JimSpore!

GeekCast was in full gear for episode 23 featuring the regular cast of Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson.

The show kicked off with discussion around the ABestWeb forum thread on the Performance Marketing Alliance initiative and whether or not affiliate marketing as an industry is being helped or hindered by the organization and whether or not some of the comments there were helpful to the industry as well. This theme comes around at the end of the show. So, make sure to listen to the whole thing for the proper context.

Talk then moved on to Technorati’s new failnetwork. The participants were not too keen on Technorati’s chances at success. Firefox 3 was released earlier today, so the gang gets Shawn Collins to move off of Internet Explorer 4.0 in an attempt to bring him in line with the 21st century.

The show then takes a turn towards more controversy with a heated debate about the nature of music production and distribution and whether or not the “metered internet” is needed to slow the tide of bandwidth hogs and how the music business will continue to wilt if it does not start providing access to music in ways that are in line with consumer demand (namely cheap downloading with no DRM).

Of course, Jim brings up his utopian vision for a YouTube Business and tries to kick that dead horse a few more times before the conversation gets back on track and Lisa leads a very thought provoking segment on how and why the AP is locking down content and what that means to the rest of us.

Interestingly enough, . The gang discusses the changing nature of news and information transferring and asks some very deep questions about what Qik and smarter mobiles mean for the future of “news” and “analysis.”

Spore’s creature creator was also released today, so Sam explained how it will become the biggest game of all time.

Jim, Shawn and Sam throw out their favorite WordPress plugins and discuss the topic of Sitemaps and their effectiveness for SEO purposes.

The show ends on a serious note coming back full circle to cover more of the ABW and PMA dust up and what it means for the future of affiliate marketing.

And of course there is talk of mandles and boobs after Lisa leaves.

If you stick around that far, there are two very special prizes that you can win, so listen for those. However, you had to have heard the middle of the show to get the full details, so don’t skip ahead

The show runs a nut filled 84 minutes and 13 seconds.