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.

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.

As you can see if you reached this blog from the magazine home page, we’ve posted the digital and podcast editions of the December issue. You can read the issue by clicking on the cover, or hear individual articles in the podcast player. You can also subscribe to the podcast feed.

Here are some December highlights:

• On the cover, we have an interview with Kent and Douglas of Ask A Ninja, whose various promotional efforts for their super-popular video podcast have been all over the place, from blogs, to mainstream media, to my personal Twitter and Facebook streams. You can read how they got started, how they’re keeping their show independent, and how they’re promoting the Ninja to new audiences.
• Lots of coverage of the first BlogWorld Expo, with product announcements, analysis,s and cool photos. I didn’t take most of the cool ones. Those come to us from Brian Solis.
• An interview-in-a-book-excerpt, featuring Engadget’s Peter Rojas. The interview is included in the new book, Blog Heroes, from Wiley.
• Advice from WordPress superstar Lorelle VanFessen, who shows bloggers how to be better writers.

Of course, you’ll find columns from Rob Walsh, Paul Colligan, Shel Israel and Tee Morris, along with other groovy features.

Let us know what you think.

I first “met” Mignon Fogarty in the forums over at Podcast Pickle. Later, we ended up as members of the same—sadly defunct—podcast network. We have mutual friends in the podosphere, too. I guess what I’m sayin’ here is that when I got to know Mignon, she was “one of us”, a fairly new podcaster trying to improve her show and grow her audience like we all were, and who dealt with the same basic stuff: how do you make phone interviews not sound like crap, how do you get the word out about your show, what’s the best Web site platform?

And now she’s done what the people who saw podcasting as a business right from the start have dreamed of doing. She’s quit her day job, expanded her listenership to thousands of people, and even appeared on national TV. For those of us whose podcasting goals were in the modest range, but who love to see a nice person succeed, she is a hero. To those who started out with a plan and perhaps a bigger budget, she’s a case study.

I talked with Mignon in April, just after she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and just before she was featured in Business Week. I asked her all the burning questions about how Grammar Girl had become so successful, what you have to do to get in the door at Oprah, etc. But the answers I found most interesting had to do with how she has handled sudden success. It’s one thing to work toward a large audience and great publicity, but what do you do when you get them? Will your Internet infrasturcture be ready? How about the content of your show? Are you prepared to take that leap and quit your job, hire people to help you or add more podcasts to your network? Mignon seems to have understood that this “background stuff” is just as important as being available for a photo shoot. In fact, she always sounds perfectly calm. I should have asked her how she does that.

Read “10 Questions with Mignon Fogarty” in the June issue of Blogger & Podcaster, and listen to the full interview on the B&P podcast.

-shelly