I had to do this for a conference and thought I’d post it in case someone wants to encorporate it into my wikipedia bio. I don’t touch my wikipedia bio, nor did I write it in the first place, since people go off on you for that.

Richard Bluestein is a podcaster primarily known for his audio podcast, Yeast Radio, his video blog, InsaneFilms.com, and his in-your-face video news podcast, “Eclectic News Brief”. Richard’s prime objective is to use podcasting to facilitate political change.

Richard Bluestein was one of the earliest podcasters, using his alter-ego, the outspoken “bloated lesbian” Madge Weinstein of YeastRadio.com to express her political and philosophical views. After reaching the attention of former MTV personality Adam Curry, who was also the person responsible for introducing podcasting to the public, Madge became one of the most well-known podcasters. Madge uses profanity and other socially incorrect means to express her points of view…. sort of a non-violent white jewish lesbian Malcolm X.

When Curry and business partner Ron Bloom started PodShow.com, they brought Richard and a handful of other podcasters to be charter members of the PodShow. Yeast Radio, The Dawn and Drew Show, The Rock and Roll Geek Show, and The Gillmor Gang were all signed onto podshow initially and were used as a business case to get venture capital for podcasting. Yeast Radio and the others were shows that could not exist on traditional radio, due not only to their vulgar language but also due to their narrow scope of audience. Therefore, Yeast Radio and the others were an example of content that could not exist without the medium of podcasting an therefore justified its funding. Curry and Bloom eventually raised enough money to start a company, Podshow,com, and then Richard and the other podcasters in he group became the first full-time podcasters, making a living on podcasting solely.

In Summer of 2005, iTunes and Apple latched onto podcasting and changed the market due to its ability to push the more commercial podcasts into the ears of itunes owners. Richard quickly realized that the gay/lesbian category had been completely ignored by itunes and saw this as an opportunity. Within a week of iTunes podcasting launch, Richard launched qpodder.com out of a server in the closet in his bedroom which also happened to contain his drag queen clothing.

qPodder.com has since served as the primary directory for GLBT podcasts, providing a way for gay and gay-friendlly podcasters to communicate with each other, and find an initially audience to make the podcasting experience more gratifying. Qpodder also serves as a means for press and academics alike to find gay podcasters for their articles or research. qPodder also provides the internet with two special RSS feeds: One, nellygator.com, is a podcast feed consisting solely of GLBT audio podcasts while another, faggregator.com, is a feed containing GLBT video podcasts.

At the same time and many years prior to his podcasting career, Richard was doing what is now called ‘videoblogging’, or to the more zeitgeist oriented, ‘youtubing’.

In 2000 became involved with the underground filmmaking community in Chicago. In a job working for Artvamp, Richard was the Directory of Photography for her film ‘Other People’s Mirrors.” As a part of this assignment all cast and crew were required to write daily journals of the filmmaking experience in ‘Livejournal’ – one of the first blogging systems.

Richard didn’t really feel like journaling in text form and instead created ‘video journals’ which were basically video diaries and uploaded them to his web site, insanefilms.com and also to his livejournal blog so that people could comment on them on line. To Richard’s surprise, these ‘video journals’ became quite popular with the livejournal community so he kept doing them… to this day.

For the future, Richard Bluestein has no lofty goals other than to keep being able to make a living podcasting and to help americans and other war funding citizens to have an self-awareness which has been subjugated by mass marketing and by many other socio-economic systems.