Matt May is a Web accessibility specialist, and has written on the interaction of people and technology since 1995. He keeps his own weblog at bestkungfu.com, and produces a podcast called Staccato, which features Creative Commons-licensed music.
Alex Williamsblogs, consults and produces unconference style events, where people immerse in DIY media. These are fun occasions, designed for people who want to get together with authors, artists, technologists and leading thinkers to converse, eat, listen to music, write, shoot photos and post podcasts and videoblogs. Alex also works with companies to establish DIY approaches, where writing, photography, voice and video come together to create new conversations and communities. Alex is currently fascinated with digital photography. His girlfriend calls him a Flickrholic. Send Alex a nice message: alexhwilliams at gmail.com.
Nicole Simon loves blogging and podcasting, dashed with an European view. As consultant she helps to facilitate such tools for business purposes or personal publishing empires. She can be found at cruel to be kind and on her private blog Useful Sounds.
Roland Tanglao is a well known podcasting enthusiast and a passionate advocate of blogs, RSS, and social software as a means of online expression for people, organizations and businesses. He is a prominent participant in the blogosphere and online communities and one of the founders of Bryght and as Bryght's Chief Blogging Officer reads hundreds of blogs daily. He graduated from the University of Waterloo, worked at Nortel Networks where he ran its first internal corporate blog, has has been blogging since 1999, and was the first business blogging consultant in Canada.
My favorite broadcast publisher is extending their "podcast trial":
There are plans to bring the total number of programmes in the trial to 50, with more programmes to be added to the trial once confirmed.
Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactivr, said: "In extending the trial, we're offering some of BBC Radio's most distinctive programming and a broad range of shows to cater to most tastes.
"The feedback we get from the trial is helping to inform our strategy for 'audio on demand', giving listeners the control they are becoming increasingly used to in the digital world.
"Downloading and podcasting are potentially fantastic ways for us to make our on demand programmes as accessible as live radio always has been."
The BBC manages to stay one of the most visible public radio stations worldwide who manages to integrate "new media" into their program landscape.
As part of the continuing Motorola and Yahoo! relationship, this mobile application would allow consumers to not only drag and drop podcasts directly from the PC straight to their mobile phone through the Yahoo! Music Engine, but would also let consumers directly download podcasts over-the-air* to their handset using an integrated application.
Free content to have more fun with your mobile phone - an attractive combination if we will have reasonable rates for downloading all those podcasts directly from the net.
For Yahoo, this may be another big step into the mobile market - not only search results but interesting content. Please note that in some countries outside the US the overall usage of mobile phones is much higher. Well, make that most western countries. :)
If, like me, you can't get enough of the XX Olympic Winter Games. Podcasting News has gathered a list of Olympics-related podcasts, including feeds from the AP, New York Times, and the US Olympic Team itself.
The online video coverage from NBC isn't bad -- but it's not portable, either. All of the media available is streamed, and unavailable outside the United States. It may be 2012 or 2014 before we can subscribe to portable video of a given sport, given the licensing restrictions that are in place. There's no doubt that the video is there. After all, nearly every country has cameras in Torino right now. But the IOC bureaucracy isn't very likely to understand the potential of the Long Tail for niche events like curling, equestrian, and distance running. Or for the tournaments (baseball, softball, basketball, hockey, soccer) that are too much to cover well on one network. Which is too bad, really. Especially for people like me.
Coca Cola is sending bloggers and podcasters to the Olympics. I wonder if these blogs will be worth reading. Why make such a point that these people will only have positive things to say? Do they not trust hese college students to just post their own impressions of the Olympics? Won't this just make these posts a bit too fuzzy?
From Mediapost:
Adding to its usual marketing efforts during the games, Coke is paying to fly and accommodate young representatives from China, Germany, Italy, Canada, Austria, and the United States--each of whom has agreed to keep their posts positive, according to Coca-Cola spokesman Philipp Bodzenta.
"They understand they we're looking for the positive side of the Olympics," said Bodzenta, adding: "They are part of the PR team, but they are not Coke employees."
But now Ricky Gervais has a world record after his podcast became the most downloaded ever.
Gervais' weekly show on Guardian Unlimited, featuring writing partner Stephen Merchant and sidekick Karl Pilkington, averaged 261,670 downloads a week during its first month.
[...]
The podcast debuted on Guardian Unlimited in December 2005 and regularly tops the iTunes podcasting chart, beating the likes of Radio 1 breakfast host Chris Moyles.
While it is nice to see podcasting in the Guinness Book of World Records and Rick Gervais show surely being a success - how can something be the most downloaded one if there are no agreed upon statistics in this area?
Many people for example mistake hits for downloads on a podcast, an error many people make also with RSS Feeds. "My feed was accessed 24 times today!" can mean 24 actual subscribers or just a service checking every minute. With podcast, some software downloads chunks (generating several hits in the servers' log files) or access one and the same file over and over again.
The mentioning of iTunes in this article indicates to me that there is perhaps an interest of Apple to have their download numbers be the standard for such a world record - but they don't publish those and they are only per store basis, also not a reliable number. And, do we count numbers in average, numbers per episode?
But, if you are in doubt and you have a better download rate, you still have a chance to enter yourself in the Guinness Book:
The Ricky Gervais Show will be included in the 2007 edition of the Guinness World Records' book - as long as no other podcast tops it before it is published in the autumn.
I would assume Podshow and other high traffic podcasters will start making phone calls - both to the Guineas World Records' Book and to their webhosters.
Today, Apple announced a new 1GB iPod nano, priced at $149. The 512MB and 1GB iPod Shuffles drop to $69 and $99. Engraving is free on all of them at the Apple Store.
Showtime also joins the iTunes video lineup today, with first-season episodes of "Weeds", "Sleeper Cell" and "Fat Actress" available at $1.99 a pop. But be careful: having "Weeds" on your iPod may qualify as possession of drug paraphernalia in some states.
Alex Williams
Matt May
Nicole Simon
Roland Tanglao
