In a flattering blog post, Darren Paul Griffith comments on a segment of my interview with Cameron Reilly. But I should point out that my example of The New York Times’ $49/year policy and how that relates to the remixability of content, came from listening to Halley Suitt’s interview with veteran blogger, Meg Hourihan. Meg really gets it.

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

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Jeff Cove – Flat-Panel Television (rated 3.3 by our listeners) LCD or Plasma? High definition or rear projection? Should you wait for another year to buy a bigger, brighter, cheaper set or get out your credit card right away? The choices are overwhelming. Host Larry Magid speaks to Jeff Cove, VP of Strategic alliances at Panasonic, about such visual media advancements and what to look for, then go for.
• Dr. David Coy (3.4) On this week’s Biotech Nation segment, Moira Gunn interviews Dr. David Coy, Professor of Medicine, Tulane Health Sciences Center, about how their research may unexpectedly help a very common condition: macular degeneration.
• Dr. Alva Noe (3.5) Moira also speaks with Dr. Alva Noe, professor of philosophy at UC, Berkeley and the author of "Action in Perception." They talk about the nature of perception, and how philosophy is quickly meshing with cognitive science.
• Joel Garreau (3.5) Moira interviewed Joel Garreau, the cultural revolution correspondent to the Washington Post. They talk about GRIN: genetics, robotics, Information and nanotech.
• MGM v. Grokster (3.7) Host Ernest Miller along with Denise Howell and Charles (C.E.) Petit disect the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling overturning a District Court in the case of MGM v. Grokster. The decision says Grokster could be found guilty of an "act of inducement" by encouraging (or not discouraging) its users to share infringing files. The panel considers the implications for publishers, software developers and manufacturers, and looks specifically at the outlook for BitTorrent.
• Scott Cook on Customer Relationships (3.8) Customers and customer relationships are fundamental to the growth of any business. So why is it that as a business grows it moves further away from its cutomers? Instead of walking a mile in their shoes they discard them. Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, understands the importance of customer-driven innovation and credits it for the success and perpetual growth of his company.
• Rob Curley – The World Company (4.4) Since the dot-com days, nearly every newspaper in the world has made use of the Internet and now has a website where readers can get their news faster than they can get the hardcopy paper. But just having a website is one thing. Doing it right — which is what Rob Curley is known for — is another. Hear Rob’s fascinating keynote presentation from the Integrated Media Association’s New Media Summit in which he gives examples of how he and his web-development team at the Lawrence Journal-World continue to do it right.

We’re all thankful to Apple for increasing the awareness of podcasting and bringing us more listeners, but perhaps it’s no surprise that things are still a bit rough around the edges.

DailySonic suggests that iTunes may be caching MP3 files, a definite no-no. [Source: Dave Winer]

The default scan in iTunes is once a day and only retrieves the single most-recent program. That may be fine for most podcasts, but here at IT Conversations we release as many as three programs per day. So unless you change these settings in iTunes, you’re going to miss some of our best programs.

One advantage of becoming a non-profit is that when people keep asking me, “What’s your business model?” I can just smile and say, “I don’t have one.” (That’s how I’ve answered the question for the last two years, anyway.) Of course, even non-profits need revenues to pay for expenses, so here are my plans for revenue generation in the new venture.

1. Quick-Delivery Conference Audio. Shortly after a major event (1-2 weeks, depending on the number of sessions) we’ll release all of the audio online for a fee. It might cost, for example, US$5 per presentation or US$100 for all 30+ sessions from a complex conference. We’ll split the profits 50/50 with the event producers. Note that we’ll still publish the conference sessions at the rate of one show per week like we’ve always done, but if you’re in a hurry you can pay a few $$ for the privilege.

2. Membership. This will be modeled after public radio. Membership will not be a gateway to the content. The content will always be free with the exception of the quick-delivery option above. Membership may get you special web-site features or thank-you gifts, but it will primarly just be a way for you to support our on-going operations.

3. Grants. Ideally, the above will cover all our expenses, but we may seek private (non-governmental) grants for special projects, to help us ramp up, or to launch new programs or series on specific topics or in new parts of the world.

Here are a few paragraphs — the long elevator pitch — I’ve written about my new non-profit venture:

Every day there are scores or even hundreds of fascinating and important conference sessions, lectures or other presentations that are lost. They simply evaporate because no one captures or records them. Some of these presentations are by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many could be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them.

My new project is to capture (record) all of these presentations, post-produce them, and make them available worldwide for free.

To record tens of thousands of events each year, we will appeal to the social conscience of the worldwide army of podcasters – 10,000 today, and 25,000-50,000 within a year – who I believe will be enthusiastic about the opportunity to give back to their communities and to the world. As a side benefit, these “podcaster stringers” will hone and extend their skills and build their reputations in ways that could benefit them financially and otherwise.

We will build an online “dating service” that will match podcasters with events in their communities. Likewise, we will recruit volunteer writers and producers to create and edit the metadata and descriptions that accompany the recordings. Content will be managed, and quality will be maintained, by a Wikipedia-like system and community. High-volume content will be delivered by a combination of BitTorrent and partners such as the Internet Archive.

We will cover not just IT or even technology, but literally every topic about which someone speaks and another person finds it valuable enough to capture.

More to follow over the days and weeks to come.

I’ve been researching, scratching my head and talking to people for the past two months or so, and I wasn’t planning on announcing my plans for the future of IT Conversations for another month or so. But I was being interviewed by Cameron Reilly for the G’Day World podcast, and I just couldn’t help myself. Cameron asked me point blank about the future, and I decided to spill the beans. Cameron gets the scoop.

I’ll have more details here in the blog over the next few days, and in the IT Conversations news podcast this weekend. But for a preview, listen to my interview on G’Day world. We start talking about the future of IT Conversations at 16:50 into the show.

I was just interviewed for BBC World Service, Greek edition. So if you’ve ever wanted to hear me discuss New Media in Greek (translated :-)) now’s your chance. Should be broadcast and on their web site in the next day or two.

Thanks to the new traffic from iTunes, Tueday was an all-time record day for IT Conversations traffic: 378.32GB. That adds up to more than 11 terrabytes/month. Thank you Limelight Networks for your awesome content-delivery network. We literally couldn’t do it without you.

Today was the launch of iTunes 4.9 with support for podcasting, and IT Conversations is proud to be among those included in the initial iTunes directory. The presentation is a bit of a mess, and over the next few days I hope to find time to add the iTunes-specific tags to our RSS feeds.

iTunes has been responsible for a 31% increase in our traffic today, and I can say that with a fair degree of confidence. The reason is that Apple chose to include our AAC/M4B feeds rather than our MP3 feeds. Normally — and it’s quite repeatable — AAC/M4B accounts for about 10% of our traffic, but today it looks like the AAC/M4B traffic will account for 38% of the total, which can only be attributable to iTunes.

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

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Ken Berryman – Software Company Building Blocks (rated 2.6 by listeners) Ken Berryman’s presentation outlines the new factors affecting the industry and how companies can adapt to remain a force in the game. The belief that software companies can work under different rules than companies in other sectors no longer holds water. The world has changed and the demands of customers and the market have become more sophisticated.
• Allen Husband – BioTech Nation (3.1) On this week’s Biotech Nation segment, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Novogen Research Director, Dr. Allen Husband, who tells us how a dietary supplement which relieves menopause symptoms in women shows great promise as a cancer drug.
• John Hagel – "The Only Sustainable Edge" (3.3) Moira also speaks with John Hagel, who with co-author John Seely Brown, has written "The Only Sustainable Edge," a new perspective for business. (See also more with John Hagel.)
• Jim Griffith – eBay’s Dean of Education (3.3) "Griff" is the official dean of eBay education and eBay University instructor. Larry Magid speaks with him about how sellers make a profit by simply buying product X from Wal-Mart for $20 and selling it for $25, and what buyers should do before they get out their credit cards. It’s a must for all kind of eBay retailers. Fact: there are approximately 430,000 eBay sellers who either make a profit full time or part time in the US alone.
• Wil McCarthy – Voices in Your Head (3.4) We’ve all imagined teleporting from place to places and making clones or copies of ourselves. But have you ever wondered what might happen if we were actually able to do so? Host Dave Slusher speaks to renowned science fiction author Wil McCarthy about what these advancements might mean and about technology, science and us.
• Todd Cochrane – Geek News Central (3.5) On this week’s Web Talk, host Rob Greenlee speaks with Todd Cochrane, host of the Geek News Central Podcast and weblog, and the author of the first book on podcasting, "Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide". Todd also talks about topic-based podcast networks and how they might just be the wave of the future.
• Lawrence Lessig – Re: Mix Me (3.6) Culture is remix, and remix, culture. That’s the message from an IT Conversations favorite, Lawrence Lessig, at O’Reilly Media’s Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in March. After Larry’s presentation, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation engages him in a Q&A session.
• Tim O’Reilly – "Make" Magazine (3.7) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. Just to give you a new project or two to build over your next free weekend, we’ll hear about their new magazine "Make."
• Guido van Rossum – Open Source Projects & Community (3.9) From the SD Forum Distinguished Speaker Series, the creator of the Python programming language reflects on the early days of the Python community, describes its development into maturity, and explains why he is still having a good time after 13 years of herding cats. In an entertaining and informative talk, he also describes the origin of many of Python’s most characteristic features and compares Python to some of the other languages in widespread use today. In two parts.
• Peter Norvig – Web Search as a Force for Good (3.9) Web search as a Force for Good? No, we are not talking about a new beta service from Google! Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality and Research at Google, says that when web searches are not actually saving people’s lives they are improving them by saving time! He talks about how the 4 billion web pages Google indexes can be harnessed to actually make a difference in the everyday lives of people around the world with the innovative new services that Google is coming up with.
• Rob Curley – The World Company (4.9) Since the dot-com days, nearly every newspaper in the world has made use of the Internet and now has a website where readers can get their news faster than they can get the hardcopy paper. But just having a website is one thing. Doing it right — which is what Rob Curley is known for — is another. Hear Rob’s fascinating keynote presentation from the Integrated Media Association’s New Media Summit in which he gives examples of how he and his web-development team at the Lawrence Journal-World continue to do it right.

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Malcolm Gladwell – On Human Nature (4.2) From last year’s Pop!Tech conference, author and New Yorker Magazine journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has been a tremendous bestseller for over three years and counting. In this presentation he explores why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke’s market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.