This is a just a quick note to congratulate my friend Om Malik and his team at GigaOm for launching a new service called GigaOm Pro — a for-pay research site that pulls together analysis on industry trends across a number of verticals, including mobile, green technology and so on. I think this is a very smart move (like most of the things Om has done), and there is more about the rationale behind the subscription service in this post. In the interests of full disclosure, I have written for GigaOm in the past, and hope to be able to do so again at some point in the future.

It’s in danger of sliding off Techmeme as I write this, but I wanted to send a shout out to Harvard for its proposal to set academic research free on the Web (I wonder if that’s the first time the words “shout out” and the word “Harvard” have appeared in a sentence together). According to this report, the university today voted to require faculty in the Arts & Sciences department to make their research available for free on the Harvard website (although there is an opt-out clause).

This move is being promoted by the Open Access movement, which wants universities of all kinds to make their research freely available. The author still retains the copyright, and is free to submit his or her work to any academic journals, but the paper is also provided for free on the Web. Many proponents argue that too much research — much of which is publicly funded — winds up trapped in journals that no one but academics have access to, journals that cost universities a lot of money to subscribe to.

Web sociologist danah boyd recently called for a boycott of any journal that doesn’t provide its articles to the public in some form:

“Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you’ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That’s super depressing… I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.”

Others who have written on this topic include David “Joho the Blog” Weinberger, who says he wishes the policy went even further. Weinberger is a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. In a comment on his post, University of Toronto scholar Mark Federman says that he hopes “the academic journal business model heads down the same road as the aluminum-disk-coated-with-plastic business.”

Rex Hammock, who writes over at rexblog.com, is a pretty sharp guy. Amid all the discussion of the report from Forrester about the uptake for podcasting – which Forrester analyst Charlene Li wrote about on her blog – there is plenty of sound and fury, signifying little. Some are outraged that podcasting is being dismissed so easily, with just 1 per cent of people saying they download or listen to podcasts.

Don Dodge says podcasts are too slow for someone who likes to consume information at high speed (I would have to agree). Others say podcasting is a fad that has already come and gone, and is only for geeks, as my friend Scott Karp argues. In a way, Scott is right. Podcasting is pretty much just for geeks – for now.

And even some geeks haven’t quite been bitten by the bug yet – I’m as geeky as anyone, and I’ve only downloaded and listened to a few, in part because there aren’t that many times in my day when I can listen to them. But I have listened to some great ones, including ones from Amber MacArthur and from Leo Laporte and the This Week in Tech crew. They have been as good as – and in most cases much better than – anything I hear on the radio.

And here’s where Rex comes in: He points out that new technologies – or rather observers of them – suffer from “macro-myopia” (a term he got from Paul Saffo), in which their short-term effects are wildly overestimated and their long-term effects are wildly underestimated. The telephone is a great example: many early forecasters assumed it would be used as a kind of broadcast device. Alexander Graham Bell himself said he could never see business being conducted using such a device (he also thought “Ahoy! Ahoy!” was the best way to answer).

As Rex puts it:

“Today, just 18 months into the era of podcasting, a Forrester research report suggesting that only 1% of people actually listen to podcasts is being treated as if such statistics mean something. They mean absolutely nothing.”

He goes on to say that it is more than likely that there will be a “bust” of financial expectations related to podcasting, but that this will also mean little. I would have to agree. Podcasting as a term has always seemed like more of a fad to me than something long term – but that doesn’t mean downloadable audio of all kinds isn’t a phenomenon that could threaten radio, just as Rocketboom and YouTube raise issues for TV (Mark Cuban has some thoughts on that topic, not surprisingly).

Are they going to kill traditional media? Not in 18 months, no. But they are sure as hell going to shake things up, and 10 years from now things will likely look substantially different. As usual, Good Morning Silicon Valley has the best headline on their post: “Podcasting is huge, it’s just the audience that’s tiny.”