Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

Advertising is not what it used to be. On the Internet, most ads are performance-based: advertisers pay when you click on their link. This is the opposite of most TV or print ads, where the advertiser pays just to get a brand message in front of your face.

But performance-based advertising is just the beginning of how the Internet changes the game. The big difference coming now is in targeting ads. You're now seeing ads that are custom-made to appeal to you, based on what you do online and, in many cases, who your friends are. The nature of the message is shifting, and the economics of sending the message are shifting, too.

To discuss new online advertising, our two guests are Irina Slutsky, San Francisco reporter for Ad Age; and Sam Whitmore of Media Survey, which analyzes technology media for tech companies, marketers, and PR pros.

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Recent announcements have shone a spotlight on e-mail: AOL last week announced its new e-mail platform for consumers called Phoenix, and then a day or two later Facebook launched its revamped private messaging service (video link), which will actually give all 500 million users the option to have Facebook.com e-mail addresses.

So e-mail, one of the oldest communications mechanisms on the Internet--it predates the Web itself--is in the news once more. And these new modern e-mail platforms aren't just e-mail. AOL's integrates instant messaging and Twitter. Facebook's product collates SMS and Facebook chat. Traditional e-mail as we know it is changing. Some say it's dying. Research group Gartner, for its part, says 20 percent of workers will use social networks as their primary vehicle for business communications by 2014.

To discuss this today, we have two great experts on the topic.

First, Joshua Baer, CEO of the e-mail helper company OtherInbox. His company makes a very cool little service that will automatically file your commercial messages into subfolders for you, a spin-off and improvement on its original in-box organization product.

And via Skype, we have Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a technology advisory firm. Charlene is also author of two books, "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead" and "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies."

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How long before we can paint a display on our walls? Is Apple's Retina Display really at the limits of human perception? And what's up with those Sharp four-color TVs? These and other display issues get addressed in this episode with CNET's Eric Franklin and DisplayMate CEO Ray Soneira.

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This week we're covering TiVo in particular, and the set-top box market in general. I have but one guest today, but you're going to want to pay attention, since it's Jim Denney, the TiVo's VP of product strategy.

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WikiLeaks launched in 2006 with the stated goal of being an open repository for documents that governments were trying to keep buried. It has become, though, more of a simple repository of U.S. military secrets. The site became notorious in 2007, when it released graphic U.S. military video of a helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians. It's released two other big caches of U.S. military docs recently, on Afghanistan and Iraq. And, despite its name, it's done so not in the wiki way--open and transparent--but selectively, giving media organizations advance news.

The site's main founder, Julian Assange, gets nearly as much press as the site itself. He has been described as "on the run" by The New York Times in an unflattering story that ran alongside a major feature detailing new findings from documents WikiLeaks released. To say Assange has an uneasy relationship with the mainstream media is an understatement.

Today we're talking about WikiLeaks and another site similar in some ways to it, Cryptome, focusing on their effect on journalism and government.

We have two guests. First up, Declan McCullagh, political reporter for CNET News. Later in our show, we're joined by John Young, the man who registered WikiLeaks.org, and the founder of Cryptome, one of the Web's first repositories of leaked documents and top-secret information.

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Today we're talking about self-driving cars. Our news hook, of course, is the recent New York Times story about Google developing self-driving cars--cars that are already cruising the public California highways and driving in traffic.

There have been other big stories in the development of self-driving cars. The first big news to get the public's attention was the running of the DARPA Grand Challenge for robotic cars, in 2004. A car built by Carnegie Mellon University drove the farthest, but no vehicle finished the course. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, five vehicles finished, and the winner was a vehicle called Stanley, which was developed by Stanford.

We're going to talk today about self-driving cars and about what's going on at Stanford, as the team there is preparing to take on even more challenges in self-driving cars. We have two great guests in the studio:

First, Sven Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. Since Spring 2009, he has taught the Stanford class "The Future of the Automobile." Sven was at BMW from 1995 to 2008, working on technology scouting, innovation management, systems design, and series development.

Also with us: Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight at Discern Analytics and visiting scholar at Stanford. Paul is a noted futurist whose essays have appeared in The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

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Editor's note: This post originally published yesterday before the round table took place. It was updated today with a new time stamp and the video interview.

Did you ever wonder where the raw materials for your phone or camera or laptop came from, or who assembled it? Popular stories this year about the working conditions at smartphone manufacturer Foxconn finally brought to light one piece of this puzzle. Workers there, stories say, suffer not just low wages but physically and psychologically unsafe conditions, which have led to a rash of suicides at the plant.

But even before your gadget is assembled, its raw materials must be pulled out of the earth. Some of these materials, notably tantalum, which is used in capacitors, are mined in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Income from these mines directly funds warring groups; ongoing fighting over resources leaves civilians terrorized and brutalized.

There are things you can do to push companies toward building more ethical and humane products. That's what we're covering today. Our guests are Aaron Hall, a policy analyst for the Center for American Progress and the Raise Hope for Congo project; and Global Post reporter Kathleen McLaughlin, who's been working on the investigative series Silicon Sweatshops since 2009.

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Against the odds, the movie about the founding of Facebook, "The Social Network," is nearly universally admired. It got a 97 percent on the TomatoMeter at Rotten Tomatoes, and is considered a strong candidate for the Oscars.

But is it accurate? Not just on the facts, but on the spirit and ethos of entrepreneurship in general, and Facebook in particular? That, and related topics, are what we're discussing today, with two great guests.

From CNET News in our New York office, we have Caroline McCarthy, author of our blog about social networking, The Social, and the CNET review of the movie: "'Social Network' weaves a complex Web."

And from TechCrunch, Alexia Tsotsis, who covers Facebook for that site. She wrote, "'The Social Network' And The Rise Of The Terror Nerd."

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Today: The movie and TV industries vs. the Internet! Who will win--Studios, Internet companies, consumers, manufacturers, or some combination?

The entire entertainment industry is, of course, in the middle of shedding its skin. The old ways of distributing and charging for entertainment content are being changed by the Web. Theoretically, entertainment can now follow us anywhere, from screen to screen, without costing us a dime. And some content is. But most Hollywood content is not, at least not yet. With "over the top" content boxes from the likes of Apple, Google, Roku, Boxee, and Tivo all giving us easy access to this content--and with content aggregation plays like Hulu and Netflix doing the back-end work to bring it to those boxes--the old TV and movie economics are increasingly challenged.

That's what we're talking about today, with two great guests. First, representing CNET's tech-first view of content indsutries, our own Greg Sandoval, author of the Media Maverick blog.

And joining us from the heart of the entertainment industry, Hollywood, we have Steven Gaydos, the executive editor of Variety and one of the foremost experts at understanding the changes in the entertainment industries.

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