Friday at the Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Calif., I did a six-minute video interview with Leo Laporte, the personable and knowledgable former host of TechTV’s "The Screen Savers" who is now doing four podcasts, including This Week In Tech. See Leoville for details.

Leo talks about the looming irrelevance of commercial radio as people look for authenticity, meaning and community through podcasts. "Everybody should do a podcast," he says. 

Here are two versions in MPEG-4: a 16MB file and higher-quality 32MB version. (Or go straight to the video.)

Technorati tags: portable media,  Portable Media Expo, podcasting,  Leo Laporte, 

Got back last night after speaking Friday at the Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Calif. (See the schedule for day 1 and day 2.) I was on a Citizens Media panel with John Furrier of Podtech and Eric Rice of Audioblog, and I gave a 15-minute presentation about the collision between big media and citizens media, and the opportunities people have to change the mediasphere by creating their own works and sharing them on sites like Ourmedia. I suppose it went well, because eight or 10 people came up to me after the session to share their contact information; many of them expressed in interest in volunteering to help with the Citizens Media Learning Center I briefly outlined.

My friend   Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs Inc., gave one of the keynote addresses yesterday at the conference. I don’t like videotaping speeches, because the quality is usually less than desirable. So after his half-hour talk, I caught with him outside the Ontario Convention Center and he gave this 12-minute summary of the highlights of his talk. Jason’s a somewhat controversial figure, but I think he’s got a super-smart business sense.

Jason discusses six possible podcasting models: podcasting directories, podcast search, podcast ad networks, podcast and creating a great podcast. (Note: I write for Engadget, one of the sites Jason just sold to AOL for more than $25 million, according to published reports.)

It’s a 32MB video in MPEG-4 (see Ourmedia page | watch the video)

Technorati tags: portable media,  Portable Media Expo, podcasting,  Jason Calacanis, 

We just issued a press announcement about Ourmedia hitting the 50,000-member mark.

Member No. 50,000 is Pastor John Rewald of the Oasis New Life Centre in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, who published an mp3 of his most recent church sermon.

We also filed for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status with the IRS this week. And we named two new members to our Advisory Board. As someone once said, We’re rockin’ the house!

Now, we need some corporate sponsorships and foundation support to make this thing really fly.

Heading to the Portable Media Expo — largely a celebration of podcasting — in Ontario, outside LA, on Thursday. I’m speaking Friday on a panel about citizens media with John Furrier of Podtech and Mike Dunn of Hearst Interactive. Should see a lot of familiar faces: Doug Kaye, Jason Calacanis, Gerd Leonhard, Derrick Oien, Phil Torrone, Karen Howe, Noah Glass and a host of others. If you’re in attendance, look me up!

I’ll be leading a session next Tuesday at the Symposium on Social Architecture at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center. Which was a good motivation to finally publish the video I conducted when I last visited earlier this summer.

Molly Krause, leader of the H2O project, explained the benefits of playlists in academic and other learning settings. I hope to make much more extensive use of these lists in the future. Anyone interested in collective intelligence, structured data and academic curricula should check this out. The 11-minute video is 31MB in MPEG-4. (See Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: berkman, playlists

Just got back from tonight’s Creative Commons party, at which Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was brought aboard as a member of the nonprofit’s board. It was my first time meeting Jimmy in person, and I was thrilled to give him a copy of “Darknet” and to discuss possible collaboration down the road between the Wikimedia Foundation and Ourmedia.

Lots of other familiar faces in the crowd, such as David Hornick of August Capital, Mary Hodder, John Seeley Brown, Ronna Tannenbaum, Dave McClure, Dave Toole, Mia Garlick, Jeff Ubois, Mitch Kapor, Rick Prelinger and many others.

I was also excited to meet Jennifer Feikin, director of Google Video. We discussed the burgeoning pool of high-quality citizens media video, and how there’s plenty of opportunity for numerous sites to become part of the ecosystem supporting the personal media revolution.

Glenn Otis Brown (the former CC exec director who’s now with Google and whom I wrote about in “Darknet”) announced that Google was contributing $30,000 to Creative Commons’ fundraising campaign, and that beginning later tonight, an Advanced Search on Google would allow you to search out Creative Commons-licensed content. Fantastic! (Yahoo! already lets you do this.)

CC founder and chairman Lawrence Lessig (pictured above) did one of his hallmark Keynote presentations and announced two important evolutionary steps for the organization: an embrace of cc.com for the commercial side of creativity, and progress made toward interoperability between “federated free licenses,” principally the varying CC licenses and the GPL (GNU Public License) scheme found on Wikipedia and elsewhere. That will be a welcome relief to sites like Ourmedia, which are trying to support both.