Last Friday, Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central (also Blubrry and Raw Voice) broke new media ground with his 24-Hour Podcast Marathon.

The event, which raised awareness and money for the One Laptop Per Child initiative, was an around-the-clock international Internet media event, featuring audio and video interviews with dozens of people in the podcast industry.

One thing that struck us as especially cool about the marathon was the way Todd combined a variety of cutting-edge technologies, including free or inexpensive online audio, video and chat services, to connect his Hawaii studio to people around the world. The technology let Todd not only cross the barriers of oceans and countries, but the barriers between host and audience.

We asked Todd how he put the 24-hour podcast together….

Connecting Internet Audio, Video and Chat

“For the chat I used Talkshoe,” explained Cochrane, shown, to the right, in his studio.

Talkshoe is a site that lets people create TalkCasts, online talk shows, discussion groups and conferences. It lets you connect up to 250 people, control who can talk, mute voice or chat and record the event.

“I was connected to it via a normal dial-in phone line, and was using a Telos Phone Bridge here locally to patch in the audio,” he added.

“That audio was fed to my Mac, which was receiving the video feed from an old video camera I had here,” he explained. “In turn, that was connected to the Mac via FireWire and was feeding the video feed via Ustream.TV.”

Ustream.TV is a live interactive video broadcast platform that lets anyone with a camera and an Internet connection broadcast a live show to the Internet.

In addition to the analog audio coming from the Talkshow dial-up line and the local video, Todd integrated Skype calls. “On several occasions, people called me on Skype and I had them patched in.”

“All told, it could have been done pretty easily on two laptops, but I had a third machine just doing audio recording,” added Todd. “The magic, though, was the phone bridge that let me push the audio multiple places.”

Todd reports that he is starting to put the archived content online at 24hrPodcast.com. The site is, in Todd’s words, a “primitive WordPress site at this point but I wanted to get the content up online as soon as possible. We hope to have a iTunes feed link as well in short order. In the meantime, please subcribe to the feed at http://www.24hrpodcast.com/feed/.”