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I first met Leo in 1999 when he was hosting the ScreenSavers on ZDTV, a nationally syndicated live daily show about technology. He has so much knowledge and charisma – he’s a great guy and an excellent speaker because he isn’t boring and he really knows his stuff. He asked me to appear live on his TV show several times which was a lot of fun.

Friday, Leo gave the opening keynote address at Blog World Expo 2007. He has a tremendous background in broadcasting: TV/video and podcasting (he has a zillion podcasts now), and has dabbled with blogging. His take on the different media formats is essentially:

- Video/TV is for the “monkey mind”: we watch TV aimlessly like drones and somehow it lulls us into a peaceful state of stupidity. Just read the completely nonsensical comments in reply to any Youtube video and you’ll see what video does to people. It will always be good for entertainment, but bad for important news.

- Blogs: Blogs are thought provoking: as a result, comments in reply to blog posts are usually intelligent. Blogs are still not intimate though, because the author is set apart from his/her audience.

- Podcasting/radio: Leo favors this medium because it connects with the listener on a personal level. You’re able to hear the tone, meaning, and personality of the speaker, and with podcasting, the speaker can interact with others and have panel discussions, such as Leo does with his “this week in technology” (TWiT) podcast. Monetization of Podcasting is beginning to take shape. Leo suggests supplementing blogging with podcasting, and if you have the time/energy/resources, I think it’s a great way to really connect with your audience and make your blog more sticky in their minds. Course, Leo has the gift of being a great speaker – whereas others are just plain better at expressing themselves in writing.

Most importantly though, Leo makes a point that I agree with strongly: historically, we have watched CNN or read professional media articles and have just assumed that the information was accurate and that journalists are showing us the most important stuff of the day. I think that’s a highly flawed approach because the media is money motivated: they do pieces that appeal to certain demographics to attract high dollar advertisers, they probably fail to cover certain subjects if the ROI isn’t there (too costly, not enough interest), and they tend to cover stories with shock or fear values to boost ratings rather than show us stuff that’s really important.

That’s where social news like blogs, digg, and even flickr comes in. Often times, after an event like an earthquake or fire, I’ve searched flickr and found real life pictures before they were on the news. And a blogger that happened to witness an event first hand is going to do a lot better job writing about it than a journalist who interviewed a bunch of people for a story. All of the world’s real-time happenings will be put online instantly, and via various “filtering” tools that will crop up similar to Digg, you’ll be able to see accurate real time accounts and commentary on what’s happening in the world and what’s important and relevant to you without relying on the pre-filtered biased accounts of the mainstream media where they pick and choose what they think is important (and then that stuff gets covered to death), while other important stuff gets cast aside and buried.

Recently I was at the San Francisco Nike Women’s Marathon holding up an official looking sign that said “Hurry, They’re Running out of Necklaces”, as a joke/jab at the runners whose main motivation for doing the race was to finish and receive a Tiffany necklace. There were thousands of women who ran by me and every 3rd woman jokingly said “no way!” or “oh you’re terrible!”, and at least 20 people took photos of me standing there. Soon thereafter the photo was on Flickr. Just an example of how even remotely interesting or newsworthy events happening anywhere anytime will be covered and blogged about by someone.

(Direct Link to photographer’s Flicker page).

Social media, blogs, “user contributed” everything (not just news), is slowly becoming a sort of hive mind or collective that will put old media (CNN, magazines, your local TV news, newspapers) out of business because the old method of one speaker telling you a third hand account of a small handpicked portion of each day’s events just can’t keep up with our insatiable demand for 24/7 real-time first-hand total coverage of everything, which makes you as an Internet entrepreneur and/or blogger perfectly positioned to cash in if you keep doing what you’re doing.