

Marc Canter, co-founder and initial funder of Ourmedia.org has posted his personal comments about the web site’s first year of operation. Although I have been an advisor to Ourmedia.org — my name appears as Audio scout, whatever that means — I’m not at all close to its innerworkings, and I consider both Marc and co-founder J.D. Lasica to be good friends. I’m not qualified to comment directly on Marc’s post with regard to Ourmedia.org, but I think he makes some very important points for similar sites including IT Conversations and The Conversations Network. So in response:

On volunteer labor. I agree wholeheartedly with Marc about the fact that you need to pay people if you want to get something done. You can’t depend on volunteers for important stuff, which is one reason why we now pay the postproduction team at The Conversations Network. We always have, in fact, starting with the distribution of the old Tip Jar from Day One, back on April 1, 2005. We can’t afford to pay a lot, but it’s in keeping with the importance of what we do. It’s not as critical as a the activities of a broadcast station or a newspaper when it comes to schedule, but it’s more important than “whenever.”

However (!) volunteers are an excellent way to gauge the passion behind a project, and some projects should indeed die if there aren’t enough passionate volunteers to make them happen. As we roll out our grassroots portion of The Conversations Network, we intend to pay for the development of the software (an infrastructure cost), but not for the producers, engineers and writers. If no one is interested in producing a particular program as a volunteer, that says a lot about its value to our listeners.

Federated IDs are the way to go. Absolutely true. In the new site for The Conversations Network, a disproportionate amout of code, time and debugging went into (and still goes into) the single-signon sytem that couples WordPress, punBB and our custom code. Ugly stuff.

Make sure to make it clear what you expect from investing almost $100,000 into something. Absolutely the case. Perhaps the good news is that no one here had that kind of money to invest in The Conversations Network. Although I and the other managers are essentially working for free — which I admit is unrealistic in the long term — we’ve achieved financial stability for the medium term. We’re about to expand into three or four new channels in April, and the general guideline is that each of them has to be self-sustaining through underwritings, and by the end of this year, I expect those volunteer managers will become paid part-time contractors.

All of us in “new media,” particularly in the non-profit space have a lot to learn, and hopefully we can continue to share the experiences from our successes as well as from our mistakes and our failures.

We’re taping a video edition of the awesome Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech on Friday night. Looks so far like me, Leo, John C. Dvorak and Robert Heron. Not sure who else from the usual TWiTs.

Got any topics you want me to take to the TWiTs, all of whom are much smarter and more tuned-in than I?

March 28 is now set as the date for our quarterly conference call with The Conversations Network Executive Producers, managers and Patron and Benefactor members. If you’d like to hear our plans and give your feedback directly to our staff and producers, now’s a great time to join the network.

Co-founder J.D. Lasica reports that after just one year, Ourmedia has 87,000 members and about 150,000 works of personal media that people have uploaded — video, audio, photos and more. They have also launched a preliminary Digital Media Learning Center and have ambitious plans for the rest of the site.

We’ve extended the deadline for the $50 early registration discount for the Podcast Academy at Boston University until April 1, 2006.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Marty Ashby – The Future of Jazz (too late for ratings) The business of jazz music could borrow a page from NASCAR or professional poker according to Marty Ashby, the executive producer of MCG Jazz. Having produced numerous concerts and GRAMMY award winning albums, as well as being an accomplished musician himself, Ashby has a lifetime of experience to share. He sits down with host Tim Zak to reflect on his past and to offer some insight on the future of jazz, both as a business model and as a vital art form.
• Bill Strickland – Manchester Craftsmans Guild (too late for ratings) Bill Strickland is one of the world’s great social innovators. As head of both the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and the Bidwell Training Center, located on Pittsburgh’s gritty north side just down the street from where he grew up, Strickland has created a youth development and adult training center like no other, in approach and results. Over nearly 40 years, he has melded an environment surrounded by stunning art, the sounds of jazz, beautiful orchids, and brilliant architecture with programs that get kids into college and adults a job with a future.
• Simon Phipps – The Zen of Free (rated 2.6 by listeners) When people say "Open source is fine but how do you make money?" you know they haven’t grokked the Zen of Free. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, describes the "virtuous cycle" model of open source in this keynote from OSCON Europe 2005.
• Jeremy Allaire – Transforming Video Distribution (2.8) The internet is starting to completely transform the distribution of multimedia content, and it’s more than just delivering video over IP. At the 2005 Syndicate conference, Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove explains how using the internet is revolutionizing the distribution of video and multimedia products, creating a richer user experience and allowing producers greater freedom and reach for their products.
• Dan Gillmor – Citizen Journalism (2.8) What does the future hold for citizen journalism? In a world where media is democratized, many organizations have responded by increasingly trying to control the message and the dissemination of information. In this edition of Sound Policy with Denise Howell, Dan Gillmor reveals that the distinction between the mainstream journalist and the citizen journalist has become increasingly blurred by the act of journalism itself.
• Bernard-Henri Levy – Traveling America (3.8) Dr. Moira Gunn interviews French author and journalist Bernard-Henri Levy. He gives us a different perspective about ourselves when she speaks with him about his latest book, "American Vertigo — Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville."
• Lynn Foster and Larry Bock – Nanotechnology (3.8) On a special edition of BioTech Nation all about Nanotechnology, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Lynn Foster, the Emerging Technologies Director at Greenberg Traurig and Larry Bock, the Founder and Executive Chairman of Nanosys.
• Mary Meeker – Internet Trends (3.9) Mary Meeker’s signature fast-paced presentation from the 2005 Web 2.0 conference answers some crucial questions regarding the relationship between internet trends and global technology markets. In particular, she examines whether – and in which areas – the US is losing ground to other countries and which internet- related innovations will lead to areas of substantial growth in the next 10 years.
• Shyam Venkatesh – Nano-Tubes (4.0) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Shyam Venkatesh, the Director of Technology Partnering at NASA Ames Research Center. He tells us all the things you might do with a nano-tube.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• Joe Trippi – Connected Politics Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager of the Howard Dean presidential campaign from Pop!Tech 2004. This is the third of four IT Conversations audio recordings from the session on Connected Politics.

I’d like to extend my apologies to the listeners of The Conversations Network and IT Conversations for some glitches in our audio programs over the past four weeks. On February 18 we launched ASM, our new automated show-assembly system that allows us to rebuild all of our audio programs from components on a nightly basis. New programs and series that were produced using ASM are coming out fine, but some of the earlier programs that were produced partially using the new tools and partially using traditional techniques have been plagued by occasional problems such as portions of shows that either don’t play back on certain players or that play back incorrectly such as at double speed.

If you encounter a problem, first go back to the IT Conversations web site and download the program again. It could well be that we’ve fixed the program since your first download. If it’s still not correct, please email me directly at doug@rds.com. I promise we’ll fix and publish the show promptly.

We’ve had an embargo on admitting new audio engineers into our apprenticeship program while we debugged our new automated show-assembly system. Now that that’s done and working well, we’re ready to ramp up our post-production volume as we plan for new channels in The Conversations Network next month.

If you’d like to join The Conversations Network team as a part-time post-production audio engineer, and if you really do have the skills, experience and required software, just go to our volunteer signup page and tell us a bit about yourself. It won’t make your rich, but it’s pretty good beer money.

An important member Team ITC, Dorothy Yamamoto, has just been diagnosed with leukemia, and will be hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center during her tests, chemotherapy and more for at least a month. Dorothy had been feeling week ever since having the flu late in 2005, and had undergone one test after another until getting this diagnosis. In fact, they still don’t know precisely which form of leukemia she has. That’s going to require some gnarly bone-marrow biopsies this week.

You may not know Dorothy by name, but you’d recognize her work, which includes The Conversations Network graphics and the logo for Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWiT) podcast. Dorothy is a brilliant designer and a huge supporter of The Conversations Network, TWiT and podcasting in general.

Dorothy, we’re all thinking of you and hoping for your rapid recovery.