Balancing on a giant rubber ball in a broadcast studio and control room carved out of a cottage in Petaluma, Calif., Leo Laporte is an unlikely media mogul.

From that little town in California wine country, he runs his empire, a podcasting network, TWIT. For 30 hours each week, he and the other hosts on his network talk about technology  topics like the best e-book reader or how to get rid of a computer virus  for shows that he gives away online.

Nerdy, yes. Silly, no. TWIT gets its name from Mr. Laporte’s flagship podcast, “This Week in Tech,” which is downloaded by a quarter of a million people each week. He produces 22 other technology-focused podcasts that are downloaded five million times a month. He also streams video all day long that captures his podcasting and a weekend radio show on computers, “The Tech Guy,” that reaches 500,000 more people through 140 stations.

“I don’t want to be just a carbon copy of existing media,” said Mr. Laporte, who at 54 is just old enough to remember using carbon paper in typewriters to make duplicates.