Don Dodge doesn’t understand why anyone would invest $5 million in a blogger.

Here’s a question for Don: would you have invested $5 million in Howard Stern? How about Oprah Winfrey? Martha Stewart? Rush Limbaugh? Jon Stewart? Back when those five people were nobodies?

I would have. Oprah alone is worth more than a billion. Not too shabby of a return. Don’t think any bloggers could become worth that much?

Well, I remember when Rush Limbaugh was a “nobody” only on one radio station in Sacramento, CA.

Why did I like WetPaint and PBWiki? Because they were drop-dead simple to get in and setup. Just enter a URL. I didn’t like Jot because they forced you to look at too many choices before you got to that stage. But, Jot just shipped a new version and WOW it’s a lot better and once you get in it has a ton of features too. I like how it shows a normal, non-geeky user, what’s possible once inside too.

What wiki tool passes your “Blink” test? What is important to you in a wiki tool?

Interesting, my former boss, Steve Sloan, is offering a podcasting class as part of the journalism department at San Jose State University.

I wonder if it would have been better to offer a “multimedia journalism class” instead (which is what this really is)? But that sounds so “old school.”

The skills journalists will need in the future are going to be a lot more varied than just churning out good text. The better journalists are going to understand how to do that, create illustrations (or at least rough drawings that an artist will be able to take and fill out), capture audio, photos, and video, and edit all that together to tell a compelling story on the Web.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you have two journalists of the same quality. One can only do text. But the other one can capture more media. Which one do you expect will get on DIGG?

Anyway, if I were a student I’d be in this class. Why? Because it would help me expand my portfolio that I could show employers. There are VERY FEW journalism jobs available (we keep hearing about newspapers that are laying off journalists) so if you want to be considered for one of those jobs you have to have a better portfolio than the next person. Especially if you want to work online (TechCrunch, Om Malik, and Huffington Post are all hiring).

One of the things we’re working to do with our audio journalists at Podtech is to get them to do text, photos, and a little bit of video so that their stories are more likely to get noticed.

So, who’ll get hired into “new journalism” outfits? Let’s say Digg was going to hire some professional journalists. Don’t you think they’d be more likely to hire someone who could do more media? I do.

Oh, there’s a San Jose blogger meetup on Thursday. I don’t think I’ll be able to get there, unfortunately, had something else going on that evening already.

One difference between Seattle and Silicon Valley? There are a TON more events. It’s amazing how many more things there are to do here at night.

Another difference? When you enter Freeway 280 doing close to 80 mph and a cop passes you at around 90 mph, you know something is different here. In Washington no one drives over 60 (it seems) and if you do you will get a ticket. Not in Silly Valley.