Steve calls in from the Integrated Media Association's New Media Summit with his special guest, Stephen Hill. The talk is all about the convergence of radio (most notably public radio) and "new media" if that term even makes sense any longer. That convergence is due to digital technologies and the fact that it's now possible for nearly anyone to create broadcast-quality audio with a very small investment in equipment. Stephen reminds us that even FM radio isn't very old, having become popular in the mid 1960s, when broadcasters even supplied the receiver. (Hey...sounds like satellite today!)

Public radio in the U.S. has more than 20 million subscribers, but the public-radio insfrastructure has become a bottleneck in its own right. (Is NPR the "Clear Channel of public radio?")

Is podcasting the next step for independently produced audio? It was an important topic at the New Media Summit. The consensus is that podcasting is still in Geeksville mode, but it's real close. What business model will prevail? Stephen thinks it's bundle-and-charge aggregation, and sees at least one segment of public radio going to a $240/year model.

But if there's an explosion of content, how will we sort our way through it? Will it be something like Attention.xml, or will we rely on more traditional systems like individual or group editors? An important development may be the Personal Service Publisher proposal (PDF) presented at the conference.

Adam suggests that the same divide-and-conquer architectures used to make web servers more scalable could be used in search. He envisions data routers that will know which back-end servers have which knowledge and will query servers asynchronously according to the liklihood of getting the best results.

The discussion then turns to the topic of attention and the technology and politics of knowing who's reading what on the Internet. XML-based RSS and Atom have created both the challenge and the opportunity.

TiVo will take a hit as PVRs are built-into TVs. Doc reports that the FCC is well aware of what might happen and what restructuring of telcos and cable may be required when the demand side (people) become suppliers of programming. And there's a hint that cars could become open systems -- backplanes for multimedia and other devices.

Podcasting at CES? Not this year. Few seem to have even heard of it yet. (Are iPods and iTunes Apple's Roach Motel?) The Gang looks to the future and how distribution and syndication will change. Will BigMedia companies adapt? And how will the entertainment industry change when the demand side competes with the supply side for shelf space?

Lotus Notes was arguably the first groupware product, and Ray explains why the company had such a difficult time explaining what it was. That tide turned when Notes was adopted by VARs who created the vertical applications that have made the product so successful. To this day Notes is respected for its rapid-application development (RAD) architecture and its ability to just deploy the prototype.

The discussion goes well beyond Lotus Notes, as Ray and Peter give their big-picture perspectives on collaboration, client/server architectures, and the bifurcation of technology adoption: the difference between deployment within and outside the enterprise.

This week The Gang starts off wondering about Chris Stone's departure from Novell, which he was steering back towards the Linux market. And what about Sun? Are they serious about Linux on the desktop, or is that just a poker chip, a placemark for their real move into software-as-service?

Speaking of software-as-service, The Gang dives head-first into Google. Jon says Gmail is "seductively powerful," but is Google on the path to becoming The Borg? Will we have to turn to turn to (gasp) Microsoft to save us? Or will Google continue to be our best buddy?

The show concludes with a discussion of podcasting: its potential business models and its ultimate effect on Big Media.

Michael Vizard, editor-in-chief of CRN Magazine, joins The Gang this week.

Does Microsoft continue to have a blindspot for search? There were rumors of a pending Google browser. Is this even better for the company and for us? What's the commercial value for Google, and will Yahoo! follow suit? Finally, is GDS just a platform for additional services?

All of this plus the podcasting phenomenon on another chock-full edition of The Gillmor Gang. This week's special guests are Scott MacGregor (Mozilla Thunderbird architect) and Brendan Eich (chief architect) of the Mozilla Foundation.

Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, and Mary Jo Foley, author of Ziff Davis' Microsoft-Watch.com, join The Gang. Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, is our special guest this week.

Where will blogging and RSS go? Deeper into local politics? Are RSS and the web as powereful as talk radio on a 50,000-watt AM station? Dave and The Gang also debate the importance and future of audio blogging and the need to link to or excerpt multimedia content. It's one thing to download a one-hour show to an iPod, but when you can blog a sound bite as easily as you can a text byte, then look for a boom. You'll hear this and much more in another great edition of The Gillmor Gang.

With special guest Mitchell Kertzman, Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the Gillmor Gang tackles these questions as well as DRM, and of course RSS.

CA's CEO resigns. Sun announces open-source Solaris. As the PC becomes more powerful, will desktops become servers? Is the middleware market as we've know it dying due to open source (JBoss)? Does IBM just talk the open-source talk? How are vendors creating their open-source strategies?Are applications and services the only remaining battlegrounds? Trends follow the talent, so where is the talent going? Globalization? The Gillmor Gang plays Vendor Sports: Who will win? Who will become the JetBlue of IT services?