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Sweet and Lo-Fi

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Today Streeter's site boasts more than 400 daily subscribers ("subscribers" being a bit of a misnomer: the content's free). And to the dozen or so regulars on his Tuesday-night vlogging videoconference, he's a bona fide celebrity.

"Forget fifteen minutes of fame; it's that you're famous to fifteen people," says Current TV's Sloan. "It's neat to flip the matrix of success on its head, and I think a lot of vloggers are doing that."

Richard Hall's vlog, The Richard Show (Richardshow.com) is exactly as advertised: a video scrap album of Hall and his family, the highlight of which is a hilarious clip depicting the University of Missouri-Rolla prof and his beer gut climbing hesitantly into an icy stream. If his students were to see it, they might mistake him for a bear, Hall quips from the passenger seat of Streeter's maroon Mercury minivan en route to Chicago.

Streeter and Hall are both about six-foot-three and don't miss many meals. But on the Saturday of the Chicago road trip, Streeter's already skipped breakfast. With their presentation set for 6:30, they might have to sacrifice dinner too. Hence a pit stop at a KFC just outside Bloomington becomes a four-helping, whole-bird smelting of three meals into one at Colonel Sanders' ample buffet.

"I could be a vegetarian if I didn't like fried chicken so much," says Streeter, wiping thigh grease from the side of his lip with an undersize napkin.

Back in the car on the home stretch, Streeter reveals that the erstwhile late-night USA Network program Night Flight is a huge aesthetic influence, especially as it pertains to Al Lien, a toilet-mouthed extraterrestrial alter ego Streeter invented to introduce some of the harder-edged acts on his site.

"There was no hard-and-fast format," Streeter says of Night Flight, popping a cassette adapter attached to his little black iPod into his van's tape deck. "It just had to be weird."

Love them or hate them, iPods and their brethren are irrevocably altering the role of mass media in society. Case in point: Not once during Streeter and Hall's nine-hour round trip to Chicago do they listen to traditional radio stations, or even compact discs. Instead, they alternate between downloaded tunes and podcasts Streeter subscribes to, which are automatically updated via Real Simple Syndication — media aggregation software Streeter describes as "TiVo for the web." Instead of having to surf from site to site to check for newly updated content, RSS users (there's also a like-minded program tailored to video content, called FireAnt) have fresh material automatically fed to their hard drives or iPods from sites they choose. Streeter goes to bed at night knowing that when he wakes up, dozens of videos and podcasts will await him.

Streeter's favorite podcaster is a gay Chicago-based performance artist named Richard Bluestein, who inconspicuously sat in the back of the Apple Store during the "Meet the Vloggers" confab. Bluestein was able to maintain that low profile because on his podcast he's not Richard Bluestein — he's Madge Weinstein, host of Yeast Radio (yeastradio.com), a cross-dressing "bloated Jewish dyke" and breast-cancer survivor with a penchant for left-wing politics, flatulence jokes and yeast-infection advocacy.

The self-proclaimed "shock jock with no cock," Madge refers to the vice president as "Penis Cheney," liposuction as "thigh abortion" and promises potential advertisers, "If you sponsor me, I'll lick your balls."

"Madge is really what Howard Stern wants to be," says former MTV veejay Adam Curry, who has started Podshow.com, a virtual podcasting network that is attempting to monetize the audio-only segment by selling premium content and sponsorships for its stable of programs (which includes Yeast Radio).

"There's no way these corporations can build into their DNA the type of programming that's being made in podcasting," adds Curry, a self-described "jetrosexual" who splits time between San Francisco and the English countryside. "I come from that industry; it's just not going to happen. When it comes to specialty shows, they don't have the resources or seconds in the day. We have no limitations in terms of frequency and time, and that is a very bleak picture for the radio industry. People are running away from what we're hearing on mainstream radio, not just because of the time-shifting element, but because of the content itself."

Señor Stern, of course, is among the sprinters: This month he shifted his wildly popular FCC whipping boy from morning drive time to the unregulated, pay-to-play Sirius Satellite Radio Network, where he joins none other than Madge Weinstein, already a prominent personality on a channel devoted to Podshow talent.

"Tens of thousands of people in the radio business have these filters," explains Curry. "It's not just the 'Seven Dirty Words'; it's what's wrong politically for the company. MTV was way like that. It was horrible. The talented people are saying: 'Screw this, maybe I can be my own man.'"

Unlike most vloggers, who dabble in text blogging and audio-only podcasting before graduating to video, Richard Bluestein actually started by vlogging. Back in 2001 when he posted his first video online, it didn't have a name. A year later he came up with Madge, almost by accident.

"Some friends of mine were smoking pot and they called me and said they wanted to do a mockumentary like Spinal Tap, except with lesbian riot grrrls," recounts Bluestein, who despite podcasting for a living fervently maintains a video blog on the side. "They wanted me to play the manager of the band — this big Jewish woman who wants to fuck all the girls. So Madge just came out of that."

In elevating to relative superstar status a gay man portraying a Jewish lesbian, the podcasting community is already leaps and bounds ahead of mainstream media in reaching an underserved demographic.

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