We're unleashing Dave Mansueto onto the Podcast Hotel this weekend, Feb 23 - Feb 25 out there in beautiful Seattle, Washington. Noone has any excuse not to go- certainly none of your west coast -erners. No telling what's going to happen this trip out west for the young pioneer, Mansueto. Please, everyone come buy a drink for our tireless traveler. The event sounds totally awesome, and we're bummed we all can't go. Live it up for us, Dave!

We'd like to take a moment and recognize another milestone and truly thank everyone for their participation in helping to build the premiere podcast delivery network. This is a network built by you guys and girls, the podcasters, from the ground up to be exactly what you need.

Alright kids, geek alert. Here's our latest stats libsyn is now 3,000 users (and growing rapidly) with over 55,000 episodes online serving almost 1 million media files every day. What does that look like on the nerd side?- about a terabyte of data served every hour!
.... ya our reaction too when we calculated that number.

Ok, nerd break over, back to work. Thanks everyone, seriously, we still are amazed when people find out about us and come join our network. We love you.

Two years ago I asked this question: Why can't we have global, ubiquitous non biased coverage of the olympics available to anyone and everyone, for free, via a p2p delivery network? The olypics are an international competition of goodwill, yet here in America exclusive rights and coverage is bid on and owned by one of the major media networks. Then, the events of most interest to the least common denominator of US viewers are recorded, edited and replayed in prime time.

I would like to seriously put forth the challenge, to all independent media outlets, that we band together and plan for the 2008 summer games complete, on-demand, streamable, coverage- free for anyone in the world to watch.

Here are some things we need to figure out how to pull off:

coverage

This may be one of the hardest pieces. We need unadulterated footage of every trial of every event. This could mean a sizable investment to cover actually having a film crew on site, and also having a mechanism to allow uploads of event coverage for citizens of this participating community worldwide. We then need to develop a way to allow multiple commentary tracks to be recorded/uploaded/synched to allow for multi-national point of view commentary. Graphics overlays should also be able to be created,uploaded, and drawn in dynamically by the international consortium of olympic coverers. All the typical resources a commentary team has on hand, like historical statistics, relevant back story, insider information, etc needs to be linked in via a comprehensive wikipedia like knowledge base.

delivery

To power the delivery of this massive archive of video footage, a more robust and flexible peer-to-peer technology needs to be developed so that a billion people worldwide can tune in via web, tv, and mobil video appliance. The UI should be a timeline map, of every event, including every trial run, as well as medal round. The viewer should be able to pick and begin viewing on-demand. The user should able to pick from angles, pov, language, and also vote on quality and completeness of any given event coverage. After several years of different experiments in the wisdom of crowds filtering, we as an online community should be able to develop something to handle this task.

archival

Once complete, this people's history of the olympic games should be kept online and available for all posterity.

Sponsors currently pay how many millions and millions of dollars- for what? At least sponsors of the people's coverage of the olympics will be contributing to something great. We would form an international organization and every dollar raised would go to the production, development, delivery, and archiving of the event and future olympics.

If nothing else, over this past year we have learned the cost of technology is not a limiting factor. The shear processing, storage, and delivery power to make this a reality is here today and not difficult or expensive to obtain. I don't think this is a pipe dream at all, and with the help of some smart people and some money we can make this a reality.

Do I have any takers?