Four and a half years ago Leo Laporte started the This Week in Tech network. TWiT started as one podcast and quickly grew to a full network of audio and video shows with varied topics and an extremely wide audience. For those familiar with Leo’s career, this comes as no surprise. He’s a media pioneer and is only now receiving a portion of the praise he deserves for promoting technology programming on TV, radio and the internet. An interesting conversation has been happening surrounding Leo’s network. Throughout the history of TWiT, the community was encouraged to make a donation to the network. Early on, this was the only way Leo was willing to make money off of his shows. That didn’t last long, as I assume advertisers were beating down his door to connect with his wide reaching audience. While no numbers are public, I assume advertising quickly dwarfed his donations, but the donations were still there.

An interesting conversation has been happening in the past few weeks about what Leo should do with the money the TWiT makes by donations. When faced with this issue, Leo decided to do something amazing with the donations. Announced on December 3rd, Leo will no longer be paying himself with the money the company makes through sponsorships, advertising, etc. Leo’s salary will be paid through the donations made to TWiT and not the company’s operating budget. This is similar to a CEO of a company being paid a $1 annual salary, but making money if the stock in that company increases. He makes sure to point out that he won’t starve, as he has other jobs that will feed and put a roof over his family, but he’s created an incentive for himself that didn’t previously exist.

Leo now has cares about two separate income streams: one for the company, one for himself. This is a monthly reminder to Leo about how much his shows are worth to his listeners. Leo has always been accommodating to his community by creating shows that they want to hear, giving them the content they want during the shows and by expanding the boundaries of what a podcasting network could be. Now it’s up to the community to give back. IF this model sounds familiar (accepting money, but also putting a focus on donations) you must be a listener of public radio. This method is how NPR stays in business. While NPR does a pledge drive a few times a year, Leo will do a mini-pledge drive once a show for each of his expanding roster of sixteen regular podcasts.

This won’t work if his listeners don’t care if he continues podcasting. If he was good, but not amazing, this wouldn’t work.

Referenced: What’s TWiT Worth to You

A few months ago I was turned on to the band I Fight Dragons by someone on Twitter and became a huge fan. I got an email announcing the band is now selling 100 “Lifetime Memberships” to the band. For $100, you get all the music the band has ever produced on a kick ass USB-card, all the future releases from the band and admission to every show they will ever play.

This is an extremely forward thinking idea from I Fight Dragons, and I think it’s brilliant. If I were to quit life and follow the band around from city to city on their US tour with MC Chris, the band would theoretically lose money on my lifetime membership, but what they gain is an evangelist for the band. Someone who will be playing their music for their friends, talking about the band pretty much non-stop and most likely 100 friends too.

While not everyone can sell a lifetime membership to their art, this makes me think about what other kinds of businesses could do with this kind of idea. Alternatively, how much money is a lifetime membership to your work worth?

The news came in yesterday that Twitter signed a sear ch deal with Microsoft and Google. Microsoft’s Bing and Google are going to have access to the real time stream from Twitter, which is commonly called “the firehose”. The firehose something that not many companies are given according to Twitter own Frequently Asked Questions.

Up until now, Twitter has relied on the technology of Summize, a company it purchased in July of 2008, for search within Twitter. (ref. “With Summize, Twitter to Buy a Clue from GigaOm) Twitter doesn’t allow for historical search through its search interface, as messages seem to go back as far as two weeks. Those interested in real time search are satisfied to see why “RIP Kanye West” is trending, but if you’re interested in something someone said four months ago you’re out of luck. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been archiving my tweets. If you’re interested in searching in Twitter Bing offers a very useful Twitter search page and Twitter results will be included in Google searches. This is a departure from the usual actions towards extending Twitter functionality the company has taken in the past.

When Twitter announces new features, usually an announcement would benefit the developers that helped drive attention to Twitter. The recent addition of location into published messages is an example of that. The search deals with Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the first steps Twitter has taken while thinking about itself and not the community of users and developers. This move is something that directly benefits Twitter and does harm to the developer community. It’s a selfish move from a company that has been very giving.

The ecosystem of companies who allow you to use Twitter for more than 140 character status updates is very rich. If you want to include video in Twitter, use 12Seconds. Photos? TwitPic. Search was perviously done in an unofficial way by Collecta, OneRiot, Scoopler and Excla.im. These are sites that didn’t pay Twitter money to access search, I assume they used the Twitter API to put their searches together.

If Twitter is making money off of the search deals, then more power to them. While I don’t see any ads on the Twitter search pages on Bing, I assume they’ll show up soon, and barely anything Google Search related exists without advertisements. I imagine that if these companies are benefitting financially from including Twitter search results, Twitter will be seeing a share of that money.

money, I has it by Kris Taeleman via Flickr
magnifying glass macro <06.jpg by by stephenjohnbryde, via Flickr