With "nothing to lose," as he put it, he launched the WTF podcast, by sneaking into the New York offices of Air America radio, from which he'd just been fired.

Nearly 250 episodes later, WTF gets more than 2.75 million downloads per month, has multiple sponsors, and has helped sell out Maron's live shows in Seattle and San Francisco.

"I couldn't get club work at all. Now I can work most weekends if I want," Maron told me this month in one of two telephone interviews, first from his home in Los Angeles, then from a hotel in Atlanta, where he was preparing for a show. (You can listen to much of the audio from the calls here.)

"It doesn't cost much to do a podcast," Maron said. "I did it out of desperation and passion, and it sort of blossomed into this."

Connecting With Fans -- and Famous Guests

On his podcast, Maron is raw and genuine. He curses (the show starts with variations on the words that "WTF" stands for) and reveals compulsions, desires, details of his sex life and his former cocaine addiction, and peccadilloes such as disdain for Whole Foods, from which he said on the show he has shoplifted Stevia.

He also gets his guests to open up with rare frankness. The aging but lucid Jonathan Winters revealed intimate family details and his psychiatric institutionalization. "Mad Men" star Jon Hamm talked about sex and his perceptions of the industry. Comedians Russell Brand and Robin Williams talked about their own struggles with addiction.

"It was just me and Robin. There was no one there, at his house. And it's not video. Audio is very intimate," Maron said. "When you're sitting there talking with somebody for a long time, eventually the pretenses kind of fall away."

After a dozen episodes in New York, Maron returned to his home in Los Angeles, and started producing WTF in his garage along with a producer who co-owns the show. Maron got guidance from NPR personality Jesse Thorn.

In the garage, he speaks to famous comedians like Steven Wright, Carlos Mencia and Conan O'Brien, who has frequently had Maron on his TV shows. Maron visited Chris Rock in his New York office, Zach Galifinakis on the set of a movie he was shooting in New Mexico, and does live WTFs with a mix of entertainers.

Early episodes were a combination of Maron's rants and phone interviews with comedian friends such as Patton Oswalt and John Oliver. The show then featured fake guests, comedic bits, Maron's mom and dad, a former girlfriend, and a visit to Maron's native New Mexico, where he chatted up an elementary school friend who has cerebral palsy.

Maron believes a lot of WTF's success comes from the relationship he cultivates with listeners. The show resonates with high school students and 70-year-olds alike, Maron said. Many of them email him about the ways he's inspired them to deal with their own "struggles of being alive."

In turn, they want to give back, whether it's buying a T-shirt from WTFpod.com, using a discount code from one of the ads on the show, or coming to see him live.

"Every week I get mailbox full of gifts and cards," Maron said. "People bake things, bring things."

The Accidental Entrepreneur

Performers like Maria Bamford and Jim Norton brought bumps in audience by telling their fans on Twitter and elsewhere to tune in. Interviews with stars like O'Brien, Williams, Ben Stiller, Dane Cook, and a two-parter with Judd Apatow got press mentions or were promoted atop the iTunes store with "billboards," graphics that Maron and his producer created and sent to Apple.

"iTunes is thrilled to have anybody who knows how to do these, any professionals. They like being involved with people who do a good product," Maron said.

WTF has sold shows to public radio via the PRX radio exchange. Maron has appeared on NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," been praised by Ira Glass, and profiled in publications such as Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and The New York Times.

And, he is very involved in the show's workings. He still books his own guests, tries to answer every email, and handles the "merch" sold on his site, such as T-shirts and mugs. His producer handles the editing and other technical and business details.

They've got partnership deals with outfits such as Libsyn, a podcast maker that has built WTF's Apple app and a revamped Android one being released any day. A company called Tunecorps helps syndicate the show to various outlets.

They'll soon be releasing a DVD of the first 100 episodes on mp3, Maron said.

Sponsors, which include Audible.com, Stamps.com, the adult toy site AdamandEve.com, and shows on Comedy Central and HBO, pay $1,300 to $15,000 per episode, Maron said, to get his sardonic spiel about them on the show.

He only takes ads from sponsors he believes in, he said. "I didn't want anyone to tell me what I could and couldn't do."

His first sponsor was JustCoffee.coop, for which he created the tag line, "Pow! I just crapped my pants," and which gives him 10 percent of every sale made when someone puts in the WTF code on their website. The company created a blend in his honor.

Maron said that sponsorship "was the first time" he realized the power he could wield.

"Once I started plugging Just Coffee and moving people toward it with a promotion code, the owners were like, 'Oh, my God, you just changed our business,'" Maron said.

Things haven't gone according to plan, though -- mainly because there wasn't one.

"I'm not a planner, a businessman. I am very easily overwhelmed. I didn't know this was going to happen, what was going to be involved." Above all, Maron said, the key to his success as an accidental entrepreneur is that, "I didn't quit. I did the best I could."

He joked to Jesse Thorn on one episode that he could teach a seminar on all this: "How to Make Panic Into Money."

Lessons From WTF's Success

With two decades in comedy, Maron, now 48, had some rare advantages in launching his show. But there are lessons for anyone trying to make a go of podcasting:

1. Be consistent. Pick a schedule and stick to it. Develop a theme and a tone, and stick to those as well. WTF goes live every Monday and Thursday "like clockwork," Maron said.
2. Cultivate a community and be responsive. Answer emails, tweet, be on Facebook. Tune in to what people are saying and respond during the show. Maron does all these things.
3. Seize opportunities. Maron booked Chelsea Handler when he bumped into her at a doctor's office, and Jon Hamm while the actor was "hanging around" a club.
4. Don't give up. Be persistent. It took a long time to book Williams, and Maron had to go through multiple handlers.
5. Produce your show in a professional manner -- even if you're working from a garage. Maron uses two Shure SM7 microphones plugged into into a Samson MDR6 mixer that feeds into Garage Band software on his laptop. On the road he uses a Zoom H4n mixer with two Blue Encore 200 mics.
6. Partner with people who will handle things you're not good at. In Maron's case, that's technology, editing and some of the business aspects.
7. Try to cut deals with other outfits to handle what they can, such as distribution, e-commerce and syndication. Maron said Libsyn didn't charge to create the apps, and takes a cut on every sale.
8. Have multiple revenue streams. WTF gets the most revenue from advertising. The premium versions of its apps offer access to archived episodes and specials such as outtakes or special recordings. Merchandise is one more stream, and donations another.
9. Use the podcast to market live shows and get an audience to them.

All photos courtesy of WTFPod.com

An award-winning former managing editor at ABCNews.com and an MBA (with honors), Dorian Benkoil handles marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the business columnist for the site. He is SVP at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on attracting, engaging, and activating communities through digital media. He tweets at @dbenk and you can Circle him on Google+.

Stuff You Should Know About 'Stuff You Should Know'

> The podcast was first started in April 2008 with Josh Clark as host with rotating co-hosts, with Chuck Bryant joining him to form the dynamic duo in August 2008.

> They are not experts. Really, they're not.

> There's a TV show in its second season on Discovery Channel based on HowStuffWorks.com, but Josh & Chuck aren't involved with it. They would like to do something like that one day.

> They have made more than 250 podcast episodes, and it has peaked at #1 on iTunes among all podcasts.

> The shows take as long as they take. A show on cliff diving clocked in at 27:19 while a show on serial killers took 44:41.

> In April 2010, the podcast had more than 3.5 million downloads. How do I know? Josh & Chuck's PR person told me that.

> Josh & Chuck still write for HowStuffWorks.com, and have become senior writers. They don't have the time to start another podcast, but do have a blog and would love to take a live show around the country based on an upcoming audiobook.

I had the pleasure of talking with Josh & Chuck recently in a wide-ranging phone chat, and the following is an edited version of that conversation.

Q&A

How did you get started with the podcast?

Chuck Bryant: Josh and I were both initially hired as writers, which is what we continue to do, for HowStuffWorks.com. We did that for a solid year before the podcast started. Josh was approached by our editor in chief to start the podcast. Josh even thought of the name, "Stuff You Should Know."

Josh Clark: Yup, I did ... HowStuffWorks is perfect for this kind of media and they wanted to expand the brand a bit [with a podcast]. I had no idea how to do it, and Chuck you didn't know how to do it?

Chuck: No.

Josh: And, frankly, to be honest I had never listened to an actual podcast before we started making one. Luckily we had a great producer and we were put together [as a team] and it worked out. We were surprised as anyone, probably moreso, that it's worked as well as it has.

Chuck: The great thing about it was that there was no pressure at all at the beginning. We were writers for the website and that wasn't going anywhere, so if the podcast failed miserably they would have shut it down and we would have gone back to writing. We have a great company and a parent company Discovery Communications [that allowed us] to let it grow organically, by word of mouth, and it's been a big success.

Josh: We found the only real pressure is when we are above Ira Glass in the iTunes ranking. Otherwise, we're fine and feel like we can do whatever we want.

Chuck explains why he think podcasting has staying power even with the rise of video:

sxykpodcast.mp3

Were you the first podcast produced for HowStuffWorks?

Josh: We were the first one and it was a shot in the dark. It started to take off like a rocket. So they said, "Let's get everyone on the content side doing podcasts." We had our history podcast that started out as "Fact or Fiction" and I played the gullible rube who would say, "I heard this about this historical event. Is that true?" My co-host would say whether it's fact or fiction, or would say -- and this would rile people up -- "that's faction!" That went the way of the dinosaur pretty quickly and was replaced by "Stuff You Missed in History Class," which evolved out of that and has been very successful.

We have TechStuff, which is a great tech podcast. It has a great following, and the guys, Chris and Jonathan, are perfect foils for one another. They're very subdued and rambunctious, respectively. We now have 10 total podcasts with a video podcast.

[UPDATE: Actually, it turns out that HowStuffWorks.com founder Marshall Brain did the first podcast for the site called BrainStuff. And now there are 3 total video podcasts out of 10.]

Why do you think it became so popular?

Chuck: The comment we get most from our fans on email or our Facebook fan page is: "It feels like I'm listening to a couple of my old friends from when I was in college, sitting around in a bar, having a drink." The everyman quality that we both bring to the show really hits home. We're not experts, we don't profess to be experts. We mess things up every now and then, and people call us out and we read the correction on the air, and people get a kick out of that. It's just a very down-to-earth smart discussion, usually pretty funny, and people get to learn something and have fun at the same time.

Josh: The conversational tone that we manage to strike in every podcast is another compliment we get. "It's easy to listen to" is something we hear a lot. The reason for that is we don't practice together or rehearse. We both read the same article from HowStuffWorks.com, and we read it independently, do our own side research, ask our own questions and go over the topic and tear it apart and explain it bit by bit, including stuff we found in the article and elsewhere. We go off on tangents. We have a way of dating things by if it was before or after the first "Ghostbusters" movie came out.

Every bit of this podcast has come about organically, was given room to grow on its own. That accounts for its success as well.

Chuck explains how they never script anything in advance and try to spring little factoids on each other:

syskfactoids.mp3

So you base your subjects on a story that's been written for the website, right?

Josh: That's right. That's what gives it the structure. We both know the meat information that we both read over and over again to absorb it. That provides the loose structure, but within a topic ... one of my favorite topics of all time is How Zombies Work. That was cut into two parts. One was movie zombies and surviving a zombie apocalypse. That was semi-fictitious. Then there was the true part about Haitian zombies and how they're created. Knowing that's how the article went, we knew when it was time to switch gears when we'd used up our external research.

It's very easy to tell, after doing this so many times, when we're done. But at the same time, we've never been very pretentious about this. So we'll say, "Do you have anything else?" And that stays in, it doesn't get edited out. We're not bashful about letting people see through the veneer of what we're doing at any point. Though we do edit out any egregious mistakes -- most of the time.

You cover some pretty serious subjects but you have a light tone. Does that become difficult for you or upset the audience?

Josh: Yes, every once in a while we get listener mail and are taken to task and scolded. It's very rare. In almost every case, the person says '"I am not going to unsubscribe but I wanted you to know you ruffled my feathers." When it comes to a heavy topic like "How Comas Work," we treated it slightly more heavily than we did "How Twinkies Work" but it still has the Josh & Chuck tone. After it was released, we knew we hadn't said anything offensive there but we wanted to make sure we hadn't inadvertently offended anyone who had a family member in a vegetative state. And we got listener mail from people who do have relatives in comas, and they thanked us and said, "You guys did this very well, it was factual and respectful and you didn't sensationalize it."

Since that point in time, we've become a lot more confident that our approach could be applied to anything. So we've done "How Tourette's Works" and we got compliments from people who have kids with Tourette's. I think people identify with us on a personal level and they're willing to forgive us.

Chuck: We now cover ourselves a little upfront with a disclaimer of sorts. We did a show on serial killers and it turns out we're not the only ones endlessly fascinated with serial killers. And we knew we would be joking around on the show, because that's what we do, so we said, "We just want people to know that while we are fascinated with this and into this, we do know there are real victims and we don't want to make light of that, so let's get on with the show." Every once in a while a little disclaimer goes a long way.

Josh: Physics doesn't really work in Chuck's or my brain, it doesn't fit that well. So we'll research our little hearts out and try. We did a recent podcast on the Hadron Collider, but we did a disclaimer at the beginning of that one too, not that we would offend anyone, but that we would surely get several things wrong on this. And if you can correct us, please do. And we got corrections from astrophysicists. As recently as last Monday an astrophysicist came up to me and said, "You guys really screwed up the Large Hadron Collider." But in a successive podcast, we read all the corrections on air, so the bad information we give out is corrected by someone who really knows what they're talking about.

How do you get your audience involved? They suggest topics and correct you, but is there any other way you interact with them?

Chuck: I can't say enough about our fan base. We've been lucky enough to meet some of them here on our trip to New York. We had a little get-together last night and are having another one tonight. They're the kindest, smartest, most interesting, curious, inquisitive people we've ever met. Josh always says that they're the largest collection of friends who have never met before. We get 350 fan mails a week, and our Facebook page has more than 10,000 fans after being up two months. We go onto Facebook a lot and we're really active there, it doesn't just sit there, and they appreciate that. It's a big happy family.

Josh: Plus, our Kiva team is another way people have got involved in a really tangible way. We did a podcast on how microfinance works, and how you can give loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. We partnered with Kiva.org and set up a Stuff You Should Know team, and got to $100,000 donated within a couple months. [The total is now beyond $150,000.] There's a subsection of fans that has taken over our team and are leading the charge to raise a quarter-million dollars to loan to entrepreneurs in developing countries by the end of August.

Do you have plans to expand into other formats or do other projects?

Chuck: We've done a few live speaking gigs and spoke at an education conference and that's opened up a whole world to us, speaking in front of live humans, instead of just the two of us sitting in a room.

Josh: If you want to be baptized by fire do your first speaking gig in front of a group of teachers and principals -- especially if you were a smart aleck in school. They can tell 20 years on that you were somebody who would have given them trouble at their school.

Do you think the reason you're so popular is that typical journalism is not doing a good enough explaining the basics?

Chuck: There's some validity to that. Journalism and television media these days is pretty rapid-fire. You don't get a lot of in-depth discussions on things. That's why I love TV shows like "Charlie Rose" where you can get to the meat of the matter. We're both big NPR fans; they do a good job of that. We've been able to expand the show, and when you have 45 minutes to discuss a topic, you can break it down, and it's just a gold mine for guys like us. It used to be five minutes long and it became really hard to work in those constraints and so they just got longer and longer.

Josh explains how the subjects for the podcasts "comes from our brains":

syskbrains.mp3

*****

What do you think about Stuff You Should Know? Why do you think it's successful, and if you're a fan, explain why in the comments.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

4MR podcast 4-17-09 final.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

#AmazonFail search on Twitter

Why Amazon Didn't Just Have a Glitch at TechCrunch

The Failure of #AmazonFail by Clay Shirky

Amazon's Fail: Not Using Social Media to React to #AmazonFail Meme by Mark Hannah at MediaShift

Journalism Online press release

Journalism Online Part of the Web $2.0 Goldrush by Ken Doctor

Ashton Kutcher's Live Webstream

Aston Kutcher's Twitter feed

Aston Kutcher Punks Twitter -- A Giant Million Follower PR Stunt at NowPublic

Here's a graphical view of last week's MediaShift survey results:

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about #AmazonFail on MediaShift!

The most recent hubbub over the gatekeeping function started when Twitter began listing Suggested Users a couple months ago for newbies who weren't following anyone and didn't get how the service worked. By highlighting popular Twitter feeds from news organizations such as the New York Times and celebrities such as Britney Spears, Twitter hoped to hook new users. The problem? There was no explanation of how anyone made it onto such a list, and all the featured users started racking up huge numbers of followers.

Video host and blogger Veronica Belmont said her growth rate of followers shot up to a few thousand new ones per day -- now hitting around 275,000.

"At the time that I was featured, I already had a pretty successful following on the site, at around 50,000 readers," Belmont told me. "Maybe Twitter thought that if those people enjoyed my Tweets, then new people would as well. I tend to write about things in the technology world, but I intersperse it with funny or cool links I find throughout the day."

Having a large audience of followers means that you could promote your personal blog, a book or another website -- a marketer's dream. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis made a kind of indecent proposal to Twitter, saying he would pay $500,000 to be a Suggested User for three years -- equating it with a Super Bowl ad. Twitter didn't bite.

"Of course, I was only half-bluffing with this move," he wrote. "I was 90% sure Twitter wouldn't take the money and I wouldn't have to pony up a $250,000 check. However, if they did call my bluff and cashed in the $250K, I actually would have gotten what I wanted: two to ten million Twitter followers and the ability to drive one to two million visits to Mahalo a month from Twitter."

Need for Transparency

Calacanis' publicity move also brought the subject to a head among power Twitter users who felt slighted because they weren't picked as Suggested Users. "Why them and not me?" was the overall feeling among many users, who envied having hundreds of thousands of followers.

Blogger and tech guru Dave Winer decided to start his own Twitter-like microblogging service, and was upset about the way Twitter went about picking Suggested Users.

"I do think the company should have done this much more carefully," Winer wrote in a blog post titled Why It's Time to Break Out of Twitter. "Now there's no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. And the people who got the push have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money. It might be worth a lot of money."

NYU professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen did a couple podcasts with Winer talking about the power that Twitter now wields in choosing who will get the firehose of new followers from the Suggested Users page. Rosen told me that we need intelligent filters online, and when it comes down to human judgment, it should be clear who's making the call.

"I would rather each company work out the best way to explain the grounds for its judgment where editorial powers (of a kind) are being exercised, and also show us how they educate -- or leaven -- their own judgment, interactively, by filtering demands from users but also making demands on users," he said. "Leaving the blinds drawn, gradually growing into opaque institutions are not good options."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told me that the Suggested User list was a stopgap measure that would likely morph into a more automated suggestion list that's based on likes and dislikes.

"The way we see it now is similar to staff picks at your local book store but with accounts that could have a wider appeal," Stone said via email. "In the future we'd like to make this smarter and take the editorial aspect out in favor of a more programmatic method for displaying the most relevant suggestions. For now this is having the desired effect of helping new users enjoy a more relevant experience."

When I noted that some people were upset by the arbitrary nature of who was featured -- including people who work at Twitter -- Stone promised that he will try to be more open about the way feeds are featured.

[See UPDATE below with more from Stone.]

Apple's Backroom Editorial Function

Meanwhile, Apple has become a force for digital music sales with its iTunes store, which now has films, TV shows, podcasts and apps. In each section of the store, there are featured slots for content and no explanations for how content gets featured. When I first wrote about this subject more than three years ago, Apple chief Steve Jobs had just sold his movie studio Pixar to Disney and I noticed that Disney content was being featured on iTunes.

In the past three years, iTunes has become an even more powerful force in digital content, and its featured picks can do even more to help boost sales and popularity. A podcast from NZMac.com was featured on the New Zealand version of iTunes, which brought in about eight times the usual download traffic, according to site proprietor Philip Roy.

And when Mike Campbell had his House Hunter app featured on iTunes, his sales went up astronomically. Campbell explained in a blog post that his sales were $101.63 the week before being featured, and were up to $2108.31 the first week it was featured. In both cases, the content owner did nothing to get featured, didn't contact Apple or know why they were featured.

An Apple spokesperson told me that all featured slots are made as editorial decisions by Apple, and are not sold to publishers who want the coveted slots. "You can't pay to get those slots," the spokesperson told me. "There's no pay to play, those are all editorial decisions. Are those decisions influenced by popularity? I'm sure, but there's no money exchanged for that."

However, music industry sources say that you can build relationships with Apple editors, just as you can with radio music directors, retail outlets and others along the old music distribution chain. That means it's difficult to tell what's going on in backroom negotations, where the music business has been notorious for its payola scandals.

Bruce Houghton, a music booker who writes the Hypebot blog, recently got insight into how iTunes chooses featured music slots. One former indie label digital promoter told Houghton:

I promoted my releases to [Apple editors], often times highlighting special content and exclusives. Generally this 'tit' produced a 'tat' where my releases were considered for genre page, SOTW ["Song of the Week"], or spotlight treatment. Sometimes their picks of my content were my priorities, sometimes they were just good music...

With our highest profile releases, we had explicit conversations about what exactly would be delivered by supplying exclusives. But this didn't occur often. Only once in four years did I have a release that Cupertino dictated the promotion level to the other stores. I assume the majors [major labels] have that type of conversation with the major-[Apple] editors every week.

The problem for Apple is that doing backroom deals for what gets featured -- in exchange for exclusive rights to certain unreleased music -- means that others can get shut out of the process. And the lack of transparency means that the public won't trust the service and what its editors feature. One step Apple could take on the road to transparency is bringing the editors out into the light, giving them blogs to write where they can explain the process out in the open.

YouTube Lessens Editorial Power

In the past, video giant YouTube was also criticized for making home page picks for videos without explaining the process behind the picks. In late 2006, many users complained that CBS videos were getting preferential treatment because of a business deal with YouTube. YouTube and CBS denied that at the time.

But now, just as Twitter's Stone says he would like Twitter to move away from doing editorial picks, YouTube has been de-emphasizing "Featured Videos" on the home page. What used to be a long list of featured videos is now a small box that lives alongside "Recommended Videos" (based on videos you've watched before), "Friend Activity" (what your friends watch) "Promoted Videos" (obviously paid slots) and many other features.

YouTube recently changed the names of some of these home page sections to try to clarify how they are picked. However, there are still some gray areas. They recently started "Spotlight Videos," which will include videos the YouTube editors believe are the best, and they plan to take "a more thematic approach to showcasing some of the best videos our community and partners produce," according to YouTube product marketing manager Curtis Lee in a recent blog post.

Lee explains the "Featured Videos" section this way:

Featured Videos will be primarily populated with videos from YouTube's thousands of partners, but they might also include select user videos that are currently popular or that we have previously showcased in Spotlight Videos. We will automatically rotate these videos throughout the day to keep them fresh.

So are they partner videos or user videos, and if it's a mix, how can we tell which is which?
Another YouTube editor told me that the editorial calendar at YouTube had become quite light lately. "The community on YouTube is really what drives videos up in popularity," he told me. "As time goes on, we've been phasing out the editorial aspect of YouTube significantly."

The problem for these new gatekeepers is that they are providing the old editorial functions, but there's a key difference between the way they operate and the way that movie critics, music reviewers and video store clerks operate: They are making editorial decisions without telling us who they are, what they like and how they are making those decisions. Otherwise, we will be left to wonder, left to come up with our own conspiracy theories, and we will lose trust in these services.

What do you think? How can these sites do a better job of being transparent with picks? Should they rely more on "most-viewed" or "most-downloaded" charts intead of editorial picks? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: Twitter's Biz Stone has written a blog post in response to my queries explaining in more detail how the Suggested Users are chosen:

Our Chief Scientist developed a program that scans active Twitter accounts for a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out, certain indications that the account is interesting to others in some respects, and a few other signals.

This program then generates a list of potentially interesting Twitter accounts that myself and some product team folks here at Twitter take a look at for another set of criteria. For example, is the account a good introduction to Twittering for a new user? Does the person or organization running the account have a fairly wide or mainstream appeal? If they are a celebrity or business, have we confirmed it's really them?

Finally, we'll do a gut check internally with a couple folks before adding them to the Suggested Users list. The list continues to grow and change although only a subset of 20 accounts are randomly displayed as suggestions during the new user signup process. Twitter is not paid to include accounts in this list. The Suggested Users feature exists to do a job -- it makes Twitter more relevant and valuable to users. All that being said, when we find out Oprah starts Twittering for real we may very well put her on the list.

This is a great start toward more transparency for the service.

Photo of Dave Winer by Scott Beale via Flickr. Photo of Biz Stone by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo.

The technology and journalism fields have long been dominated by men, especially in the upper management of big companies. But the J-Lab and McCormick Foundation want to shine the light on new ideas from women who work at mainstream media outlets but want to start something up on the side.

That's why they started giving out grants in their New Media Women Entrepreneurs (NMWE) competition, with three winning ideas getting $10,000 in seed money:

> Echo, a locative media project that encourages people to call in their stories about places in Atlanta

> Latina Voices, a website for Latinas to discuss social issues

> Northwest Navy News, a site that will facilitate connections between military families in Washington state

Jan Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab, told me that women are still struggling in the journalism industry, even though there are less barriers to entry in new media.

"The tools for entry [to new media] are not as much of a barrier," she told me. "You need airwaves to broadcast, but you can build a website online, and do something on your own in the new media world. If you look at what BlogHer has accomplished in three years, it's phenomenal. The entry points are less insurmountable."

Two women who feel like they have no barriers to entry are Karyn Lu and Lila King, two CNN.com staffers in Atlanta, who got funding for the locative media project, Echo. Their plan is to put signs up around Atlanta encouraging people to share their stories about places via cell phone messages -- and let people hear each other's stories via cell phones, the the web or podcasts, turing the voicemails into custom audio walking tours.

"We'll have the stories and locations where they occured, but we hope to have walking tours on the website that you can download and customize for your iPod and then take them out for a walk," said Lu. "It would be great for us to partner with local Atlanta organizations that promote walking and biking like the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign. And then we could co-host events with them and get people outside that way."

While the NMWE site lists all the facts and figures about how women struggle in the journalism industry (e.g. women make up two-thirds of journalism school students, but make up only one-third of the workforce), Lu and King told me they hadn't felt any limits in their own careers in new media. The following is a video they posted to explain their project:

Introducing the Echo team from J-Lab on Vimeo.

I spoke to Lu, 28, and King, 31, on the phone recently about the motivation behind Echo, their evolving business plan and how audio is an overlooked medium. The following is an edited version of our discussion.

What's your background and why did you decide to do this project?

Karyn Lu: I have an undergradute degree in English literature from Wellesley College and a master's degree in digital media from Georgia Tech, which is a great combination for this project. I did do one other public art project for the city of Atlanta in the summer of 2005. It was also a place-based storytelling experiment, and was one of the projects that, when I was talking to Lila, sparked our interest in working together. It was funded by the city of Atlanta for a three-month run in Freedom Park, which is Atlanta's largest public green space, and it was called StoryScape.

I was working on it with two other friends from graduate school, and we put up signs all over Freedom Park with phone numbers and location IDs, and we asked people in the park to stop and call in and leave us stories about the park and why it was important to them. It was a great experiment. We put those stories into a database so that when people called in they could hear other stories left by neighbors and fellow Atlantans. We had them up on a website, with a small Flash-based interactive map with signs that people could click on and listen to stories that people had left on that sign.

Lila King: One of the things I'm most proud of in my pre-CNN life is that a friend and I built a proto-podcasting streaming radio site before there was podcasting. We were dissatisfied with the radio where we lived, in Atlanta, so we thought 'this isn't rocket science, we can do this.' So we bought some recorders and interviewed our friends and anyone who would talk with us, and started producing radio pieces for the web.

In doing that, it made me develop an appreciation for the power of storytelling simply through sound, with nothing but a person's voice narrating their own personal story. There's something about sound, even coming from a computer speaker or the radio, where you can just close your eyes and imagine the person who's talking is right beside you. It's not interpreted through a screen. Because I like storytelling through sound, that's what brought me to Echo.

I'm really excited that this first pass of the project will be exclusively through sound, because it's a medium that's overlooked.

Lu: I have to agree with Lila on that. When I was working on StoryScape and listening to the stories on my phone, I wasn't looking at a tiny screen, I was standing there looking and smelling the air and listening to the stories and their words were almost bringing back ghosts of events that had happened right there.

Tell me about the genesis of the idea for Echo, and what's your motivation for doing it?

Lu: It came out of a lot of conversations that Lila and I had at work and outside of work. We are kindred spirits in a way, we're both tinkerers, and we both taught ourselves how to design and code. It's satisfying for us to make something ourselves, and have creative control of our projects. Every time we talked, we came away inspired, and thought we should work together on something.

You both taught yourselves how to code?

Lu: Yes, not that we're great at it. It's the basics, HTML, CSS and basic design. It's something we've done for a number of years.

King: I don't consider myself to be a supreme software developer, but there's enormous ease and possibility on the web. You can learn a little bit and do so much with it. That's so enticing. Over the years, we've often talked about what else we might do. It's so easy to go from having an idea to making it happen on the web, that doesn't necessarily map to other media.

Lu: We would always share other projects that other people were doing that were great, and say, 'Isn't this great? We could totally do this.' It came out of different conversations like that. I had mentioned my StoryScape project and she mentioned her radio project and the two melded perfectly together in the way mine collected stories in the public and Lila produced audio pieces.

I see that you're still brainstorming ideas for it. How formed is the idea at this point? How much do you think it will change?

King: I think the core of the idea is that we enable place-based storytelling about Atlanta, and encourage people to walk and get on their bikes and experience the city outside of cars. We have a kernel of an idea of how we imagine it could happen. I feel really strongly that this is going to evolve considerably over time. Part of our development process is setting up brainstorming dinners among our friends who have different backgrounds and expertise. And every time we talk to someone new, they have a new light to shed on how we might direct the project and what we might do specifically. We're all ears.

Lu: We have a couple main guiding principles that we're working with, like getting people outside and walking and cycling more. And we're committed to working on an open source platform like Drupal. And we're committed to using audio to start with instead of video or text. And we want to present personal and historical stories side by side. But there are so many great ideas out there, and we're open to all that. When we have the system up and running, the users will probably surprise us by the way they use it.

Tell me more about the entrepreneurial part of the project. What's the business model behind it?

[Both laugh]

King: We shouldn't laugh about it, but to be perfectly blunt, we haven't talked a lot about a business model behind the project. The motivation is more about motivating our community and adding something to the community. We're truly only at the beginning. If there's a business model, great, but...

Lu: I think it's something that will have to evolve.

[In their proposal to NMWE, Lu and King mention partnerships with local institutions such as the Atlanta Bicyle Campaign, the Clean Air Campaign, and universities that could secure them more funding.]

What will you spend the $10,000 grant on? For your time or for development?

Lu: Most of our budget will go to hiring a designer and developer to help us get our site and our mobile storytelling infrastructure up and running. There will be some costs for printing and mounting the signs, and equipment and hardware and things like that.

Are there deadlines for when you have to have something up and running?

King: Yes, there are guidelines with the grant, we're supposed to have a prototype up and running within 10 months. So we aim to have our beta site up and running by then. That's the end deadline for this grant.

What's the reaction of people at CNN to your project?

King: I don't know if I want to speak on behalf of other people at CNN, but as far as my friends go and aquaintances, every reaction has been positive, and a lot of people said, 'How can I help?' And that's why we decided to have a series of brainstorming dinners with them. My husband kindly agreed to cook dinner for us. [laughs] So we'll sit around and talk about what we're doing.

Lu: It's one of those things where every time we tell someone else about it, they come up with another fantasic idea for us.

I've heard a lot about locative media, both from Medill's projects and from projects on Idea Lab. Do you think that the community is demanding them, or is it the kind of thing that they like when they see it?

Lu: When I did the StoryScape project I was doing it for a class called Experimental Media. So that says something about how new this is. Communities have always had lots of stories tied to spots, and I don't think people are demanding it. But based on the reaction we've had so far and in the interviews we've done in the pilot phase, people get very excited about the project when they realize how powerful the stories can be.

King: I think in Atlanta there is definitely a demand for improved infrastructure for walking and biking. This project is our answer to that demand. It's one of many, I'm sure.

Lu: It's our goal to pleasantly surprise the people who live in this city, so they stumble on something that will make their lives a little richer...Space is a physical location that exists without any meaning, but when something personally or culturally significant happens there, then it's transformed into a place. I think place-based storytelling plays into that.

King: I'm really excited to build something based on mobile phones that nearly everyone has, and isn't based on a screen or a smartphone that has a visual capability. I like the idea that using the phone opens it up to everyone, plus you can look around the place while you listen to it.

Do you feel like women aren't represented well in new media? In blogging, there was a time where people said that female bloggers weren't getting enough recognition, and then BlogHer came along. How do you see the industry right now?

King: I think BlogHer is an amazing organization, but I don't really perceive in my limited world of new media that there is limited opportunity or exposure for women. I'm proud to receive this grant and take a women-led project out into the world. I don't feel like as a woman I'm limited in any way.

Lu: I completely agree with that.

*****

What do you think? Can locative media projects like Echo help people get out and walk and bike more in urban places? What's your view on women in new media? Do the have the same opportunities as men? Share your thoughts or experiences in the comments below.

For five and a half days, a group of mostly newspaper journalists (with a few broadcasters and non-profit folks thrown in) took an intensive boot camp multimedia training at UC Berkeley through the Knight Digital Media Center. The idea was to learn as much as possible about shooting and editing video, capturing and editing audio, building Flash animations, doing on-camera work, and finding out how journalism is changing due to new technology.

I followed along as a class "auditor" for the week, and made it to about 80% of the sessions. I even got to join one of the teams (Team Gecko), going out to report on a story and helping to put it together. My overall take on the week was that there was a lot to learn, and our brains were stuffed to overflowing after starting each day at 8:30 am and going until about 9 pm -- with very few breaks in the action.

I enjoyed getting quick overviews on software such as Flash Pro, Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro, while getting hands-on time with high-end video and audio capture gear. The trainers from UC Berkeley -- along with the slew of grad students -- helped us out even when we were clueless and clumsy. The talks from speakers also helped us get our bearings on what was going on in the outside world, whether at the El Paso Times or Current TV or the BBC.

My biggest concern was having to swallow so much information in so little time. It would have been nice to have more time to work on projects and on the software, and a bit less time with the speakers. There was also very little time for socializing with other fellows in the program, outside of nighttime drinks here and there. Maybe one more day added to the agenda would have helped in that regard.

Participants Give Feedback

I polled some participants in the training, and here are some highlights of what they told me via email.

What were some of the best things about the training?

Karl Mondon, staff photographer and multimedia producer for the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times: [I enjoyed] leaving my hotel room at the Gothic-inspired 1930s-era, Julia Morgan-built Berkeley City Club and arriving a short walk later at a high-tech, totally-wired Graduate School of Journalism building at Cal where the newsroom of the future was being shown. It was like walking out of the Flintstones and into the Jetsons.

I liked both cartoons as a kid, but as a journalist, I can see the Jetsons paradigm is the winner. Getting slapped around with super-brief, intense tutorials on sound, video, and Flash applications for 13 hours a day, six days straight was a definite grind. It made me realize how little I know and how far I have to go if I want to be proficient in these new forms...The whole program is top-drawer, though. We were treated like royalty by people who truly enjoy what they are offering.

Laura Bischoff, staff writer of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News in the Columbus bureau: The workshop showed what we can do on the Internet to feed that information machine. It showed me how with some different thinking, new skills and a pile of expensive equipment, I can crank out some super cool stuff.

I was also happy to see Aman Ali in action. He's a 23-year-old reporter [at the Journal News in New York] who has been using Photoshop and Final Cut practically since preschool. He gets all jazzed up when he gets something to work just right but he said he gets equally excited when he snags a good quote and scoops his news competition. His enthusiasm is infectious.

Scott Anderson, video and technology editor at The Times of Shreveport, La.: I thought the training was terrific. I thought the skills/applications training was right on target. As someone who has dabbled more than a little bit in multimedia, this really gave me the confidence to know I can accomplish more online. And the storyboarding exercise gave me the tool to give the process some very critical thought -- which has been the key component missing from multimedia efforts in our newsroom.

I definitely think they have the right slate of applications. With a grasp of the programs they taught this week, anyone can look like an online specialist.

I also enjoyed the speakers. I think it was great to hear from alumni of the program to see what they have done since. I especially enjoyed Jay [Koester] from El Paso. I think he taught us we don't have to be so serious about everything. [Voice and on-camera coach] Marilyn Pittman was a terrific speaker/trainer. She put the spotlight on one key element of this whole process I think few print people give enough consideration: Audio really does drive a story, and she helped us all understand what good audio is all about.

What do you think could be improved about the training?

Mondon: Perhaps one day less of training and one day more of practice would have suited my personal needs. While the non-training presentations were quite interesting, I probably could have used more time to try and drill some of these new skills taught into my dense, gray-haired scalp.

For example, I couldn't take the opportunity to play with Final Cut Pro with pros in the room, because I felt more compelled to work in Flash as much as possible. It seems "interactive" is the native characteristic of the web and those Flash skills seem the most elusive and non-intuitive.

Bischoff: I think the best way to improve the workshop is to make it half a day longer and direct the fellows to go through the tutorials before they arrive. I felt sort of shell-shocked by the rapid fire pace of some of the technical classes. I'd also like to come back in six months for a follow-up course.

And, it was a crime to have the workshop in such a beautiful setting but have no time to see the area. Might as well hold it in Flint, Michigan. No one would feel bad about being trapped in class from 9 to 9 every day there.

Anderson: My one issue with the conference is perhaps unavoidable in situations like this. The groups for the projects were a bit large for me. In my reality, I am fortunate when I can have time as a one-man band on a project like this. And two people is a luxury. Five people working on a project is too much, if you ask me. And so many creative and enthusiastic individuals working on one subject makes for a chaotic process.

*****

I'm curious to hear from other folks who took this training -- or other similar boot camps. Please give your feedback in the comments below. Or if you're a mid-career journalist, give your own take on what kind of training you'd like to get. How can traditional journalists get the skills to do original multimedia work online?

Read More about the Knight Digital Training:

> Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists

> Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job

> Hands-On Training with Videocameras and Shooting for the Web

> Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso

> Flash Techniques, and the Participatory Push by Current TV

All photos by Jerry Monti via Flickr.

BERKELEY, CALIF. -- The week-long training at UC Berkeley in multimedia has now moved to a new phase. After getting basic background on audio, video and photographic equipment, we went out into the field on our group's assignment. My group, Team Gecko, went to visit Professor Robert Full to learn about the work he's done in biomechanics. Full's lab discovered the properties of gecko's feet that allow the animals to stick onto slick surfaces without use of suction or adhesive. He then mimicked that stickiness in robots that could climb up walls.

So the seven of us descended into Full's office, a press gaggle with a high-end videocamera, two audio recorders, a digital SLR and point-and-shoot camera, and lots of microphones. Often, Full would ask us what we wanted to do next, and we had to struggle to figure it out. We were like a team without a leader. The idea is that we have to work everything out together, and all of us get time doing video, audio, and photo capture and do interviews.

Sometimes, the journalist scrum was as entertaining as Full's spiel about mimicking nature with new inventions. When we were observing one of the geckos in Full's lab, we were packed into the room, recording one of the grad student/researcher's every words.

But the good part about the gaggle was that we could each take turns with the equipment and try out things we didn't know before. Even though it was at times a cumbersome process, we knew that we were gaining valuable experience and had more chances to capture all the video, audio and photos we might need.

Learning Basic Flash

Now we're doing a basic training on Flash production with Jeremy Rue from UC Berkeley in the multimedia computer lab.

Jeremy Rue: Flash was started in 1986 to do web animations. And you'll see that we'll be making things move with Flash. It's now evolved with a level of interactivity, so that things move when you push a button. It's great for multimedia because it helps make your story more dynamic. You will recognize Flash with advertisements because a lot of ads use Flash to move around and annoy you.

Now, about 97% of computers can view Flash. Flash is on virtually all computers. It's safe to know that if you do it in Flash, almost everyone can see it. And it works cross-platform, on Macs and PCs. When you build a website, you have to build it for every platform, every browser. Whenever you build something in Flash, you have to consider it as being in a locked container that Google can't process well when it comes to finding it in search.

What's Flash good for? Slide shows, movement, animation, video.

(Shows some examples of Flash)

(Now we're using Flash Professional 8.)

If you're working on a project, it's automatically created in an .FLA file, which includes everything in a project. When you export a project, it is in a locked .swf file, that people can see but can't change. It's designed to be embedded in a web page. Tomorrow we'll teach you how to use Dreamweaver and we'll show you how to embed Flash in a web page. Then there's the .FLV file that everyone uses online, including YouTube.

(Begin tutorial for Flash. Also taken from online tutorial.)

Each box is a different frame. How long is 20 frames? It depends on your frame rate. The timeline is frame-based. On the right is a library. So anything you import will go into the library, a photo or video. The "property inspector" is important, and tells you the properties of what you click on.

Today we're going to make a simple slide show of four photos. And it's pretty basic, with the photos fading in and out. It looks basic but we're going to do it manually, and it's going to seem like a lot of work and it is. Why do we teach this then? Because it's important to understand how this works. There are other slide show programs that are easier, like SoundSlides.

To build a basic audio slideshow in Flash:

1. Import images.

2. Choose all photos in the stack.

3. Highlight and trash the empty Layer 1.

(Clicking on the dots on each layer lets you see the layer below each one.)

("Eye" icon shows you all layers; "Lock" icon protects each layer.)

4. File > Save to save the slideshow so far.

In Flash, a symbol is a container. We will convert each of these photos into symbols. Flash can stretch a symbol out and do all kinds of things to it. Any Flash project you've seen on the web, when an image moves around, it's in a symbol.

5. Choose a photo, and then go to Modify > Convert to Symbol, and then choose "Graphics" button and name the photo and hit OK. Do that for each photo.

We now want to create our timeline to fade up and down each image.

6. Click on 44th frame. Hold Shift and highlight all the keyframes in 44, covering all the pictures.

7. Insert > Timeline > Keyframe. Then choose frame 10, highlight all the layers, hit Insert > Timeline > Keyframe for each one.

8. Move the Play Head over to frame 1. Click on the first photo, and then select all four photos. In the Property Inspection, choose Color > Alpha and set it to 0. That way, the start of the slideshow will have a blank slate. Do the same for frame 44 to make the slideshow end in a blank white page as well.

9. To create the fade, you need the "tween." In old cartoons, the apprentices would draw the in-between frames, the transitions for the cartoons. The main cartoonists would do the main drawings and let the apprentices do the transitions. Choose all photos in Frame 1, in the Property Inspector go to Tween > Motion to make all the photos fade in. To do the fade out, choose all photos in Frame 35, go to Property Inspector and go to Tween > Motion.

10. Select the bottom three photos, and drag them over to the right so they transition over time. Then drag the bottom two photos over, and ten drag the bottom one over.

11. Click the +page icon so you can add a layer at the top. Rename that layer "Actions." Go to Window > Actions, and then type this in the box:

stop();

If you put that on Frame 1, it will never start, so put it in the last frame to make the animation stop.

12. Hit Control > Play to watch the animation.

Learning to Build a Flash Template

Jeremy Rue: Now we'll learn how to build a Flash shell, with three buttons that takes you to three parts of your project. (You can check out a more full-featured online tutorial on the Knight Digital Media Center site.

1. Create > Flash Document

With most multimedia projects, you initiate it with a mockup in Photoshop so you know the look and feel ahead of time. We've done that for you already.

2. In Property Inspector, click on Size and choose "600" by "400." This sets the size of the project, based on the image we already have. In the Size menu, you can choose the Title, Description and frame rate. Be sure to save your work.

3. File > Import to library > Choose images. Hit Import. If you hit "Import to stage" the images go directly into the project.

4. Take background image and put it on the stage. Window > Align and then use the buttons to align the image to the stage. Click the Lock icon to lock the background.

5. Create new layer called "title" and use the Text tool. Make sure the text is "Static Text" and choose the font and size. Create a text box and write in the text. Use the "Move" tool to move the text around. When you choose the text, in the Property Inspector, choose Filters. You can then choose Drop Shadow or other filters for the text. Lock the title.

6. Create new layer called "Buttons." Drag Button 1, Button 2, and Button 3 onto the stage. Choose the images, and then use the Align tool to make sure they line up.

7. Choose each photo, and do Modify > Convert to symbol and choose "button" and name each one.

We can go into each symbol and manipulate them from the inside.

8. Double-click an image and you go into Symbol Editing Mode. Click on Scene 1 if you ever want to go back to the main timeline. Each button has different states: Up, Over, Down, Hit. Go to Insert > Timeline > Keyframe. Click on image, and hit the Swap button, choose the other image for that button. Do Control > Test Movie to see how the image changes when your mouse rolls over it.

The Up state shows what the image is at first. The Over state shows what the image looks like when you roll over it with a mouse. The Down state shows what it looks like when you click it.

Repeat this procedure for all three photos. Lock that layer.

9. Create a new layer called "labels" and a new layer called "media." Choose Frame 40, highlight for all layers. Insert > Timeline > Frame. Just highlight the top two layers, labels and media, and then do Insert > Timeline > Keyframe at Frames 10, 20 and 30.

Putting in Keyframes means that you are creating spots where things will happen in the project.

10. Click on "labels" layer in Frame 1. Under Property Inspector, put in "opening" as the name. Do the same for Frames 10, 20 and 30 with the names "video," "text" and "map." This gives you reference points for each section.

We now want to put the video in the project. Flash Professional comes with Flash Video Encoder. Hide the Flash program and open the Video Encoder which is a batch encoder, which will take videos and put them into a Flash format. Drag a sample video and put it into the Encoder. Hit Settings... and then Show Advanced Settings.

On2 format is being replaced by H.264 now. The most common thing you'll change is Resize Video. Choose 320 pixels for width, as that's a standard size for web video. You can also use the slider to preview the video and clip out the beginning or end. You then process the video encoding, which can take up to 10 times the time of the video to do on these computers -- but that depends on the video content. Now you have an .FLV file

Go back to Flash.

11. Lock the labels layer. Click on the frame under video in the "media" layer. Go to Window > Components and choose FLVPlayback and drag it to the stage. When you drag your playhead over that section, you see the video, which then disappears when you leave that section. The Keyframes trigger the video off and on.

12. Go to Window > Component Inspector to get options for your component. Click on the video to see the options. Look for "contentpath" and click on magnifying glass. Find the movie file and click OK to put it into the player.

13. Go to the "text" section and choose the "media" label. Get the Text Tool and write up text in 12 pt. size. Go to Text > Scrollable. That makes the text scrollable. Click on the lower right part of the box to stretch it out. Cut and paste your text into the box.

14. Open Window > Components. Select UIScrollBar and drag it to the right side of the text box. A white box will appear next to your text box.

15. Create a new layer called "actions." Go to Window > Actions and then type in:

stop ();

video_btn.onRelease = function(){
gotoAndStop("video");
}

This allows people to see video on the release of the button. Click on the blue checkmark to check for errors in programming.

Then add in these lines:

text_btn.onRelease = function(){
gotoAndStop("text");
}

These scripts will help you do the interactivity for about 90% of Flash designs.

16. Go to the buttons layer, and choose one button. Using the Property Inspector, name the button "video_btn." Make sure you are in the Selection Tool. Name all the buttons. Then hit Command - Return to test the project.

You can download other Flash templates and open them to see how they work, and put in your own material. Here are a bunch of Flash templates that you can customize for your own use.

Current TV Pushes Participation

Robin Sloan from Current TV is now doing a lunch talk called "Current, Collaborative Storytelling and Our Googlezon Future." Sloan created the EPIC 2014 video predicting the future of online media. He's showing it for the group. Predictions that didn't pan out: Google Grid, and MSN Newsbotster (though the latter sounds a lot like FriendFeed), and Googlezon. EPIC is a kind of combination of Daily Me and Google's advertising network, a personlized take on the news. New York Times becomes an "elite print-only newsletter for the elite and elderly" (audience laughs most at this point).

Robin Sloan: We were two young guys at a journalism school and think tank, Poynter Institute, and were frustrated that people wouldn't pay attention to the web. So we created a scary ghost story to get people to pay attention. The video became a viral sensation, and we got emails from people outside the media world, with people wondering, "How is my job changing? How can I deal with this new world?" And they were librarians and marketers and not just journalists.

There was a story in the Financial Times in 2004 with Rubert Murdoch saying his company missed the boat on the Internet, and that he had watched EPIC 2014. So from this dim computer lab in St. Petersberg, Florida, it went to Rupert Murdoch, and shortly after that, News Corp. bought MySpace. Then I went to work at Current in San Francisco.

A key line in the EPIC video is: "The news war from 2010 were notable because no news organizations were taking part." But that has changed and now the news organizations are doing better. But I didn't want to be part of a news organization that had to change fundamentally.

Current is a 24-hour news channel and website, and the idea is that every part of the network is participatory. Since we launched in 2005, we let people upload videos about themselves. It can be about a friend's band or serious stuff. The community gives people feedback on the website on their videos. And the videos that get the most traction make it onto TV and the makers get paid.

Now we're looking at things differently in the last year. We realized that we were doing a good job with indie filmmakers and citizen journalists, but there are only so many people. I don't think journalists have to worry about losing their jobs because it's not something people can do well in their own time.

So we reached out to people with webcams on the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, and had students just talk in freeform about their experiences. We call that "collective journalism" and have done stories on student debt, gun control and the election.

Q: What about EPIC 2015?

Robin Sloan: We did it because there were so many people asking why we hated journalism or hated Google. In the update, it goes beyond what happened with the NY Times and it ends on a happier note.

Q: Was it a mistake for Current to focus early on TV instead of the Net?

Sloan: It might look strange that we were trying to start a cable TV network in 2005 when online video was taking off, but it was actually an easier way to make money than being an online startup. We're still trying to figure out the online revenue model but we are making money with TV now.

(Shows video explaining project with the Shins where the audience filmed the song, and Current edited it into a video. The band asked people to tape the song before playing it live, and people in the audience were taping it with cell phones and cameras.)

It was actually a pain to edit everything together. But so many people had a stake in it, and they loved to see their video make it into the final work. One of the big lessons of Current: You end up spending as much time on participation as production.

By involving more people, they become allies and guerrilla marketers. We could use more many-to-many connections like that in our media culture. In another area which requires a lot of work is in advertising. For every advertiser, we include user-generated ads for each one. We put up an assignment and ask people to upload their take on a commercial. And those efforts are almost always better than the advertiser's efforts.

They're called "Video Created Ad Message." They're some of the most popular content on our site.

We launched a new site a little over a month ago. Collective journalism was a way to broaden the scope of who could participate but that still requires people to tape themselves on webcam. Now we added Current News, and we generate it by having people submit stories -- it can be theirs or from someone else or a news organization. Then people vote on them.

Then our producers go through them each hour and put together a quick package that gives a rundown of the top stories, include reader comments and other tidbits.

(Plays news segment. Uses computer-generated voice.)

Q: Why use the computer-generated voice?

Sloan: We decided to try it out. But people either love it or hate it. I love it. It takes about 90 minutes to put each one together. We put this layer of human taste and production because humans are still needed to pick things that look good on TV.

Another learning: We had voting and comments before, but we didn't have that motivation before, getting people's things on TV. After that, our voting and commeting and participation rates went up 500% because then there was a reason to do it.

(Shows We Tell Stories on Penguin Press.)

Sloan: I think this is a great, gorgeous effort, but it's incomplete. After they are made, they just sit there and never change. When it comes to news, it's depressing to see something stay the same like that. The web doesn't have to have

(Shows site called Twistori that takes in Twitter feeds and makes a running feed based on topics.)

Sloan: Ze Frank posted on Twitter once as an homage to summer camp games. He said, "Color Wars is on, I'm on the blue team." And without any more structure, people started saying what teams they were on, "I'm on the green team," etc. Then he started doing a rock/paper/scissors game. Instead of building a story, he did very little and just built it on the feed of information that already exists.

Read More about the Knight Training:

> Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists

> Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job

> Hands-On Training with Videocameras and Shooting for the Web

> Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso

Today's training includes sessions on audio recording, photography, Mac computers, and Photoshop.

In the morning, Jeremy Rue, a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Journalism, showed us the basics of audio recording with a Marantz PMD660. Later, Rue turned to the basics of photography.

Jeremy Rue: Advanced point and shoot cameras are between an SLR and point and shoot. They have a non-removable lens, shorter shutter lag, manual focus, and generally high quality.

Even if you can get a good deal on a camera, you still get hit with huge costs on accessories, which include:

> Lens filter
> Camera bag
> Additional rechargeable batteries (go with name brand)
> Memory cards
> Card readers
> Extra lenses
> Software (Photoshop)

Lots of jargon with digital cameras, such as:

Megapixels: only refers to output image; not necessary to be more than 2 or 3 megapixels for the web.

IS: image stabilizer. Prevents blur from hand movement.

Optical vs. digital zoom: Digital zoom crops the image and is terrible quality -- you don't want that.

ISO: Refers to sensitivity of sensor. Higher number = better for low light. Don't go past 1600 ISO or quality will be degraded. But 1600 is good for very low light situation, but very grainy.

CMOS vs. CCD: CMOS is cheaper sensor and has lower power consumption, but it is a lower quality censor.

RAW: Great for print, but not necessary for the web. One photog in the group says he hasn't shot in RAW mode for two years, and only does it for something that will be blown up into a poster.

Video FPS: Frames per second. 30 fps is a good quality for video.

Techniques for Shooting to Make Slide Shows

Jeremy Rue: Photographers have been trained to go out and get one image, but now that there are more online narratives, they need to shoot more photos. Here are some main tips for shooting for slide shows:

> Form a narrative, with a beginning, middle and end.
> Take lots of pictures.
> Don't be so literal -- let the audio "tell" the story. Images convey moments, emotion.
> Matching photos to words isn't always necessary. Photos can tell you more than the audio.
> Domument with images, narrate with sound.

Rue: As journalists we learn this craft of telling stories, so it's much more effective having someone else tell the story -- and not having it ambiguous. It's a straightforward way of doing the story.

Paul Grabowicz: I wouldn't have someone else do the entire narration. It's good to have differing voices in a story. It's good to save the people talking to times when they are emotional. TV has moved away from narration, and on the web, there are people talking without narration. I think we'll go back to having more narration and variety of voices. The web is about personalities, and that might be hard for print reporters, because we're not supposed to be part of the story.

(Rue plays example of audio slide show on San Francisco Chronicle site told entirely by the subjects.)

Rachael Myrow: It's about the emotional honesty of the voiceover. Even if your voice isn't perfect for radio, it still works if you are engaged with the story. The problem is when reporters sound like they are dragged into a sound booth and don't really want to do it.

Jeremy Rue: You can always just do your own narration if the subject doesn't do a very good job of that.

*****

After lunch today, there was a speaker, Jay Koester, online editor for the El Paso Times, with a talk titled, "Looking Big on a Small Budget." Koester would tell us how his staff could do more with less -- with a lot of wit and humor.

Jay Koester: Circulation is 60,000, we're a fairly small paper. It's a small staff covering a city of 750,000. Eighty percent of our efforts are with breaking news. It's the most important thing. Databases are important, our readers love them. We had a popular one from the health inspector ratings of all the restaurants.

Everything I will show you was done by one person on one shift. It will help you learn what's possible. We're shooting video on a camera that's worse than what you shoot your kids with. It is a cheap $300 camera but it has an external mic, which is important. We bought four of them.

We don't take much breaking news video, because there are four local TV stations in town. We can't really compete with them.

(Shows video report on border crossing and how it's angering people who are stuck in hours of traffic.)

We have a music blogger on staff, and she's been getting us to put up music videos on the site, taken from live shows.

I know I'm not supposed to use a "TV guy voice" on web video, that's what you're taught in the Knight training. But in this case, I was doing a promo for a live show we were putting on, and I think it works in this case.

(Shows video promo where he uses a slick TV voice to hype the music show.)

For another shot, we didn't have a light on the camera, so someone said he'd bring a flashlight. [lots of laughter] When I got back to the studio, it was dark, no matter what I did. I finally used two different effects that made it watchable. Then everyone said, 'Hey look at this cool artsy video.' The strobe effect, though, didn't work every well.

(Shows video of Sun Bowl fans for South Florida and Oregon. Burning question: "Who would win a fight between a duck and a bull?" Follow-up: "What if the duck had a gun?" Correct answer: "Ducks can't hold guns; they have webbed feet.")

We do podcasts on sports, on UTEP and high school sports. One thing I thought would be awesome was to have people call in and record their calls in audio for the podcast. But only one guy called. It just didn't work.

As for blogs, I had been doing a blog about politics in El Paso, and didn't write it under my own name. I was just on the copy desk at the paper, and my editor knew I was doing the blog and told me to stop writing about politics as it might reflect badly on the paper. As time went on, I wasn't writing about politics, but we had an editorial writer doing that. He kept asking me to write about politics, and eventually I started blogging about politics again. Before the paper, had asked me not to get into personal opinions about politics, and now they were telling me to do it -- it's interesting to see the way their attitude about blogging has changed.

Read More about the Knight Training:

> Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists

> Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job

> Hands-On Training with Videocameras and Shooting for the Web

> Flash Techniques, and the Participatory Push by Current TV

BERKELEY, CALIF. -- After our long storyboarding sessions, it's now time to move into more hands-on training and seminars on doing video shooting, audio recording, digital photography and using Macintosh computers.

So far, there's been a good mix of lectures, discussions and collaborative work on storyboards for our projects. The group is very inquisitive, and the instructors have done a great job of imparting their knowledge but also including the group as much as possible. (I am banned from using the term "unconference" by Paul Grabowicz; it's a term he is very tired of hearing.)

First up is a Videocamera Instruction led by Ellen Seidler, photojournalism lecturer at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Each group gets a high end Sony DV camera and tripod to try out.

Ellen Seidler: We used to have analog video, and now it's digital video. The difference is that with analog, it's a continuous signal, and with digital, it's a series of 1s and 0s. You can copy it and copy it and copy it, and you don't lose any quality. When we copied analog, each copy degraded it more and more with each copy. With digital, once you have that video, you'll have that quality in every transfer and copy.

We're in the digital age, and it's opened up a lot of amazing opportunities. Equipment that cost thousands of dollars a few years ago now is completely affordable. This tutorial is available online on the Knight website as well.

Organizing equipment and doing a checklist before you leave is an important thing. We're using cameras here that are rather nice. They are about $3,000, and are DV cams. (They are Sony DSR-PD170 cameras.) When you look for cameras, go to B&H Photos and look at consumer cameras, with the median price point at $1,000.

The things that differentiate each camera's price are:

> Chips: The charge couple device (CCD). With a three chip camera, there's one chip for each main color -- RGB (red, green and blue). A single chip camera has sections for each color. For web work, it's primarily irrelevant. But if you're working with content that might go on broadcast, then you will need to get a three-chip camera.

> Auto-functions: You have point-and-shoot cameras for people to shoot baby's first steps and they're not for journalism. I don't recommend getting a camera with auto-everything. You may need to override it at some point.

> HD video: We'll be talking about HD video a bit later.

The first thing you need for each camera is something to power it. We call these batteries "the brick." You want to make sure your battery is fully charged and that you have a backup. The camera bag also includes an AC adapter to plug it in. With these cameras, you have to use Sony mini-DV tapes. The Sony camera is the best way to go. If you use an off-brand tape and record with it, it can clog the record heads. We always insist you use Sony tapes.

What about cameras without tape? They record onto small hard drives, or mini-discs. They could be the wave of the future, but for now, I would stay away from them. They add more steps to the process, and you can't archive it as easily. If you have to archive on your computer, it becomes a nightmare, and with tapes you can just put them on your shelf.

Check out the video tapes themselves. The first thing you need to do is write the story slug (description in a word or two) and the number 1, then number 2, etc. We've had people lose tapes because they never labeled them and they got mixed with other tapes. Make sure to label your tape clearly.

(She now goes through the basic parts of the camera: the lens, viewfinder, power button, LCD pop-out screen, manual focus, etc.)

Auto-exposure can be a problem when there's someone in front of a window and there's light behind them. To override the auto-exposure, turn off the "auto-lock" button, and then use the manual iris, so you can regulate the amount of light. The F-stops refer to the amount the iris is opening in the lens. The lower the number, the larger the iris is, and the more light is let in. If you leave it on auto-exposure, the camera will keep hunting for different exposures and the iris will change a lot -- so I don't use auto-exposure.

Audio is an integral part of video. It's flat and dead without it. From the get-go, learn to acquire good audio with the video. In these cameras, there's a built-in microphone, a "shotgun" microphone. They vary on their "pickup pattern" -- the line of how they pick up audio, whether it's straight or more broad. The closer you are to the subject, the less outside noise you'll capture.

It's better to use external microphones, than built-in microphones. Hand mikes are workhorses in TV news. It doesn't require an extra battery, and you should use a wind buffer. They run about $140, they're not that expensive. I like the RE-50. For the lavalier microphone, it attaches to a lapel, and requires a AA battery. It attaches with an XLR cable.

Learning to do video right is like learning to write sentences and do grammar. When I look at videos on the New York Times site, I am amazed that they allow people to shoot videos like that. They would never allow that quality of writing into the paper, so why allow videos like that online? They have got a bit better, but I never watch videos at any of the newspaper websites.

*****

I had to leave the day's sessions early today, so luckily Jessica Goldfin, a fellow in the boot camp who works as a journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation, agreed to take notes for MediaShift. The following is taken from her notes from the "Video Shooting Techniques" talk by Ellen Seidler.

Ellen Seidler: Before you go out and shoot, you want to plan your shoot. What visual elements will help you tell your story? Have a conversation with the reporter on the way to the story, "What kind of pictures, in an ideal world, do we want?" You will probably have to adjust when you get to the location, but it is nice to have a shot list in your brain.

Also, when you stick a new tape in your camera, let 30 seconds roll by. Check your audio and wear headphones throughout the shoot. It is also not a bad idea to have a little checklist when you are starting out. This will eventually become second nature, even though it is overwhelming at first. Become one with the camera.

Next thing that's important: shoot selectively. One main reason being that it will take you that much longer to get to the good stuff, so don't commit to taping anything you don't want seeing the light of day! Stop the camera to get the good shots. Start the editing process before you even shoot. Don't shoot garbage...develop good habits.

Second thing is to "shut up when you shoot!" If you are rolling tape, don't talk. The sound of cars going by or wind will be poisoned by Joe asking what you want for lunch. You can't separate the bad from the good when it comes to audio editing.

Paul Grabowicz: Also, don't "uh-huh" in response to interview answers because you will have a whole roll of that.

Seidler: People have this notion that taking video is like taking slow shots. No. Think of Thanksgiving Dinner when you take photos all down the line at the table. You can't do that with video! Hold your shots instead, for 10 to 15 seconds.

It is easier to take a 10 second shot and cut it down to three seconds. Not so easy for the reverse. When you are shooting action, anticipate ahead. Have a few seconds buffer before and after. Holding shots gives you options in the editing room.

The next thing is to not zoom or pan. Why? Well, imagine if you wrote a story and everything ended in an exclamation mark. It would drive you crazy. Use zoom or pan for emphasis. Get your camera and frame it on something. Don't feel like you have to follow the action. Let things happen within your frame. Once it happens, stop, follow the action, reframe and shoot again. There can be times when it is helpful, but don't overuse it.

If you are going to zoom or pan, then use it with the "holding your shots" rule in mind. For example, you want to do a story about a beautiful park, so you start with a wide shot. Hold for 10-15 seconds. Zoom in to ducks on lake and hold for 10-15 seconds. Then, when you get into the edit room, you have tons of options for nice static shoots.

Movement on the web sometimes doesn't work so well. Movement requires more compression. Sometimes it doesn't translate very well.

One of the hardest things to learn is shooting in sequences, which is like Hollywood moviemaking on the fly. Gas prices, for example, a story about gas over $4. Go to a gas station and you have a 20 second spot to fill. You could stand outside and get a 20 second shot of the station, but that is pretty boring.

Instead, think of the parts. Start with a nice wide shot to establish place. Then, focus on the parts. Maybe there is a guy pulling in? Get a shot of his feet stepping out, or maybe a close-up of his hand pulling the nozzle out or unscrewing the gas cap. You could get an extreme close-up of his eyes, and then a close-up on the numbers going by. Then an over-the-shoulder shot...get lots of angles to get different components that will build the whole visually.

But don't let the camera roll continuously. Turn it on and off. Only shoot when you are ready to get something you potentially want down on tape. The other thing to think about is to not to shoot everything from the eye-level perspective. In this case, you can take video to more interesting places but leading their eyes to different angles. Remember this is for the web! The stuff that is really going to resonate are the close-ups. The wide stuff is going to get lost.

In journalism though, you have to be mindful of manipulation. You don't want to give the sense of something that isn't...especially if you are splicing together and editing shots. If you want to be a photojournalist, you want to be up in the action. You can't shy away. Take advantage of foreground and background to get a sense of depth.

It is also interesting to layer different audio experiences to create more richness. Variety in perspectives, angles and details has the same effect regarding the richness of a piece. Today, quality has diminished, but YouTube has kind of made that acceptable. It is difficult since instead of a two-man team, one person does everything.

When framing people, get head and shoulders. You want the eyes to be on that "top third" line. It is a compositional thing and serves very well to define a shot.

When you are doing an interview, remember to have the camera at eye-level. Good framing is very important. You don't want too much empty, useless space. Remember the "rule of thirds," with the eyes on the top-third line.

Generally, you do "talking head" interviews a lot in news. Have interviewee and reporter face-to-face and the camera is to the side. If someone starts looking at the camera, tell them not to since it is distracting.

If you are shooting by yourself, without a reporter, you should sit across from the interviewee and maintain the eye contact. Keep audio in one ear though. This is tricky since you have to be responsible for everything, so develop a routine.

Microphones in interviews: You want the lapel mic to be as unobtrusive as possible and clipped facing the same direction as the person is speaking. If you are using a hand mic, frame it outside of the shot. I know this is obvious, but remember to point the mic at the source of the audio.

Set-up shots are important. Shoot 15-20 seconds from over the reporter's shoulder. Then get the same shot from the other side (reverse shot of the reporter). Also get a cut-away shot of the reporter listening. This gives you shots to cut with in the editing room. You might not need to use this, but it is always good to have. You also need to keep the camera on the same side, the "180 degree rule" to keep consistency within the segment.

Also, think about three point lighting: key light; fill light; back light. Key light is the dominant source of light. Fill light is the half light that fills in shadows. You can be creative. Often in news, you don't have time to set up this traditional lighting setup.

Think of Picasso. He learned classical figure drawing first, then experimented. Take that lesson with you into camera work. Get a strong foundation and then branch out.

Your editors will push for you to do video, but push back for having it as good as it can be. Video for the web is part of a larger piece, not as a stand-alone. It needs to fit into the overarching storytelling, but quality is still important. This is evolving everyday. I see stuff online just so they can say they have video, but to me, it doesn't add anything to my knowledge. Video content should provide information that is compelling and gives a perspective that print can't.

Read More about the Knight Training:

> Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists

> Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job

> Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso

> Flash Techniques, and the Participatory Push by Current TV

As a journalist covering a particular business, there is a temptation to believe that we know enough about that business to actually become a full participant in that business. We have been writing about it, we see what works and what fails, so we should know enough to try our hand at it too. But more often than not, we don't succeed.

The latest example of that came from popular tech blogger Robert Scoble, who left his cush gig as Microsoft evangelist to be a videoblogger for startup PodTech. While Scoble might not qualify as a traditional journalist, he fits in the mold of someone who was writing about the media revolution around him -- on his blog and in the book he co-authored, "Naked Conversations" -- and felt he knew enough to take the chance on a startup. Now he is leaving PodTech as it struggles with a new business focus, and he might end up at Fast Company, according to TechCrunch.

Other writers and journalists have tried and failed, most notably during the dot-com boom times. Back then, even CNN anchor Lou Dobbs left the network for the startup Space.com before returning to CNN. And yes, I caught the fever and worked at email newsletter startup Topica back in 1999 and 2000 before returning to freelance writing. More recently, blogger-journalist Dan Gillmor left the San Jose Mercury News in late 2004 to help start citizen media site Bayosphere, before that venture failed.

So what's the big draw to the startup world? As Gillmor told his colleagues, "I am jumping off a cliff with the expectation of assembling a hang-glider before I get to the bottom." Even though he didn't get to assemble the hang-glider in time, Gillmor did land softly as director of the Center for Citizen Media and now a founding director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

For me, I was drawn to the idea of going to a tech startup to see how such a company operated from the inside. I had actually briefly been at an earlier pre-Internet startup called MusicNet in 1993. Startups mean that you're in on the ground level, not only with the chance to shape something special but also to profit if and when the company becomes successful. It's part of the American dream to help start a company that goes on to revolutionize its field, as Google or Microsoft have done.

Of course there are many journalists who have succeeded in creating online businesses based on their writing. Rafat Ali has been successful with PaidContent and its network of sites, while OJR's Robert Niles points out that Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo and Markos Moulitsas at DailyKos have built businesses around their political blogs. But that seems to be a different animal than actually building a startup around something other than your writing, as Editor & Publisher's Steve Outing did with his recently failed Enthusiast Group.

Knowing Less Than We Think

Perhaps the problem is that we think we know more than we do. I can't speak for other journalists or bloggers who have made the leap and failed, but I can say that the odds of a startup becoming an iconic company -- or even a profitable one -- are pretty slim. Topica is one of those rare dot-com startups that has actually survived to this day, though it hasn't lit the world on fire.

Going back to Scoble's old 2006 blog post, in which he described why he left Microsoft for PodTech, helps give some insight into why he jumped ship at the time:

Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon, one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That's, what, a year or so old? Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week? That's almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft.

Now, I have no delusions that I'm either Amanda or Cali [Lewis of Geekbrief.tv]. I'm not half as cute as either of them, for one. Nor am I as smart. Or as visionary. I'll just have to work harder (which is going to be very tough, since Amanda tells me she and her team are working nearly around the clock right now to put together their three-minute videoblog).

But I had the same smile on my face when I told Cali I just quit my day job too to work in this new media industry.

Yes, there's a certain excitement, a certain freedom, a certain thrill in jumping off that cliff with the hang-glider still being built. As writers and journalists, we are constantly viewing (and reviewing) the world of other people, the real doers and shakers who are changing the world. We feel like our own fame and respect is built on the accomplishments of others. We might bring an important story to the public's attention, but it is rarely our story.

Going to run a business or work at a startup gives us as writers a chance to be part of the story, and not someone who is merely latching on to someone else's story. But in that process, that excitement, we can also lose sight of who we really are, what we really know. At Topica, I realized that being at a startup could be a lot of fun, a lot of hard work -- and also a loss of personal identity. I had to put my own creativity into the context of the business, and it had no validity on its own.

But trying and failing is not necessarily a bad thing. Gillmor counts his lessons from Bayosphere as some of the best of his life. I'm sure Scoble wouldn't trade in his time at PodTech doing videoblogs for anything else. And I've got notebooks full of hilarious notes taken at Topica company meetings for a future TV sitcom.

Journalists and writers will always be lured into the world of the businesses they cover because they will want to try it out in the first person -- succeed or fail. But they should just consider the shoddy history of those who've done it before they make that leap into startup land.

What do you think about journalists that go to work at startups? Have any succeeded spectacularly? Would you consider making that step, and why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo of Scoble by Mathieu Thouvenin via Flickr.

After an initial false start with podcasts a couple of years ago, I recently decided to give them another shot. But after trying again, I just don't feel like podcasts are my thing. Here are the six main reasons why:

1. Podcasts go on too long. I admit that I've been impatient with podcasts in the past, so over the last several weeks I've been downloading ones related to my topics of interest -- mostly technology -- to try to integrate podcasts into my media diet. The problem I always encounter is my own impatience. The podcasts on topics that interest me are produced by people with a palpable passion for the subject matter, but a limited grasp of the limitations of the audio or video medium.

On traditional radio, shows take special care to set a pace and create a rhythm that hooks in the listener. The average podcast (outside of the professional ones) seems to disregard all that. Time constraints aren't an issue. I found that podcasts that could deliver value in 3 minutes languish on for 20. Some last up to an hour. At the risk of sounding like an impatient grouch, who has that much time to spare on just one podcast?

2. They need to get to the point. I've found that in many of the podcasts I've tried out, hosts rarely cut to the chase. As a Mac user, I read several blog posts a day about Mac news, so I thought I might like a popular podcast, MacCast, around that topic. I was surprised to find that the host spent the first 3 minutes telling listeners why the current episode would be so great and stressing how much he hoped we would like it. The next 2 minutes or so were dedicated to mentioning several sponsored products, describing them in detail, and plugging an advertiser URL again and again.

Not until several minutes into the podcast do we get to the real content, which would have been interesting if it were 6 and not 60 minutes long. The host's penchant for beating around the bush made me tune out completely. I know podcasts give me the ability to skip through what I don't want to hear, but there's a risk I'll miss what I actually do want to hear. I prefer blogs because clicking through RSS feeds, you see a headline, skim a few lines and you know whether it's for you or not.

3. Good content is tough to find. While I occasionally enjoy listening to news podcasts from traditional media companies, sifting through the amateur ones on topics of my interest is difficult. Apple's iTunes suggests things I might like and I almost always don't. Obviously podcasts are like anything else: There is the good and bad, the marginally decent and the terrible. But the accessibility of the medium to any and all -- the spirit of the democratic web -- might be podcasting's downfall when it comes to quality content with solid production values.

In a perfect world, great bloggers would also be amazing podcasters, and content would work well on all mediums, but it doesn't. I know not everyone cares about how engaging a host is or how well organized a show is, but for me these elements are essential to keeping my attention.

4. Some audio podcasts should be seen and not just heard. Some podcasting friends of mine defend the medium, saying it's a great way to get information while you're commuting. Admittedly I don't commute nor do I have a car, but I've found that if you download a podcast to a portable audio MP3 player you might not have what you need to enjoy it.

The other day I decided to subscribe to a popular podcast about Photoshop tips and take it along for a ride on public transportation. I was surprised that the tips -- quite specific to the Photoshop tool palette -- were presented only over audio. It just isn't that useful to get software tips on your portable player while you're not at your computer. And while I've called into question the value of doing video for the sake of doing it, there is subject matter that demands visuals.

5. I want quick access to the info I want. Perhaps RSS feeds and blogs have spoiled me for quick, easy-access content that lets me control my time, but I don't have many spare minutes for inefficient media these days. If I use RSS feed readers to be able to manage my time when consuming lots of different written media, why would I take the time with an experience that forces me to sit back and listen passively, with no indication of whether or not it will be useful or entertaining?

I've adopted efficient ways to find what I want when I'm online. With podcasts I can't control the speed of delivery nor can I be sure of the nature of the information I'm about to consume. While some podcasts have blogs that lay out the content beforehand (and there are even the generous souls who give us time-stamp information so we can skip through what we don't want to hear), that's adding another step to the process. Compared to written media, podcasts seem slow.

6. Managing podcasts on devices isn't streamlined. I am fine with listening to certain podcasts on my home computer, where I have space to spare on my hard drive, or through a feed reader. But I can't take the constant synching and deleting required to keep my MP3 player up to date. I still have some Ricky Gervais podcasts from 2006 on my player that I forgot to delete, eating up a bunch of disk space. It's hard to keep up with what's new and what's old. Or I'm just too busy to constantly sync my player to my machine. Even though it seems as if podcasts were made for iPods, it isn't convenient for me to put them on or get them off my iPod.

Call me a podcast skeptic, but I'm not alone. Last year, research firm Forrester put podcast adoption at just 1% for North America. While that doesn't necessarily mean podcasting doesn't have potential, it does lead me to believe that either there is something innately unattractive about the medium to the average person or there is just a lack of understanding of it.

I do believe there are great uses for podcasts, such as language learning or streaming university classes to those who don't have access to them, or catching up on news when you have time to spare (like on a really long flight). But they don't seem to fit easily into my daily routine, so I'm resigning myself to the fact that not every new medium is for every new media person. Everybody's got their own media diet, and mine continues to be heavy on written media and weak in podcasts.

What do you think? Do you like or dislike podcasts? Why or why don't you listen to them? Which podcasts have great content and which ones disappoint? How do you fit podcasts into your daily life?

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a San Francisco-based writer, blogger and marketer, who covers Latino marketing at Latin-Know and Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

Just as the Internet and technology have shifted the playing field in media, allowing bloggers and podcasters to help set the news agenda, so has the realm of politics been disrupted by technology that gives voters more power to inject their own issues into the fray. And in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, that disruption has been strongest in online video, with Phil de Vellis creating the home-made Vote Different anti-Clinton ad and CNN taking video questions from ordinary Americans for its YouTube debates.

But the folks at the group blog TechPresident thought they could improve on the CNN/YouTube debate formula by having people submit and vote on the questions they want to ask candidates the most. With the support of the New York Times editorial board and MSNBC, as well as various liberal and conservative bloggers, TechPresident launched the site, 10Questions, letting anyone post a video question to Democratic and Republican candidates. The top 10 questions were chosen by online voting, and now the candidates have until Dec. 31 to submit video answers, which will then be rated by the audience.

This type of grassroots, "small-d" democratic process for a presidential debate fits in perfectly with the mission of the folks at Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), who started TechPresident and 10Questions. PDF was co-founded by political advisor Andrew Rasiej and journalist/analyst Micah Sifry, and has been an influential conference covering the intersection of technology and politics. PDF's Manifesto includes the following passage:

Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a reporter, a community organizer, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader. If what they have to say is compelling, it will spread. The cost of finding like-minded souls, banding together, and speaking to the powerful has dropped to almost zero. Networked voices are reviving the civic conversation. More people, everyday, are discovering this new power. After years of being treated like passive subjects of marketing and manipulation, they want to be heard.

Increasingly, these everyday people are using blogs, social networking sites and online video to make the case for their candidates or issues. So how do you track the effect they're having? The cross-partisan TechPresident group blog includes commentary from political veterans of 2006 and 2004 campaigns -- who rate the way campaigns are using technology and the Net. Plus, the blog has handy charts showing which candidates are leading in MySpace friends, YouTube stats and blog mentions via Technorati.

But PDF's Micah Sifry told me that online popularity and social media usage might not necessarily translate into election victory.

"The two front-runners, Hillary [Clinton] and Rudy [Giuliani], prove that the Internet doesn't trump fame," Sifry said. "If you are already well known, you might not need the Internet. Both of them are showing that. People often say that Barack [Obama] has more friends on Facebook or MySpace than Hillary, so why isn't he leading her in the polls? The answer is that she's been around longer, she's got a really well organized campaign, people know her. There are a number of strong reasons, so you don't expect the Internet to trump them. But for a number of candidates -- [John] Edwards, Obama, [Mike] Huckabee, Ron Paul -- the Internet is buoying them, and they wouldn't be nearly as much a part of the race as they are now."

In a wide-ranging interview, Sifry told me there was interest from other countries in using the 10Questions platform for their own election campaigns, and that they would do another round of 10Questions in the U.S. general election next year. Sifry explained how they chose bloggers for TechPresident, and described how video and mobile usage were becoming big factors this election cycle.

What was your motivation for starting TechPresident, and what were your goals and vision for it?

Sifry: We started with a larger vision four years ago with the launch of Personal Democracy Forum, which is an annual conference on how technology is changing politics. That came out of Andrew Rasiej's strong belief that the same sea change that is hitting other aspects of society -- commerce, media, etc. -- was going to hit politics. He spent a lot of time banging his head and trying to give advice to political incumbents about this, and they wouldn't listen. So his feeling was, 'I'll go around them.' And we launched PersonalDemocracy.com as a place to continue that conversation online.

What crystalized for us this past winter was an email that Andrew got in December from a college student who was actively supporting Barack Obama. The student said, 'I wanted to let you know we're launching a website, we've got 20,000 people, it all came out of a Facebook group we started, and we're taking it into a more active mode.' A light bulb went off for us: In this election, the Internet isn't going to just be an adjunct to the action; it's going to be the center battlefield. The new factor of voter-generated content would be an even more significant wild card.

This isn't new. You can go back to Zack Exley's GWBush.com [spoof on Bush] in 2000. There have always been a smattering of people with the skills and a bit of luck, who have created activist projects that interfere with the thread of the election. The JibJab cartoon is another example from 2004. Our sense was that this would be a much bigger factor and you'd see it in voter-generated message-making, in voter-organized field work, voter-generated fundraising. These were all new elements in the game. So we wanted to track this very closely and get it from both sides -- both on what campaigns are doing with the web and technology, and what the voters are doing to affect the dialogue.

The most critical thing we wanted when we launched the site was to make sure the site was cross-partisan. We wanted to have experienced veterans of the last two political cycles involved who could comment in an intelligent and informed way about what the campaigns were up to. Mike Turk had already been reviewing sites for PersonalDemocracy.com, and he had been working for Bush-Cheney in 2004. To be able to launch with a diverse array of voices...we had one critical proviso: that they leave the partisan sniping for elsewhere. Their job is to analyze how campaigns are using the web or the web is using them. It's not for them to say, 'nah-nah, my candidate is winning.'

As long as they are open about any connections to any particular campaigns -- open support or quiet advice-giving or consulting work -- I think we've succeeded in having an open dialogue. It's interesting to see partisans talk back and forth about the state of the art.

So if they write about a candidate they are working for, do they disclose that on the site?

Sifry: I will ask people to mention any conflicts in their posts. But I don't ask people to always mention their partisan allegiances. It's pretty plain. David All is a Republican consultant. You can tell that immediately from his writing. I have had to say to people, 'Watch it.' Republican writers forget that when they refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, it's offensive. And it's deliberate. They've been trained to talk that way, but not on our site. If the Wall Street Journal can refer to it as the Democratic Party, so can they. I think the readers will tell us if something we do is crossing the line or is unfair. That's one of the great things about blogging.

How do you fund the blog?

Sifry: Andrew is the sole proprietor of our two blogs, and he has financed the Personal Democracy Forum since Day 1. They do not make money. The conference does make money, it broke even two years ago and last year it made some money. He hasn't made back the money he put in for four years. There's the potential for that, as it serves a niche and a community. Eventually he will be able to plow more money back into the blogs. We have a small staff, including a couple editors and business manager. This is not a big new media play, but like everything, you find a niche and serve it well and your community will support you.

We had 800 people at last year's event and are planning to double the size of the conference by next spring. I don't think we'll have trouble filling it as we've hit that sweet spot. We're not getting that much money from advertising. At the same time, Andrew and I started a small consulting practice that helps advocacy groups and media organizations to use the web effectively. But those are separate entities, and we disclose when they overlap.

Campaigns aren't the best incubators for web innovation. They are under tremendous pressure, and it's difficult to act in focused ways. There's a brief period where they are willing to try new things, but that's over now. The only campaigns willing to do more innovative things are the outsiders, the mavericks, the second-tier candidates who have less to lose but even those are under tremendous pressure.

How do you choose who blogs on the site?

Sifry: We started with a cross-partisan array of campaign veterans who had worked on the web side of several major campaigns in 2004 and 2006. We added to that mix people who had a particular specialty, such as Steve Garfield, who has been doing a regular video blog as long as anyone.

And then in some cases they find us. Like Adam Connor, who writes about Facebook and approached us about writing. We look at people on a case-by-case basis. In effect some of our contributors are in a freelance mode and have to pitch us what the piece would be about, and see if we're interested, and their pieces go through more of an editing process. The bloggers who are listed as contributing editors have a green light to post at will and I just keep an eye to make sure they don't abuse it. The theory is when you have 20 contributing editors, if they write two to three posts per month, the result is a healthy daily mix.

And [the top editors] try to add to that. Right now, I'm working on a long post rating the various candidates' tech policies. One of the fun things about blogging in general is when you pick a subject and start covering it well, the people who are interested in that subject come to you. So then we can ask them if they want to cross-post to TechPresident.

The one other thing in terms of picking our writers and the kind of thematic conversation we're looking for: We are looking for people who view technology as a way to open things up, make the democratic process more participatory, more transparent, more interactive. That said, there's still a big question mark hovering over all this: What will translate into political success? It's not just which campaign is getting the most visitors to its website. It's also about getting votes, raising money, getting boots on the ground.

The truth is that the insiders, the political technologists, are looking at all of this. If Ron Paul has figured out a new way to raise money, then everybody wants to know that.

Why did you decide to launch 10Questions?

Sifry: 10Questions grew out of two things. First, we watched as YouTube and CNN did their Democratic debate where they had people post questions online. And people asked us what we thought of it, and we said it's not nearly as innovative as it appeared. It made for great television but it didn't exactly expand the boundaries of what was possible because CNN got all these people to post questions but then they picked the questions. In some ways the debate was less interactive than a town hall meeting.

Part of it was that it wasn't enough to just take potshots from the sidelines, and we thought we could get into the mix with our own idea. Luckily we weren't alone, and we found another effort led by a guy named David Colarusso, who had begun a site called Community Counts, where they were attempting to pool the community's responses through YouTube's YouChoose Channel, and involve the community in choosing the best questions. And Edwards and [Chris] Dodd both went on Community Counts to answer those questions.

This gained steam when we went to the Yearly Kos convention. We asked people, including the top bloggers, if they thought this was a good idea, and everyone was interested in it. It answers the question, 'What happens if we live in a world of abundance instead of scarcity?' On TV, the candidates get time for soundbites and the audience can't offer any feedback. Andrew said again that he would pay the bills, and with David, we merged our efforts and created a new platform. The great thing is that we've been able to get so many great co-sponsors, from the New York Times editorial board to MSNBC, and great blogs that are conservative and liberal -- some strange bedfellows.

The voter-generated question round is over, and 200 questions were submitted on a variety of platforms. That's pretty good without having a TV network asking people to submit questions. CNN got about 3,000 questions for their first debate. We got more than 30,000 people sifting through those questions and they made more than 120,000 votes...The community of users sifted through the questions and made a serious list, and there are questions on there that don't normally get asked: Is the two-party system broken? Would you abolish corporate personhood? I don't think any mainstream reporter has asked those questions before at a presidential debate.

Which candidates have agreed to answer the questions so far?

Sifry: Mike Huckabee was at MSNBC, and the news guys there had the foresight to have all the videos cued up, and asked him if he was willing to answer them on the spot. And to his credit, he said, 'Yeah.' He could have easily said, 'Wait, I haven't had time to study these.' He just sat and taped his answers off the cuff. If you sit and watch him answer -- I just spent about an hour working through his answers, and I learned a lot about Mike Huckabee. I am more intrigued by him now than I was before. That's the potential for this, if you have a candidate who takes the time, he can stop and do it over, this isn't television.

Both Edwards and Ron Paul have agreed to answer the questions. Obama answered one of the questions because it was posed directly to him during the MTV/MySpace dialogue he did a couple weeks ago. He answered the question about Net neutrality. We are on the phone pressing all the campaigns to answer the questions. The ball is in their court. They have until December 31 to answer the questions. We will get them up on the site as fast as we can. The fun part is that you don't just get to watch, but you get to vote if they answered the question. If we managed to do anything with 10Questions, it is that [we showed that] the Internet can be a powerful tool for aggregating feedback. And not just the dial group numbers on a little focus group, but everybody.

Out of the candidates, you have tracked many ways that they are using technology, who do you think at this point is doing the best job?

Sifry: I think the book is still out on both the best use of the web and most effective use of the web. The two front-runners, Hillary and Rudy, prove that the Internet doesn't trump fame. If you are already well known, you might not need the Internet. Both of them are showing that. People often say that Barack has more friends on Facebook or MySpace than Hillary, so why isn't he leading her in the polls? The answer is that she's been around longer, she's got a really well organized campaign, people know her. There are a number of strong reasons, so you don't expect the Internet to trump them.

But for a number of candidates -- Edwards, Obama, Huckabee, Ron Paul -- the Internet is buoying them, and they wouldn't be nearly as much a part of the race as they are now. Obama and Edwards have made the most robust use of online social networking. Edwards started out as the innovator, doing everything -- videoblogging, podcasting. But his site was almost too much, everything but the kitchen sink. A lot of people watching Obama think his campaign has bottled up more of the energy of supporters and could have a tidal wave if they let it go a bit more.

If you look at the Democratic campaigns overall, while they have clearly benefited by more interest from the electorate, more social networking activity, they haven't done as good of a job letting the energy out in the opposite direction. It's not as freewheeling as it was back in 2003. But you look at Huckabee and he has been successful by letting anyone share in the attention and not forcing people to go into his walled garden, his own social network that the managers decide what will be done with it. Huckabee's the only one who has a visible blogroll on his home page.

Ron Paul is a classic example of the Internet propelling a compelling message upward. But you need a compelling message and messager. He's benefiting from the same thing Dean benefited from in 2003 -- he's the only candidate in his party that is stridently against the war.

As we go into the general election, it looks like a good year to be a Democrat. Everything, from when I first started tracking the numbers back in January, the overall trend is about 2-to-1 for Democrats over Republicans. It's a sign that the electorate is tilted that way.

How do you see this 2008 election being different than what was going on in 2004 or 2006 with technology?

Sifry: The biggest difference is the overwhelming reliance on online video, both by activists and campaigns. It is the lingua franca that they rely on now. A debate ends, and within hours, campaigns are scrambling to put their spin on the debate by finding the best clips from the debate and putting them up on YouTube. You see a lot of people trying to be the next Phil de Vellis, or the next Obama Girl. There is a range of ambitious would-be TV personalities who see the online video realm as the place to audition.

It's frustrating to me. We do a weekly roundup of what we think of as the most interesting political videos of the week. But because the online video web is built on a different infrastructure than blogging, it's difficult to produce a consistent way to track it. On blogging, I could tell you which candidate is being discussed, but I can't tell you which candidate is being most video'ed about. I can tell you how big an audience each candidate has for their own videos on YouTube thanks to the tracking you can do there. But spotting the unusual voter-generated video is more of an art than a science because we can't track it. We can't find every video about Rudy Giuliani.

The second thing is what people do with mobile phones. We will see it as more of a mobilization tool. Someone should be watching to see how [Edwards consultant] Joe Trippi uses text messaging during the Iowa caucuses. This is a wonderful device for quickly communicating to large numbers of people, and you could see a role for that at the conventions. And text messaging during an election can increase turnout. So campaigns that build the best cell phone list could be at an advantage in some places.

If Facebook changes its policy on mass membership groups, then we might see some really interesting independent group activity happening. It's too late for the primaries. There's this tussle going on to get Facebook to lift its 1,000 email limit, so you can get 1 million people to join your group but you can't email them. The organizers can't really get access to the members. You would have to create mini-lists within the lists. It's really clunky and not as good as a Yahoo Group or Google Group for messaging lots of people. But Facebook is a great platform for spreading information virally. But so far these are just virtual bumper sticker operations. But that could change, as they say they will lift the cap.

The BOBs awards blogs and podcasts, but will not accept material that "contain or link to any form of insulting, racist, sexist or in any other way discriminatory or obscene content." You can submit your nomination here. Plus, the 2007 Weblog Awards will start taking nominations in October, covering more American entries but with some international categories. We also want you to make your case in public: Tell us about the blogs you write or read that deserve a nomination, explain why and include the URL in the comments below. I'll run a selection of the more interesting nominees in a future installment of Your Take Roundup.

But thanks to the power of voluntary collaboration, technology tools and the reach of the Internet, college-level classes and learning resources are becoming more and more accessible to anyone who has the interest and an Internet connection. But can you really get an education for free online? Yes and no. I set out to try to see what I could learn from two high-profile initiatives, Wikiversity and iTunes U.

When we hear the words "online university," many of us tend to cringe, thinking of the ads that appear incessantly online for diploma mills promising anyone a Bachelor's degree in no time with little to no effort. But the term is also becoming used to describe the phenomenon of the open university, which allows anyone with an Internet connection to access courses, media and resources on the topic of their choice, sometimes without a fee.

One of the most successful examples of this model is the UK's Open University (OU). Recognized within the EU as an accredited university with full time faculty and staff, some of OU's courses are free. With 180,000 studying full or part time around the world, the Open University and others of its kind have given broader access to education. What's remarkable about this concept is that the student is granted a degree at the end of his or her course of study, something that newer, less traditional online learning initiatives can't deliver. [Check COMMENTS below for a clarification on OU's pay vs. free courses.]

Wikiversity: Collaborative Teaching and Learning

Last year, the Wikipedia Foundation announced the beta launch of its Wikiversity, a "multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service." Wikiversity isn't an online university per se, but rather a repository of information on subjects one might study at a university. The site is organized into "faculties" and "departments," letting you access materials for learning about a wide range of topics -- from South African Contract Law to Hitler's Germany. Since Wikiversity, like Wikipedia, depends solely on voluntary submissions, it's often impossible to complete a whole course on something. Information comes in bits and pieces, and in the cases of some faculties, there are huge holes where information should be.

Since I've always been so bad at Algebra, and the Wikiversity College Algebra course seemed fairly complete, I chose this subject as a starting point. To get started, I only had to select a "learning project" (in my case, College Algebra) and click on it, and this took me to the main page of the course. I then read through the overview, and got acquainted with what will be covered in the class, as well as the materials I would need. The "books" I needed were located on the Wikibooks site and the University of Kentucky website.

Excited at the prospect of getting started on my 10-15 week Algebra course, I quickly realized that while the course is laid out just fine, many of the elements I'll need for study are missing. I have my books, I have my instructors, teaching assistants and tutors, but only one of the lessons in the course syllabus is actually available online. It looks as if the course was created last year with great zeal, then abandoned before it was ever completed. So instead of learning College Algebra from beginning to end, I'm left only with a short lesson on FOIL and algebraic manipulation, my books and my tests, the latter of which will be hard to complete since I haven't learned much. Oh well.

While the idea of Wikiversity is great, it's not quite there yet. In attempting to supplement what was lacking for my Algebra course, I actually found more on Wikipedia than at the Wikiversity. While other areas of the site might be richer in content, I wasn't able to access what I wanted to learn. It's kind of like registering for classes and realizing the one you want is full. I got stuck in Geometry, but I really wanted Algebra.

iTunes U: Top-Tier Learning at a Distance

In 2006, Apple quietly launched iTunes U, an initiative to help universities get their content -- mainly the audio from lectures -- online and available to students through their popular iTunes application. While the original idea was for current students to be able to "attend" classes from home through podcasts, anyone can take a class at say, Stanford or Harvard -- at least the classes that are available online.

It's no secret that an Ivy League education is out of reach for many, but with iTunes U, ivory towers fall and anyone anywhere can listen in on classes at these institutions. I, however, opted for a humbler state school experience: UC Berkeley, which offers a course in new media, "The Foundations of American Cyberculture", taught by Professor Greg Niemeyer. Instead of combing through text as on Wikiversity to get a sense for what the class would be like, I simply hit "play" to hear the professor kick off the first class and get acquainted with us, the students.

Professor Niemeyer is an engaging speaker, which is great since his class is offered only in audio on iTunes U; with a lesser orator, I would probably have fallen asleep. The first class is the humdrum introduction and overview, but subsequent classes are fascinating. We explore how cyberculture and new media have created a post-biological period in history in which we are more concerned with cultural evolution than genetic evolution. I learn that many experts link technology and men's quest for creation in it to womb envy because of their inability to create physical beings. Suddenly I remember what it was like to be in college and enthralled with ideas that if spoken outside classroom walls warrant strange looks.

But none of that really has to do with iTunes U. The content provided by the professor is engaging, but the platform upon which it lives is just that -- a platform. If I had taken another class, my experience might not have been so enlightening. And even in Niemeyer's class, I began losing interest when later classes include the professor showing videos that I can't see. The class at Berkeley is watching cyborgs and crazed computers, and I'm left in the dark. So I drop out of class.

Innovation or Hype?

Before iTunes U was even a thought, universities were offering their content to the world online. The homepages of professors with study notes and homework assignments for their students came way before the iPod. And it's this very fact that has drawn criticism from some in the academic community, who wonder if Apple is really just forcing iTunes adoption on faculty and students. Last year, Jon Udell of Infoworld quoted a university instructor who attended an Apple on-campus presentation as saying "it was made explicitly clear (in that I asked about it and he told me point blank) that iTunes U is seen specifically as a driver to iTunes adoption. That's their bottom line on the issue."

And while the Wikiversity idea is, in theory, revolutionary, it seems extremely hard to pull off without an engaged university faculty community online. While Wikipedia's users are prolific in their contributions, it might take a bit more to rile the great minds into action on Wikiversity. The established MIT OpenCourseWare online archive of classes offers deep content and real courses on nearly anything under the sun, so perhaps sharing content with projects such as this could help broaden the offerings for Wikiversity.

Beyond the Open University model, are we any closer to providing free access to a college education with these initiatives? It depends on whether you define "college education" as self-edifying studies or an actual degree. While initiatives like iTunes U serve to turn on technophiles to information and resources that they wouldn't normally access and provide on-campus students classes they might have missed, it won't put me any closer to a degree in new media, or even a certification for that matter. And while listening to lectures on iTunes sounds more sexy than taking classes on UC Berkeley Extension's Distance Learning site, only one will give me academic credit and it's the one I have to pay for.

In the end, I think the tools are great, and education is what you make of it. An unlikely comment on the subject of online learning comes from Cuban President Fidel Castro, who in his regular column this week talked about the topic of brain drain -- young, bright professionals leaving poorer countries for greener pastures in the U.S. and Europe. His message was: "Whoever has a computer has all published knowledge at their disposal and the privileged memory of the machine belongs to them too." Too bad very few people in Cuba actually have access to the Internet.

What do you think? Are Wikiversity and iTunes U a step in the right direction toward opening up education to more people? Are there any other online learning projects you use or would recommend? What can be done to make learning more accessible? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a San Francisco-based writer, blogger and marketer, who covers Latino marketing at Latin-Know and Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

NPR is using blogs for the early development of new shows, as well as boosting interactivity and reader input for mature shows such as "Talk of the Nation." Chicago Public Radio is launching a new local station/website Vocalo to serve various ethnic communities by asking locals to record and submit audio segments. And Search Engine is a show being tested by CBC in Canada that would involve listeners in the show's development, while also opening up full interviews for public remixing.

All those efforts follow in the footsteps of the pioneering Radio Open Source show, hosted by Christopher Lydon, but truly created by the community effort on its bustling blog. The hour-long show runs on air and online four times per week, and one to two of those shows each week comes from an idea from the online community. The blog has a regular thread of pitches from audience members, and when an idea graduates into its own blog post, the audience/participants can give input on guests and angles for discussion on the air.

"Open Source is smart talk radio on speed," Lydon told me. "It's global, it's egalitarian, it's 24/7. What we've discovered after two years is that it works. We can train participants and they can train us...It's humble, slow work, but the whole idea of listener-created content, where listeners become writers, is a good idea and it works like a charm."

In fact, one of the listener/contributors, Garrett Zevgetis, became such a prolific help online that he's been hired as a summer production intern at Open Source. For the past two years, Open Source has been syndicated on 30-plus stations out of Boston by Public Radio International, but the syndicator will be dropping the show after it lost a key funder at the beginning of 2007.

The University of Massachusetts-Lowell dropped its support due to budgetary constraints, but Open Source gained a much needed grant from the MacArthur Foundation earlier in March. Recently, the show put out a call for donations on its blog and raised more than $150,000 in a week to stay afloat for the summer. Lydon doesn't believe he can support the show completely from direct donations, but he also isn't worried about being the pioneer who did the dirty work but died trying.

"There are no promising simple business plans out there yet for earnest young entries in the blog world," Lydon said. "It's going to need some help...But I don't worry about [running out of money]. We'll see what happens, you know? We're having a lot of fun, we make interesting discoveries month by month, and I think there are endless possibilities."

[See UPDATE below for more on Open Source's broadcasting challenges.]

Greta Pemberton, the Blogger in Chief for Open Source, told me the show averaged about 150,000 listeners on-air per week and 150,000 downloads of its podcast per month. She told me one of the keys to success with audience participation is giving people guidance on how to pitch show ideas.

"What we've learned [with pitch ideas] is that you can't just do a thumbs-up or thumbs-down," she said. "You have to teach people how to pitch to you, and explain that a nationally syndicated public radio show needs a news peg. We need good talkers or a show that's broad enough but not too broad. At the beginning we didn't give people guidance on pitches and it was really a chore to go through them. Since we've been responding with more feedback, we've been getting a better response."

Of course public radio staffs are constantly strapped for time, so I wondered if all this feedback and input from the former audience meant that producers and web folks had even more work to do.

"It absolutely adds work and it's absolutely rewarding," Pemberton said. "We talk about this at big public radio conferences and some people are jumping on the bandwagon, which is fantastic. But we tell people it does add a tremendous amount of work. Every producer has to take an hour out of their day to read comments from the site, and decide whether we need to respond to them or not. It becomes a big part of the job and it tends to be neglected when you have to crank out an hour-long radio show each night. But it also means that the listeners are much more invested in the process, which means they're more invested in the show."

NPR Develops Shows in Public

The granddaddy of public radio, NPR, is trying a double-pronged approach to online collaboration, testing out pre-launch radio shows as blogs through the Rough Cuts section online, and creating adjunct blogs for current shows. One new show, Tell Me More has already "graduated" from Rough Cuts after it launched as a radio show in April, and another show, simply dubbed the Bryant Park Project has designs on going "on the web, through podcasts, in video and even on the radio," according to the description on the blog. Its blog includes audio segments, text commentaries and some rough video shots to gauge audience interest and help shape the show in advance of production.

Maria Thomas, vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media, told me that the new production style meant that NPR shows would be cross-platform from the start.

"In the old radio days, the way [a show's development] would have worked would have been in a vacuum," she told me. "A group of people would have tried pilots, and kept trying things and so on, and then an expert would say it was ready...We want people to think of [Rough Cuts] as being the place to weigh in and share their ideas. It's a new way of doing a programming effort. Rather than starting as a radio show and then building a web presence, we are doing an online thing that's viral that leads eventually to a radio show."

While the Bryant Park Project already has a podcast (even though it doesn't yet have a fully realized show name), the blog seems a little lonely for participation, with only scant comments. That's less of a problem at Blog of the Nation, an adjunct to the popular two-hour call-in show, "Talk of the Nation." On the blog, host Neal Conan and three producers elicit even more reader input. Mainstream media broadcasts, such as NBC's Daily Nightly with Brian Williams, are starting to make blogs an important component for behind-the-scenes details and more audience interaction.

At NPR, Conan told me he was reluctant to blog, with all the work he already has on his plate for the show, but said "it's something we need to do, and I want to do -- I wish I could do more of it -- but my primary focus is still on the radio show." Conan hopes that eventually blog comments and perhaps incoming text messages might help reduce "caller lag," where a person's comment becomes stale by the time they get on the air past the screeners. But having someone coordinate and answer a live stream of blog comments while the show is on the air might make for an even more crazy production than it already is, Conan figured.

And how far can you take user participation and feedback, and where does that leave the professional producers and hosts? Conan still sees an important function for the pros at NPR.

"People come to us because they trust us and we have to earn that trust," he said. "If there's a guest that's suggested, we still have to check them out. We have to add our editorial context into the conversation. But listeners want to have more input, and that's fine. But this is still NPR News and we have to put our imprimatur on it."

Conan and Thomas both say the technology at NPR still hasn't caught up to the ideas there for collaborative radio via the web. For instance, "Talk of the Nation" still can't take comments via text messages. One place they might look for inspiration is the BBC, where the folks who produce the call-in show World Have Your Say allow listeners to text message comments and even call in to participate in editorial meetings each day. There's even a Contributors' Charter that explains how the former audience can help set the agenda for the show, give input to morning editorial meetings, and ask to be featured on the show.

"Some of you simply email or post a comment [about the show's topic]," wrote producer Ros Atkins in the Charter. "Others who want to come on air leave your phone numbers or VoIP ID. If you've asked to come on air, we will try and get in touch with you."

Taking Open Source Further

So where does the concept of collaborative radio go now, past the pioneering and experimental stages? Chicago Public Radio decided to try a new avenue to reach ethnic and underserved communities that didn't relate to the "NPR sound" of WBEZ. They decided to create a new station, called Vocalo, that would sound like the communities by reaching out to those same communities and helping them record their own shows and segments.

Vocalo soft-launched its website first, asking for people to join and submit audio stories, and is now running a few hours of orginal programming per day over the air with a 7,000 watt transmitter. Later in the fall, the station has FCC approval to go to 50,000 watts and cover most of the Chicago metro area.

Wendy Turner, general manager of Vocalo, explained to me that they hired radio hosts who came from different communities and will play segments no longer than 7 minutes long, quick-cutting through various topics.

"We hired a staff of seven host/producers, and only one of them comes from public broadcasting," she said. "The rest come from other places in the community and bring to the table ethnic and economic diversity. We have an African-American comedian, and an Arab-American filmmaker...they all bring their own piece of culture to the table. What they have in common is a passion for exploration of the community. Eventually there will be 19 of them, and they will go out and explore all kinds of community organizations, arts groups, youth organizations. These organizations are hungry and eager to point us to people in their communities, whose stories we could tell."

Vocalo plans to actually set up recording studios in different areas of Chicago and train community members to tell their stories. Turner says she is taking Lydon's Open Source idea outside of the web and into the real world as well.

"I think Open Source has a similar idea, which is to create a life and community around topics and expand it beyond the broadcast," Turner said. "I think it's a great program and experiment. What we're doing is trying to make that a 24/7 service to our community and make it for our population who lives here. And we're not waiting for people to come to our website, but going out and seeding that participation."

Also taking Open Source further is a project being tested by CBC, called "Search Engine," a 30-minute show that looks at cultural and political events through the lens of the Internet. The producers set up a rudimentary website and blog for the test, posting entire interview audio from the first test show, and asking people to comment on ideas and even send in musical ideas for breaks.

Jesse Brown, the show's host and co-producer, told me they are considering putting all source material for the show into Creative Commons licensing so that the audience could reuse and remix the shows for themselves.

"What about issuing journalistic assignments -- asking listeners to gather responses from their communities on a given topic?" he said. "Ideally, it could be like having a freelancer in every city and town, or an inside source in every workplace and institution. There are some very exciting possibilities here, and we want to explore them all with Search Engine. Of course, part of the open model would involve the community itself generating new ways for it to be utilized."

One of the challenges of doing any of these collaborative shows is that of funding. While Open Source struggles to get steady institutional backing, Vocalo also is in search of corporate sponsors, and Search Engine still hasn't been approved as a regular series by the CBC. The question remains whether funders, foundations and corporations will value a collaborative radio show and online elements as much as they do traditional radio audiences that they've always reached. Backers will have to take into account not only audience numbers for on-air listeners but also web traffic, podcast downloads and increased loyalty for an audience that is more engaged in the creative process.

Hopefully, public radio will understand it has a chance to re-energize itself, and serve more of the public via collaboration and Internet reach. Torey Malatia, president and general manager of Chicago Public Radio, explained in a commentary in Current just how much of a catalyst the Net could be for public media:

If public broadcasting loses its vitality, the reason won't be that new technologies have swept away the radio tower and the need for wide-reaching wireless media. The cause will be our own rigidity in neglecting to join broadcasting with new media that can enliven and enhance the content we produce. We have effectively disconnected from those we are mandated to serve. Until we wrestle our content out of the vise of tradition, we will be incapable of helping our communities ignite the ideas that support their evolution. Radio and the Internet each offer a unique kind of access to information, and both are necessary for listeners to join the civic conversation and be heard.

What do you think? Do you like the idea of more collaborative radio shows and stations, or do you think they are not economically feasible? Do you think this is a trend that will spread to more mainstream public radio shows? Do you know of other collaborative radio programs or stations? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo of Neal Conan by Antony Nagelmann. Photo of Christopher Lydon by Steve Garfield.

UPDATE: More bad news for Open Source, as hometown station WGBH in Boston won't be airing the show anymore. Here's what producer Mary McGrath said on the Open Source blog:

We learned on Friday that WGBH in Boston has decided not to continue airing Open Source as of July. We are disappointed, of course, and surprised as well. To us the station expressed concern about our long-term funding and said that our program had not developed the Boston audience they had hoped for. We enjoyed the association with the revered brand of WGBH. At the same time we felt the difficulty of breaking through with a one-hour program, in the evening, on what prides itself as a music station. Alas, we never stopped running into people who didn't know we were on the air in Boston at all. We're grateful for our superb production colleagues at WGBH. We're confident about finding the right way to keep distributing Open Source to stations and podcast listeners far and wide.

We'll see how they pull that off, and perhaps the Internet and podcasting can support a full-blown public radio show in some way.