The New Media landscape continues to morph into … well, the pundits know not what, but they worry that too much power will be concentrated in the hands of the media powerhouses, like Google’s YouTube. So said Leo Laporte, of TWiT.TV fame, on his weekly This Week in Tech podcast. He’s leery of what this will mean with YouTube creating it’s own content and “channels.” How is the small independent podcaster supposed to compete? Well, TWiT might be independent, but they’re hardly “small” in terms of revenue and audience/community reach. But his point is that YouTube is becoming a bit like it’s parent company, Google, in that if you have the misfortune to not ranking or.. horror of horrors, be banned from posting your material, you would be virtually disappeared and have almost no web-presence. Long gone are the days when a funky couple in a retired Wisconsin farm could post audio of themselves talking about their lifestyle, venturing a bit into the naughty not allowed on national radio/TV, and in a very short time turn their hobby into a full-time media job. Also long gone are the days when a young couple in the Dallas area who were running a storage business decided to produce a daily video-podcast featuring the quirky bubbly wife talking about the latest tech gadgets, and have the podcast also go “full-time job.” But then, this shouldn’t have surprised anyone that as online media attracted more advertising dollars that the big boys were going to want a piece of this and buy up the independents or squeeze them out. Or am I just being too callous?

So YouTube’s announcement is that they have teamed up with the creators of the web series, The Guild, to create “Geek & Sundry,” think early revision3, with an emphasis on gaming and geek culture. They go live on April 2nd (really? they couldn’t suck it up and go for April 1st?!) and only one week after the pre-announcement they have over 91,000 subscribers and over 600,000 video views. Yeah, I can see how other podcasters might want to go into iOS app development.

Then at the end of the week, Molly Wood tearfully announced that C|NET’s Buzz-Out-Loud podcasts, which had recently moved from a daily to a weekly show, was ending it’s run of over 1,500 episodes with the April 5th show. I’ve mentioned on more than one occasional that BOL jumped the shark and became an anti-Apple rant-fest when Tom Merritt moved from C|NET to TWiT leaving no one capable of keeping a balance between tech news and Molly’s … passion. I used to be a strong supporter of C|NET’s programs (besides BOL, there was Gadgette’s, the Crave podcast, C|NET to the Rescue, Apple Byte, C|NET Top Five, and the MP3 Insider) but now the only one left in my player is Reporter’s Roundtable. Not so surprisingly, besides BOL, C|NET is pulling all of it’s podcast programming except Reporter’s Roundtable. What’s that tell you? Based on the promo video of Molly Wood’s next gig, Always On, it looks like C|NET might be returning to the well-produced gadget/tech-happy programming that made the big red ball my favorite back when C|NET did news. I sure hope so, and dear god, I hope we never get a rendition of Molly singing a wiseass prediction that no one is going to buy the original iPad because of it’s name and “uselessness.”