DIGITAL L.A. : TALKSPOT.COM LEAPS OVER THE BARRIERS OF TALK RADIO.

Byline: David Bloom

Ken Williams thought he was going to retire. After founding and building Sierra Online into a formidable player in the video game industry, then selling it for hefty bucks, it was time to build a big house in Cabo and enjoy the good life sailing around the planet.

Except it didn't quite work out that way. Turns out Williams is an inveterate entrepreneur who can't resist the siren song of a good idea, even from the deck, or maybe particularly from the deck, of a 60-foot Cheoy-Lee ketch bobbing in the Gulf of California.

``I actually never intended to work again in my life,'' Williams said. ``But I spent two weeks in retirement and said, `This is dumb.' ''

Then there was his wife, who was complaining that in remote Cabo San Lucas - tucked 850 miles down the Baja California peninsula from San Diego - she had no way to hear the talk shows she'd come to love in recent years.

Figuring out how to solve that problem led to Williams' next great idea: an Internet version of talk radio and television shows that takes advantage of the new medium's strengths.

So he hired a crack team of managers, cobbled together an array of interesting hosts and started writing code, about half of it himself.

The result: TalkSpot Inc. (at www.talkspot.com), which puts its own New Media spin on talk radio, doing things with the genre on the Internet that you really can't do well in traditional broadcast venues.

For one thing, there's that darned Federal Communications Commission, which keeps slapping shock/schlockmeisters like Howard Stern with fines for racy talk.

No such limits hang over the jocks on Channel Z, one of four channels of all-day programming that TalkSpot offers.

``It's more like what you can get away with on HBO, like a Richard Pryor,'' said Williams of the content on Channel Z. ``It's not exactly for kids.''

But the off-color humor and grown-ups-only topics of Channel Z are the least of it.

Show hosts cover a broad range of subjects, grouped loosely together on the four channels. One specializes in news and political topics; another explores ``new age stuff, astrology, feng shui''; a third features cooking shows, therapists and other ``Life.''

And then there's the talk part. Here you can interact with the hosts in ways that were never possible in radio or TV, no matter how much Jerry Springer's guests ``interact'' upside each others' heads.

``There's three pictures: A live feed from the studio, the middle is whatever the host is talking about, and the third is a picture of the caller, or whatever the caller wants to put there,'' Williams said.

That could be, for instance, floor plans to a house for review during the feng shui show, Williams said.

``You can do (a simple port of talk radio to the Internet), but who wants to do it when you get it there?'' Williams said. ``It's like you could hold a copy of a publication up to a TV camera but it wouldn't be very engaging. It's kind of an underutilization. It works, but it's not what the medium is meant to do.''

And though Williams has designed the site to work on a modem running at 28.8 kbps, he's thinking down the road to a world where much faster access makes even more interesting programming possible.

``What we're doing now is what can be done today,'' Williams said. ``Five years from now, we'll be doing what people think of when they think of interactive television. Our real model is to be a network of other people's content.''

The idea is to provide a venue for ``anybody with a following of at least 20,000 people,'' to centralize those ``affiliates'' under TalkSpot's site and technology and to make money off the advertising.

``There are lots of other groups out there,'' Williams said. ``They could be political parties, NASCAR, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church. We're really narrow-casting. Our niche is going to be finding people who have an audience that maybe it's big but not big enough to have a TV audience.''

Stay tuned.

The bully pulpit

Gnomon Inc., a Hollywood-based school for computer animators, has become the latest venue for speakers on developments in entertainment technology and special effects, joining forums such as the American Film Institute in Los Feliz and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica.

The speaker series will next feature Doug Nichols, director of digital training at Walt Disney Feature Animation, on Feb. 11, talking about the history of computer animation in Disney's movies.

The event is free to Gnomon students, and $10 for the public. For more information, contact Gnomon at www.gnomon3d.com, or call the school at its headquarters at 1015 N. Cahuenga Blvd., suite 54301, in Hollywood.