Hi Clare,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment and ideas. I'm very interested in the way technology tends to take us outside of our presence in the here and now. I'll check out David Abram.

Well, I think, in general, we'd like to keep it to technical questions, which can include the etiquette and social norms of communications technology, but I'm hesitant to put too many rules around it. I think we need to see how this experiment evolves organically. It's really about what the Spark community decides the purpose of it should be.

One thing I would say is that we hope it can be a place where people who are trying to learn more about computers can ask questions in a non-judgmental environment, and have those questions answered by our community members with expertise.

I keep hearing about this show. I've got to see it!

Thanks for the thoughts, Dale. You know, the Korean Gina Trapani thing is an awesome idea. One of the things I like about the show is that it takes a flat world for granted.

I take your point about the Search Engine stuff. We both hit the air at the same time, and I think that meant we naturally defined a difference between the two approaches, with Jesse's show firmly fixed on an Internet news/politics mandate. Now that Jesse's with TVO, maybe there's room to increase the scope. It's definitely something we wrestle with.

Interesting thought, Rodd. We do get quite a few queries from educators.

Thanks for the kind words laurendorphin. I like the meet up/public event idea too.

When we went to the hour-long format, I wondered whether there would be a difference in how podcast vs. broadcast listeners responded. As a podcast listener myself, half an hour is a great little chunk, and you also have the luxury of being able to stop any time, go back and listen to things again, or only listen when you're in the right frame of mind. I used to hear occasionally from broadcast listeners, though, that they sometimes found the pace of the old show made it difficult to follow. That is, if you were listening while doing the dishes and walked out of the room for a minute, you wouldn't know what was going on. I'm a bit ambivalent about it, myself. I liked the intensity of the old show, but I found the inability to go deeper a bit frustrating. Thanks for the thoughts.

I love the ongoing social media skills idea. I think there's a lot of 'throw social media at the problem and see what sticks' going on.

That's an interesting thought. I'll raise it with Elizabeth and Dan at our Monday story meeting. Cheers!

Hey, thanks CRS. I'll be curious to see what you think of this week's show (should be posted later today). In the last part, we have an interview with David Zweig, who studies Organizational Behaviour at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He talks about monitoring at work, and the down side of blocking some sites (lack of employee engagement being one example).