I have been thinking about the possibility of life after I, Cringely. After nearly five years and almost 400,000 words, I have to wonder that PBS just might be getting a little tired of me. This column predated (and survives) almost the entire Internet boom and bust. The column stands out in many ways, some of them good, many of them just odd. It is a column about Information Technology that lives online next to Barney and Frontline, competes in a sense with C-Net and Computerworld, yet is supported by Mr. Rogers. Certainly the readership, which is global, is among the most influential anywhere. News outfits and high school students from around the world steal my stuff all the time. And while there is nothing wrong with the traditional column format, I have started to think about ways to go even further, covering the same type of material in a completely new way. The purpose of this particular column is to share my ideas and ask for feedback from the people who really matter — you.

Probably the one aspect that most contrasts I, Cringely with the rest of PBS Interactive is that the column is not associated with any TV show. Nearly all of the 147,000 other pages you can reach through pbs.org concern television. People often write to me asking how to find my show on their local PBS channel. While I make occasional documentaries for PBS, I have never made a traditional series. Nor is one likely, either. The simple fact is that, while the stuff I write about affects everyone, everywhere, it isn't simple or easy. I speak to a niche readership of a couple hundred thousand people, which is enough to make this one of the most successful Internet publishing ventures around, but not enough to support a national television show. The only way to make that work would be to dumb down my content to the point where it would be of no interest to the very readers who have been so loyal. I won't do that, nor does PBS want me to. What we both want is to find a way to do the same job even better.

So how do I serve better both a national television network and a global niche readership? The idea that comes to my mind is to do a TV show, but to do it strictly online rather than over the air. This has several advantages and a couple of big disadvantages. Some of the advantages might surprise you. Television shows tend to have actual production staffs, while I, Cringely has my editor Dave Neiman in Los Angeles and me in Santa Rosa and that's about it. So in theory at least, a TV show could be bigger and better, and there is even the vague possibility that I might get some occasional time off, which I don't under the current scheme. The big disadvantage is one of technology and economics. As I have written before, streaming video isn't yet ready for prime time. There are serious issues of video quality and broadcast economics. In fact commercial TV networks do such a pitiful job of streaming on their web sites because they lose so much money doing it. If they did a better job and more people watched online, those networks would lose even more.

But still, I want to do a TV show and I want to put it right here on PBS Interactive. So I have to find a way to make both the technology and the economics somehow work. And weasel that I am, I think I have figured out how to do it.

The show I would like to do would be weekly and be a sort of high tech Charlie Rose, generally covering a single topic with heavy reliance on interviews. If there was a big high tech news event that week, I'd cover it and hopefully get those involved to explain themselves, badgering the heck out of them as I am wont to do. If Microsoft was in the news, I'd go to Microsoft. If it was Apple, I'd go to Apple. And in every case, I would bring the camera's unblinking eye to give my print readers a better chance to decide for themselves what is really going on.

To deal with issues of video quality and making the show viewable by normal folks with dial-up Internet connections, it wouldn't be streamed at all. Rather, it would be downloaded. And to cut the cost of distribution, this would be what I believe is the first-ever open source TV show. Viewers would be authorized to share it with anyone they like, which would hopefully place the show in a lot of corporate caches and save bandwidth costs.

But there wouldn't be just one version of the show. The same show would be downloadable in four different versions each week. The first version would be completely unedited — literally every inch of raw footage presented in the order in which it was shot. This would deal for the first time with the nerd paranoia that they are somehow being manipulated by the media. The second version would be edited to cover mainly technical issues — the nerd edition, so to speak. The third version would be edited to cover mainly business issues — the suit edition. And the last version would be just 2-3 minutes of highlights covering both technical and business material for those who don't want to wait an hour for the bigger download.

Those who are sophisticated about Internet video may still see a bandwidth problem with this scheme. If the show became popular, even with giving it away and encouraging people to share it with friends, the bandwidth requirements could be staggering. Just this one show could take more bandwidth — by a factor of ten — than all the rest of PBS Interactive. Fortunately, there are some deluded people who believe in what I do and believe in the future of video on the Internet to the extent that they are willing to provide a little bandwidth here and there. Well maybe just a bit more than a little bandwidth; what's on the table right now is an offer for 30 terabytes per month and the server capacity to support that bandwidth. This would be enough for 400,000 downloads per week — far more than the current readership of this column. So I would have to do whatever it takes to grow the audience.

The show would be available for download starting at the same time every week. But in order to give the show a little publicity and to gain a longer lever for opening the right doors for interviews, I'd probably make a broadcast-quality version available a day earlier strictly for traditional TV news. That way, when the topic happened to have broader appeal, it could be picked-up by the Newshour with Jim Lehrer or even by CNN.

The column you are used to reading wouldn't go away at all. There would just be a download link added for those who wanted video. The whole enterprise would have to become bigger, of course, and — gulp — more professional. We'd probably be talking abut having corporate underwriters, too, so any people who are interested, please get in touch, but know in advance that it still won't make me like you.

So that's my grand plan. PBS knows about it, but has yet to take a position one way or the other. Maybe it is a bad idea. Certainly it is an idea still subject to change, so please let me know what you think. You are the boss.