• Amb. Joe Wilson | Marcy Wheeler on VS Sundays:  Balancing security and transparency in a 21st century democracy  | Listen here, on or after Sunday, March 20 @ 9pm est|6pm pdt

• Susie Madrak | Scout Prime on VS Susie: Blogging Wisconsin |Listen here, on or after Monday, March 21 @ 9pm est|6pm pdt

• Stuart Zechman | Jay Ackroyd on VS A-Z: Exploring liberalism |Listen live here, on Thursday, March 24 @ 8pm est|5pm pdt | Listen here after midnight Friday, March 25.

• Brad DeLong | Jay Ackroyd on Virtually Speaking w/Jay Ackroyd:  How the great recession has exposed a rift among macro economists. And Ricardian Equivalence.|Listen here, on or after Thursday, March 24 @ 9pm est|6pm pdt

More about Virtually Speaking. More from Jay.

[this section lightly edited for clarity.] As may be evident to you and my 3-4 other readers, I’m fiddling with format and content. All pretty experimental and my goals are simple: more people listening – both in real time and in the future. Podcast as long-tail blogging.

We figure that the people who are most likely to listen to a program are the readers of the guests or the host, e.g. Susie Madrak’s most likely listeners read Suburban Guerrilla. Marcy Wheeler’s most likely listeners read FDL. Which is why we ask the hosts and guests to post the links to their programs. Even better, some post the links to each other’s programs, too. But still, we do our part, reaching out to people who are generally interested in progressive perspectives on current events, media, policy, politics, science, technology, etc.

When I first started helping out, folks who wanted regular program announcements from VS had a number of options: some synchronous, some asynchronous. Signing up to the VS Facebook group and the Ning both allowed for email notification. Following @JayAckroyd opened the way to his tweet stream. For the digitally present Second Life studio audience (more on that next time), a Virtually Speaking SL group provided notices received upon log-in to Second Life, or instant messages while logged in.

Seemed like a lot of redundancy, so I sent a query through all these channels, asking for preferences. A couple dozen folks responded. Their preferences were equally divided among all the choices; which is why I continue using all ‘channels.’

In the Spring of 2008, we switched over to BlogTalkRadio, which has it’s own set of options and then later added a free subscription service via iTunes. Posting here is the newest development- as is direct email or twitter from me – but if I do it right, all have the saving grace of using the same work – this post or versions of it – multiple times. So, lots of ways to get regular program announcements in a variety of ways.

Note: to listen to any of the programs linked to in this diary, all you need to do is click through on the appropriate “here.”

Finally: do you have a question for one of our guests? Leave it here or send a tweet using #Vspeak. I’ll watch both places and pass your message along.