… I can continue to bring great audio podcasts to my listeners every day. My name is Christopher Penn, and I’m a podcaster. I produce the daily free Financial Aid Podcast, a show that brings financial aid tips and hints to students, parents, and families every day. You know how much a college degree costs these days? About 40 Seagate 750GB Pushbutton drives (~$500 each) a year at private institutions, and about 20 at public schools.

Each day, my show covers financial aid, scholarships, and personal finance tips. Since I went on the air in April 2005, we’ve covered nearly $4 billion in scholarships, or 8 million Seagate drives’ worth. Here’s the catch. Each show takes about 250 MB of disk space to work on, because it’s all uncompressed audio. I chew up disk space like crazy, and though I love my Powerbook G4, I don’t love the puny 80 GB hard drive inside.

What I really want to do is start getting into video work, to bring visual tutorials for things like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to life. Video, unfortunately, is even more hungry for drive space. A single 5 minute clip in iMovie can eat 8 GB of disk space, easy. I can’t afford to do that with my current setup, but I’d love to, because I think one well made, short FAFSA video could help HUNDREDS of college students get more financial aid and graduate with less debt.

So here’s my plea to you, Mr. Scoble and the team at Seagate. Put a Seagate Pushbutton 750GB on my desk, and your investment in my little podcast will put at least one student through college debt-free with the content I’ll produce. Thanks for supporting new media.

Tags: Seagate Contest Scoble Podtech