hmm.. i agree with burying the publishing functions for the reasons you mentioned, but i think the interchangeability of the words show/user/publisher would cause even more confusion than inadvertently making new users think that they have to publish their own lessons to use the site.

if you take the words on the lesson page "This is our lesson archive. Click on any user's name to view all their shows, or any lesson title to visit the lesson." i think they'll be unlikely to make the connection (at first anyways) that Absolute Beginners is a user. maybe they'll see mikexx88 on the list and make the cognitive leap but i don't think so. i think this site model is more suited for youtube than here, for a couple of reasons:

- the site operator is publishing content, not under the username PopupChinese, but usernames that sound like content.

- a typical user name likely won't contain any words relevant to the content they are publishing, unless they intentionally change it to a content name, which makes them seem less like a person. but here, much more so than youtube, a username that reflects the content type is much more important, for reasons i don't have time to list at the moment.

- basically, i just have a hard time seeing what i call 'show names' and 'user names' in the same list, even though in actuality they are the same thing.

i'm not saying it won't work but i think the abstraction is at the expense of clarity.

maybe it's just been too long since i left 1 twilight lane.. :)