Fans of Laporte’s show noted last month how the host lamented the quality of video online as a reason why TWiT stuck with the audio format for three years. Laporte said in May issues with audio and video quality were disappointing up to that time.

Since then, TWiT hooked up with Stickam to handle Laporte’s embracing of video. TWiT Live opted to go all-in with Stickam, as a month of videos drew a daily audience of 400,000 and some 3 million live views of the program.

Stickam launched as a social media site, enabling people to share video, audio, and image files. Plenty of widely-read bloggers in the niche picked up on Stickam and raved about the service.

Today, Stickam announced its high-definition availability, a factor they noted as a reason Laporte opted to keep TWiT Live available through the site. The show broadcasts five times a week.

Stickam may want to address any concerns Laporte still has about chat on Stickam. At the TWiT Live FAQ we found this entry:

Stickam chat sucks!

Yeah, we agree. The IRC channels are much more civilized. Leo has put in several feature requests to Stickam about their chat (particularly, turning off join/leave messages).

TWiT Live airs each day except Mondays and Fridays.

I find increasingly I’m missing that interface on other applications and useage models.

Anyway, good podcast over with Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott where they both talk about Windows Vista. Paul says Vista is changing the way he uses his computer. I find that too.

But, damn, I wish everything used the J and K keys. Heheh.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Actually, Laporte was a bit more metaphoric about it in a post entitled “No TWiT Today.”

During his keynote address, Laporte warned about obstacles facing podcast success. He warned against old media, about greed, about choosing advertising over audience. He didn’t say anything about hookey-playing cast members.

Fans immediately took action setting Save TWiT blogs and Digg.com entries, prodding readers for donations. Laporte’s blog post so far has over 400 comments. But it doesn’t appear to be a financial problem. It’s either a publicity stunt (which worked, obviously) or a publicized dispute intended to embarrass his cast members (which also worked).

Laporte followed up with concerned fans, some of whom swore allegiance to TWiT only, threatening to abandon podcasting forever.

What’s the future of TWiT? We’ll find out nearer to Election Day.

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The company says the algorithms also analyze consumer intent, which is often indicated by clicks, to serve up online ads in conjunction with the content. Podzinger says the new service “goes far beyond” traditional text and click-through advertising services that advertisers have become dependent upon today.

Because podcasts are already highly-targeted, the company believes advertising on this medium will be extremely effective.

“As a podcast and radio host and producer, I believe PodZinger will be a tremendous service to my listeners, enabling them to browse archived shows to find specific information of interest,” said Leo Laporte, host and producer of TWiT.tv.

“With PodZinger’s new advertising platform I will be able to deliver effective, targeted advertising that is relevant to my content. This is a powerful tool and I expect PodZinger’s new platform to generate a robust, incremental revenue stream for my business.”

The company says this is the first time advertisers will be able to mine multimedia search data, and understand usage and topic filters to arrive at a better understanding of how consumers are interacting with content.

“Advertisers should not wander into the world of online audio and video with blind hope of finding their target audience,” said Alex Laats, CEO of PodZinger.

“With PodZinger, advertisers can craft their campaigns based on real information about consumer intent and usage, aggregated over a broad base of consumers.”

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Laporte is the host of the smash-hit podcast TWiT (This Week in Technology), which is downloaded millions of times each time it is released into cyberspace. But beyond being one of the founders of the medium, Laporte is a 30-year radio and television veteran. Active in building the old media, for which he has few nice things to say, his real passion, he says, is still just a toddler.

His address focused on setting the agenda for the next two years – what he called podcasting’s terrible twos.” But it’s not just that the medium is still wobbly and messy, small and irreverent; Laporte says that for proper development, podcasting will have to outgrow two things: Apple and Old Media.

At first it seems that strange would have a problem with podcasting. Apple’s the reason the medium exists. But trademark lawyers are seldom sentimental, and the company has been working to put this newly coined word, formed from the iPod, to rest.

That presents a bit of an identity crisis, which purveyors seek to resolve by throwing around new words like “netcast” and, if for the video iPod or similar devices, “vidcast.” It’s early enough that the term podcast is hardly common usage, even if that’s the only name the medium has known in its infancy.

The conflict with Apple, though, was just an underlying issue in his speech. The main focus was on the culture of podcasting, the spirit of cooperation over competition, and the warning that the culture would be threatened by Old Media.

“Don’t copy the mistakes of Old Media,” said Laporte. “I’ve spent 30 years laboring down in the mines of television and radio.”

Earlier, Laporte called television and radio a “cesspool,” media that exploits its audience for advertising, and bemoaned “three minutes of content for four minutes of ads.” Podcasting, he said, is the best advertising medium ever. “But that’s not why we’re here,” he corrected. “New media do not spring up all the time. This is a powerful medium.”

The first goal is to expand the audience, not exploit it, and then experiment with different methods of monetizing, several of which would be discussed at the Expo, even if no one is sure yet what exactly works.

Podcasts sponsorships are still sold at a cost per thousand (CPM), which is a method Laporte called “old school.” Part of the problem I that we have no real way of measuring the success of a podcast. Though we can count downloads, those numbers “are fuzzy.” There’s no way to know if those are partial downloads, or repeats.

But the culture, and not damaging it, is first and foremost, in the eyes of Laporte, then settling “the Apple iPod thing,” reinventing a new name for it, and not making the same mistakes as Old Media.