I’m very excited to announce that Blogger & Podcaster will be interviewing basketball legend, and now blogger, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the March issue of the magazine. And I want you to help me choose the questions.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is, as you sports fans know, the all-time leading NBA scorer, and the creator of the skyhook. His pro career spanned 20 years and two teams, the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. He now writes a daily blog for the Los Angeles Times.

If you’re not a sports fan, resist the temptation to skip Kareem’s blog. This is not simply a jock’s recollections of past glory, or his thoughts on the sport he loves. At the Kareem blog, you’ll find stories about the b-ball legend’s interactions with famous friends like Grammy winner Herbie Hancock, his role in the recent “Yes I Can!” music video produced by will.i.am for Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign, and profiles of unsung African-Americans, just in time for Black History Month. Oh, and you can learn how to shoot a skyhook after age 50.

My interview with Kareem will focus on his decision to begin blogging, how he approaches his new blog, and his interest in new media in general. If you have questions for Kareem, please post them in the comments to this entry, and I’ll choose several of the best ones. You’ve got until 9 AM PT/noon ET tomorrow to add your suggestions.

Look for excerpts of the interview in text and podcast form very soon, and the full version in our next issue.

Well OK, it’s just one billion actually.

Just one billion?

Wizzard Media announced today that the company’s podcast hosting units had delivered 1 billion downloads in 2007. That’s a whole lot of episodes, but what does it mean for the future of podcasters and podcast networks, and who gets the credit for moving all those bits?

Wizzard’s Libsyn and Switchpod subsidiaries are podcast hosting companies. They began by selling hosting services to podcasters, and that is still a large part of their business/. Libsyn, in particular, provides an inexpensive, easy-to-use service that’s almost always recommended to podcast newbies, and those faced with sudden spikes in subscribership. That’s because Libsyn charges based on how much storage you use, not for bandwidth. Wizard/Libsyn hosts some of the most popular shows around, but for $5 a month, it can host your grandmother’s podcast, too.

In 2007, the company began inking deals with ad brokers and content providers in a very public way: it had launched a business-focused podcasting service in 2006. suddenly, their press releases started to resemble those of companies who marketed themselves primarily as podcast aggregators or networks.

I think it’s fair to say that credit for the sheer number of podcast downloads delivered by Wizzard companies in 2007 (I personally accounted for several thousand of them) goes to their hosting customers. The Libsyn service, which has been plagued by intermittent service outages and other growing pains, has been a boon to anyone wanting to publish a podcast without worrying about how a popularity spike would affect their personal bandwidth costs. And the company’s participation in the podcasting community, and its DIY spirit, have kept many users loyal, even in the face of hiccups.

It’s also an encouraging sign for podcasting that Wizzard’s announcement was picked up by ReadWriteWeb, then by TechMeme. Podcasting companies and happenings don’t tend to get the attention of the big tech blogs. The 1 billion number may be more of a mile marker than a real turning point in the industry, but so what?

Blogger & Podcaster is a sponsor of the second annual Mac Mingle, a party open to all Macworld Expo badge holders. You’ll meet famous Mac podcasters, and a whole lot of other very cool people, and enjoy snacks and a cash bar. Save Thursday, January 17, 8 PM for us on your calendar.

Right before the mingle, at 6 PM, Adam Christianson of The Maccast will host a Mac podcaster meetup, featuring some leading Mac talkers. Both events happen at Jillian’s Restaurant, just across from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. If you can make it the the Mac Mingle and Mac Podcaster Meetup, please say hello. ‘ll be the one in the stylin’ Blogger & Podcaster shirt.

As you probably know, we run a calendar of events in each issue of B&P. In addition, I want to do a news story for the next issue that will round up important conferences, trade shows, gatherings, meet-ups and other events that bloggers and podcasters should know about. The idea is to help readers plan their travel schedules for the year, and pick the best opportunities for learning, networking and general pod/blogging goodness.

If you know of an important blogger and podcasting event that will occur in calendar year 2008, please let us know. You can add your event to the comments for this post, or drop us an email at feedback at bloggerandpodcaster dott comm.

Another year, another reason to talk about Facebook. And about Robert Scoble. Sigh.

Seems that Mr. Scoble, blogger and serial friend-collector, is on the wrong side of Facebook and has gotten his account suspended. His crime? He used a script to extract his Facebook contacts list from the service. That is a violation of the social network’s terms of service, according to an email Scoble reprinted.

Those in the blogosphere who have engaged in the ensuing debate are arguing over whether Scoble has the right to control his data: his social graph, versus Facebook’s right to prevent automated scripts from scraping its property.

But are Scoble’s contacts (he famously accepts every one of the thousands of friend requests he receives) really his to do with as he pleases? Or is the information, voluntarily shared with him by his friends, but understood to be within the structure of Facebook, actually the property of those who gave it to Scoble? The way I see it, the question is not whether Scoble or Facebook has the right to control friend data, but whether the people whose information actually forms the social graph should have a say.

Facebook members agree to (whether they read them or not) terms of service under which the information they provide can be used or disseminated. But if you friend Robert Scoble, he doesn’t offer you a TOS. You know that your information is indirectly available through his public friends list–again, within the confines of Facebook–but you haven’t authorized him to repurpose, blog with, sell, or generate social graphs with your data, now have you?

Leaving aside whether you specifically trust Robert Scoble or not, data scraping, which allows him to use or deliver that data in ways decided by him, potentially compromises the privacy of his friends without giving them options. His most recent post describes how he intended to use the data: to compare his Facebook database with that of Plaxo, whose tool he was alpha testing.

If Scoble succeeds in mining his Facebook profile, we’ll need to add one more to the long list of warnings to Internet users: if you value your privacy, and don’t wish to be socially graphed, much less sold to, or munched into a company’s database of potential customers, don’t friend people who know how to scrape data from social networks.

My Twitter feed this morning is full of links to a very inspiring story of how a woman faced with breast cancer is using her blogger gifts to raise awareness, and how her friends are using theirs to raise funds.

Blogger Susan Reynolds learned earlier this month that she has breast cancer. She is in surgery today. She blogs about the suddenness of her diagnosis, her understandable fear of what could happen to her, and about how she dealt with the physical pain of the biopsy that was required to determine whether the mass she found in her breast was malignant. Reynolds, who is a well-known presence on Twitter and in Second Life, tells the story of how frozen peas eased her pain.

Organized by Reynolds’ friends on Twitter, The Frozen Peas Fund raises money for Making Strides, the breast cancer campaign of the American Cancer Society. The group has declared the first Frozen Peas Friday on Twitter, as a catalyst for the fund-raising, and a weekly encouragement to contribute “the cost of two bags of frozen peas” to cancer research.

those of us who use Twitter daily have already seen how the service can be a source of information, comfort, and inspiration, because of the way in which it connects people in almost-real-time. I hadn’t heard about Susan’s struggle, or about Frozen Peas Friday until I checked in with Twitter this morning. But judging from the variety of people who are talking about it, and taking action, and sharing links, I think we’re seeing something really powerful that has its roots in a very organic means of communicating.

I have three news items for you today. Not bad for mid-December.

• Movable Type has gone open source. Six Apart announced its intention to take the blogging platform open in June, or at least to create an open source version. with the release of a fully open source MT, users now have complete ability to modify and redistribute the blogging platform. Here’s hoping that an open source MT will encourage the development of blog themes, add-ons, and other tools from developers.
• Zune Insider (the blog written by Zune Marketplace podcast honcho Rob Greenlee, reports that the service is back online after a planned update that was done yesterday. Doesn’t look as if the update added any podcast-specific features.
• The Scoble rumor is mostly true. He told a Le Web audience, (and later blogged) that he will leave PodTech on January 14. He says he’s weighing options for his future employment, and that the rumored move to Fast Company is one of these. Scoble’s explanation of his reasons for leaving PodTech was not written in corporate speak per se, but it might as well have been. There was a lot about “working with the new management”, “change in focus” etc., which you can read for yourself.