Having children enter the public school system this last year has really opened my eyes up to a number of things that only parents can identify with. Not only is my son becoming something resembling a person (as opposed to a chubby mass of toddler cuteness), he's exposed to teachings outside the normal curriculum of information I'd normally expose him to (for instance, unlike the local public school system, I probably wouldn't have spent a week of lessons centering around the ins and outs of recycling).

It's not to the point where I feel like I need to intervene and start suggesting alternative topics for my son's teachers, but it is making me aware the need to be in touch with what it is the teachers do with our children during the days, and the importance of having a hand in helping your child get the best education possible.

That's why it was refreshing to sit down with Edward Fields recently on Mashable Conversations and talk with him about what he's doing as CEO of HotChalk.  They're a niche social network for students, teachers and parents that uses the power of quality user-generated-content to improve the education experience for all involved. It's a place for teachers to share in lesson plans that cater to students at all levels of development, parents to stay in touch with what the kids are learning, and kids to better understand and relate the the curriculum they're being taught.

This is one of the most apt and useful applications of the niche social network concept I've come across. If you have a school-aged child or are a teacher, this is a must-see site.

Listen to the MP3 to hear more from CEO Edward Fields and I as we discuss American education and how HotChalk aims to help our children succeed in learning.

Sean and I had the rare opportunity of unmasking a company today on Mashable Conversations. Our guest on the show today was Jon Labes, the founder of a new video marketplace called Plentitube (pronounced like "plentitude, if you change the 'd' to a 'b'). Jon is probably best known as being the creative mind behind Wallstrip, the financial podcast that was later famously sold to CBS Interactive for a tidy sum.

Through his experience in New Media production as well as the experience of taking a show like that from concept to completion to exit, he was made aware of the wide variety of issues that arise for successful independent video producers that we're just not equipped to deal with.  Legal issues abound, as do business decisions, odd technical issues, and sales situations; most of the time indie producers just want to, well, produce.

Plentitube is a marketplace built with that in mind.  It's currently still in an invite only beta situation, but their goal is to take top notch producers and pair them with advertisers, resources and potential investors and owners for the content.  In our interview, we explore the history that led Jon to this venture, as well as the intracies of the marketplace, and how it can benefit the New Media video producer set.

Discussion: YouTube v. Viacom, the $1 Billion Dollar Privacy Question
In our discussion segment, we talk a bit about the YouTube v. Viacom debacle, and what it means (from legal laymen) to open the Pandora's box on user records, and why we're glad it's Google getting sued.  Leave your comments below for inclusion in future shows.

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First of all, if you're American, and you're reading this - I have to ask why? The web is like a ghost town today. There isn't much going on via Twitter. FriendFeed is unusually slow, and about six or so of our two trillion readers showed up to leave a comment today. It's July 4! Independence Day! Go out and have a brew and a hot dog! For all our non-American friends and readers, and the six US readers who have nothing else better to do, Sean P. Aune and I have recorded a special episode of Mashable Conversations today. We scoured the web and couldn't find a guest to come in today, so we reverted to a topic that had particularly irked us from the week past - the bizzarre assumption by some in the blogosphere that Identi.ca is the natural successor to Twitter. I won't steal the show's thunder, but Sean and I puzzle over this idea and try to figure out exactly why this is being said. It's a short episode, so go ahead and watch before you throw on your swimwear and jump in the pool this afternoon.

With the proliferation of information sources and ways to read them, it seems counter-intuitive that one of the hotter topics in the blogosphere is still aggregation, discovery and syndication. Yet here we are, yet another day, yet another Twitter story, yet another FriendFeed story, and yet another Digg story.

Don't get me wrong - I too have a obsessive fascination with the nuanced myriad of way we can move our 1's and 0's around. That's why when I got a ping from Ari Newman, founder and president of company making an AI-powered news filtration service, my ears perked up.

I had a chance to bring him on the Mashable Conversations podcast so I could learn a bit about it. It's that's suitable for news junkies and professional bloggers like myself, but it's primarily targeted to marketing and public relations professionals, as it has a wide variety of graphing and search functions that serve to aggregate keyword searched news from just about every source out there.

It is capable of pulling in any RSS source, any Google alert, and is able to search across a wide variety of sources, from New Media and Old. 

What seems to be clincher on this is the review system, which attempts to learn with at "three dimensional rating system" exactly the style of news you're interested in.  After you're done setting up your complex filtering requirements, you can begin to subtly refine the filters to find the topics you're tracking by rating the source types.  For instance, if you're more interested in finding out user comments, you can place an emphasis on feeds coming out of FriendFeed or Twitter.  If you're focused on New Media response, or a specific response, you can highly rate certain blogs or a certain genre of blogs, and the system will pick up on those relationships.

It sounds like a very advanced system, and it only launched this Monday, so I haven't begun to explore the whole depth of it yet, but what I've been played with so far has kept me intrigued.