rumor mill: iPhone to download podcasts wirelessly

Ho long have I been wanting this? Wishing for this? Rumors are that the iPhone's next software update will include the ability to download podcasts from "the cloud." Niiiice. Only took 18 months, but I won't quibble.

Now, syncing a to-do list with iCal? Helloooo?

Fair Use: Using copyrighted material legally

American University's Center for Social Media recently released a tremendously helpful resource that helps to clear some misconceptions about the concept of fair use of copyrighted materials. There are a lot of people out there that think fair use is any use where they aren't paid... not true! There are a lot of ways a video producer can rely on fair use, and this Code of Best Practices soes a great job of spelling it out. Check it out here.

Best Wifi Hotels

Talk about a great resource for the mobile traveler... I've been surprised to find that sometimes nicer hotels have worse amenities in the WiFi space than cheaper hotels. Now my suspicions and anecdotal experiences have been confirmed by the folks over at Hotel Chatter. Take a look at their 2008 Best WiFi Hotels for more...

Easy Podcast Marketing

Great stuff from Chris Penn... an eight step guide to marketing your podcast.

A sidebar regarding the title... it's funny how some people are staying away from using the term "podcast" while others are doggedly sticking by it. There's no question the technology will be around well into the future as we get more and more adopters, but what might happen is that the name gets subtly changed because of this (silly, in my opinion) fear that the term podcast connotes an amateurish production.

Ok, sidebar over... check out the audio or e-book version of Penn's guide.

How does your iPod's illegal tracks stack up against the average teenager?

The Times of London reports a study regarding the amount of illegal tracks on the typical iPod:

Teenagers and students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players, the largest academic survey of young people's music ownership has found.

* * *

The average digital music player carries 1,770 songs, meaning that 48 per cent of the collection is copied illegally. The proportion of illegally downloaded tracks rises to 61 per cent among 14 to 17-year-olds. In addition, 14 per cent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person's collection are copied.

So, how does your iPod stack up? A quick poll here is definitively "under" but we're a squeaky clean kind of operation...

Podcasting in plain English

Kudos to commoncraft.com:

Podcasting listenership continues to grow

Continued growth in the podcasting sphere... the latest technology poll from Jacobs Media reports an 87% jump in numbers year to year. The survey covered 27,000 respondents, across 69 Rock-formatted stations, so it's not exactly a broad demographic, but a pretty important one. Of those surveyed, nearly one in three people had listened to a podcast before. Lots of room for more growth...

New media ad rates announced

The Association for Downloadable Media announced an industry-wide proposal for advertising standards in podcasting and video podcasts. The highlights, as reported in Podcasting News:

• Insertions - Pre-recorded file provided by sponsor
• Time :10, :15, :30, :1:00
• Location: pre roll, mid roll, post roll
• Frequency: variable by episode or time period
• Audio: 128k stereo/64k mono mp3
• Video: H.264 mp4 Aspect: 4×3 or 16×9 – sd and hd
• Content Participation - sponsors message included in show
• Time: variable from :1 second to full episode
• Location: pre roll mid roll post roll or integrated w/in episode(s)
• Frequency: variable by episode or time period

Check out the ADM website for more. I like the concept of standards here, but as I've been posting lately, podcasters that are in it to make some dineros should probably seek to diversify beyond just ad revenues.

Using New Media to Promote Your Book

Podcasting News has a great story that goes hand in hand with my post from the other day about using podcasting and new media as a way to promote other things you are selling... like your book.

One of Nineball Media's clients has found success in creating an ongoing community that is tied into a book. It's a great way to expand on the concepts and create a launching point for other ideas... different products? a second book? The best part is that the podcast is free content that listeners are excited to receive - not merely a series of advertisements wrapped around some minimal content.

If you're a budding author, think about how you can use new media before, during and after you publish as a companion to what you're writing! With the news that podcasting continues to grow and reach mainstream acceptance, the time to integrate new media into your plans is now.

Will It Blend: a great model for revenue generation from new media

Podcasting News has a terrific article on the Will It Blend phenomenon... using new media as an advertising substitute (although that might not be the right way to look at it).

If you haven't seen the videos, the Blendtec blender company has found a huge earnings jump by showing their product demolish things like soda cans and iPhones. Do yourself a favor and check out what happens when an iPhone is blended. Wow.

Moral of this stor: Think of your podcast or video podcast not as a revenue generator in and of itself... it might be a better awareness raiser for some other business interest: a service you provide or a product you sell. Sure, some podcasters are doing a good job monetizing their shows through ads, but for others this may be your better path if you want to leverage new media into profits.

The latest on LibSyn stats problems

I've long been a proponent of LibSyn as a host for podcast files, and I've generally been happy recommending them to clients. One of these days, they just might get stats right. Here's their latest on the latest in the years-long battle they've been fighting against the lack of scalability of their original system:

We have repaired this mishap as best we can and are moving forward with the work on the next generation stats system which will handle these types of issues in a much better manner. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

This next-gen system apparently will fix the stats issue from the ground up... here's hoping it will succeed (I'm a fan of the LibSyn folks and hope for continued success). One solution in the near term is to store files on LibSyn, but run your RSS feed through Feedburner. Use the Feedburner feed as the one listeners and viewers use to subscribe to your show. Of course, Feedburner isn't immune from issues, but from a stats standpoint, it seems to be a lot more stable than the built in Libsyn option for now.

New Media Expo: Vegas, baby, Vegas

The New Media Expo schedule is official... lots of people were interested in a move from (sleepy?) Ontario, CA to a slightly more uptempo Las Vegas locale. Good thing August 14-16 is a good indoor time in the desert... more quality time with vendors and podcasters in the AC!

PodCamp DC

I'm happy to say we're getting a great group amassing across the river in Arlington, VA for the upcoming PodCamp DC. It will be April 18-20 at the Art Institute of Washington in the Spectrum Theater. Just judging by the list of attendees, this should be a good show if you live or work near the DC area. PodCamps have been really great resources for new and experienced podcasters... check it out here. Oh, and it's totally free!

Podcast host sees profits increasing

Podcasting News reports good news for podcasting host Wizzard Media:

Wizzard Software, the parent company of Liberated Syndication and several podcast hosting services, announced today that revenues for the fourth quarter of 2007 were $1,540,992, a 108% increase over revenues of $739,551 in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Podshow on layoffs: no comment

Adam Curry talks about "the focused strategy and direction PodShow has embarked on" for Daily Source Code 733 but nothing about layoffs. Mark Hopkins at Mashable called around and got this:

I tried contacting three different PodShow offices in search of someone for comment, but the only one that picked up was their San Francisco office. They were aware of the news, and sounded rather irritated that I’d be calling to check up on the rumors, but offered no comment, confirmation or denial on the matter.

We'll likely hear more next week.

Podshow layoffs?

Valleywag is reporting that Podshow's venture capital is apparently not enough to save about 30% of their workforce. Take this one with a few grains of salt... a lot of their reporting (particularly on Yahoo) is way off or overstated. If true, however, this strikes me as a serious indictment of Podshow's growth strategy.

Housecleaning: server transfer/downtime

We'll be having some downtime here at Nineball Media as we shift servers on March 20th (next Thursday as I type this). You might experience some delays in getting in touch with us during that process, but everything should be operational in short order. Thanks!

You don't need a million downloads to be successful

I thought this piece by Kevin Kelly was really interesting... he suggests you can find a great deal of success if you have 1000 "true fans" rather than striving for a million downloads. Good stuff if you are trying to find ways to make a living off of your new media.

MacBook Air: A downside to the ever-shrinking technology

From the latest Newsweek... Gone, Without a Trace

On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well. My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin.
* * *
As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.

Yikes. For the record, my girlfriend has a MacBook Air, and I can totally see something like this happening...

Podcasts and music: law and licensing issues

Form time to time I like to sprinkle in a bit of the law here on the blog (which is only a slight hat tip to my other life as an honest-to-goodness lawyer). I only do it when we need to, and only when I stumble upon good stuff like this great resource... last summer's Podcast & new Media Expo panel on music licensing. One of the panelists is Colette Vogele, an expert on IP law in this area (and author of the Podcasting Legal Guide... an indispensable resource).

It covers the four different types of licenses and a primer on copyright law. Check it out here.

Feedburner ain't infallible

I just spent the morning cursing Feedburner.

While working on a client's premium podcast, the service that has always been a really nice way of creating a welcome interface for users (play now buttons, choice of subscribe options, etc.) totally rebuffed any attempt to make episode #1 be recognized in an mp3 enclosure. That's fancy talk for "it didn't work, and iTunes wouldn't see a podcast." I still can't figure out if it was a Blogger problem or not, but it was officially not working... despite all the elements being there.

So, it was back to the olden days of podcasting... yep all the way back to 2004. I had to code my own source RSS feed and plug that into Feedburner. Lo and behold it worked. I wonder what people who weren't mucking with hand rolled RSS feeds do when presented with this issue? I suspect they throw their hands in the air and give up... that's a shame, and it shows how we have a ways to go in the industry to truly make it simple when a Blogger-Feedburner handshake won't work on the first, second or even third try...

BTW, if you're in the same boat I was this morning, check out the podcast feed generator. It'll get your feed parsed out for episode one. Beyond that you have to write your own code in addition to what it spits out. Still, a handy resource in a pinch.

Olympic podcasts? Don't look for an athlete-produced one.

The International Olympic Committee has just made NBC and other rights holders (who give them lots and lots of money) very happy. Athletes are banned from podcasting from the Olympics according to Podcasting News. Their take on the IOC guidelines:

[A]udio podcasting, video podcasting, photoblogging and vlogging are banned for Olympic athletes, media representatives, officials and staff. Anyone violating the guidelines may be banned from the Olympics and sued for damages.

Too bad. Wouldn't it have been cool to get an insider look at some of the track athletes' prep? Swimmers' parties after the final lap's been swum? This all goes back to my original theory that the Olympics have gone downhill since Lake Placid 1980... but then again, I didn't exactly get an Eric Heiden podcast or a US Hockey video podcast then either...

Podcasting predictions

The head of Wizzard Media projects significant growth, matching the marketing report from a few days ago:

Well, I’d like to predict that the rest of industry getting better at reporting.

I’d have to guess that, oh, if i had a crystal ball to forecast Wizzard’s statistics, my educated guess is 1.5 - 1.8 billion downloads, and double to four times the ad spending of the past year.

More listeners... more revenue. This medium is growing, despite the doom and gloom predictions (sort of) back at the New Media Expo. Now, do I think tech podcasts are growing? No... those were the realm of the early adopters, and I think (maybe... perhaps) that they've maxed out on listeners. Not as good for Leo Laporte, but plenty good for the yoga podcasts, the political podcasts, and everthing else in between.

Podcast advertising and ratings standards

The Association of Downloadable Media announced that it will be presenting "Advertising and Sponsorship Standards and Guidelines for Traffic Measurement" at the ad:tech Expo in San Francisco, April 15-17. Should be interesting.

Speaking of ratings and other metrics, a recent article suggested that most podcasts are consumed on computer desktops rather than portable media players like iPods. That's good news if you are a podcaster that spends additional time putting together shownotes and other additions on their webpage...

Audacity recovery utility

For you Mac users* of Audacity you may have had a crash and lost your recording. It happens... trust me. I just had a massive crash and turned to my friend, the Audacity Recovery Utility, and it made a very bad problem turn into a blip on the radar... a small bump in the road...

You see, Audacity is always saving your audio in about 10 second chunks. The problem is that in a lengthy recording, you have hundreds of these chunks. You could string them together one by one, but that would take forever and probably not work anyways. Download the program (there'sa version for older PowerPC Macs as well as Intel ones) and make it your friend. The trick is finding the hidden temp files... go into your Audacity preferences tab to find them - it's usually in a hidden folder you can't find without going into the finder (Go>Go to Folder). Once you have them, plug that path into the recovery utility and let it roll. It will string these files together into a WAV file in the same place as those temp files.

After that, breathe a sigh of relief.

*PC people, check out a similar option here.

Wizzard going public

Podcasting host Wizzard Media has been approved to be listed on the American Stock Exchange... kind of the minor leagues of stock, but still a good sign for podcasting's growth as a business!

Professional podcast secrets

Ok, I don't know about secrets per se, but Michael Geoghegan is releasing a series of professional podcasting tips over on his blog. I plan to check them out... he's been a pretty big name in the business and assuredly has some interesting things to say.

Apple's offerings: 2008 MacWorld Keynote

I'm blogging this as we go along... here's Apple's new stuff as announced by elJobso this morning in San Francisco:

9:18 AM - Time Capsule, a new network attached storage device that merges the Airport Extreme with a big old hard drive. Wireless backups for your notebooks... $299/$499 (500GB/1TB)

9:22 AM -iPhone and iPod Touch get a a lot of new goodies, most notably the ability to find yourself on a Google map automatically. Nice feature. The Touch will now include a lot of apps from the iPhone, most notably Mail. Weird part? Apple's throwing in a $20 fee for upgrading current Touch owners... kind of surprising there.

9:36 AM - iTunes Store now offers rentals... most surprisingly it includes ALL studios, including Universal. Universal owns NBS and we all remember that they yanked TV shows from the iTunes Store this season. You have 30 days to start watching it, and once you start you have 24 hours to watch and finish it. Movies are all transferable to iPods and iPhones. $2.99 for older titles and $3.99 for new titles. HD is also now available for a buck more.

9:44 AM - Apple TV Take 2 - an upgrade of the current allows movie and TV purchases & rentals from the screen. The YouTube offerings have increased as well (presumably for iPhone owners too). All purchases sync back to your computer. More HD podcasts as well... good news for those of you who jumped on this! Also new: Flickr integration. That's pretty nice... definite upgrades to a product that was coolly received so far. Existing owners get the new software for free, and new units ship in 2 weeks (with a price drop to $229).

10:08 AM - What we've all been waiting for (and by "we" I mean me) - the MacBook Air. Jobs describes it as the world's thinnest notebook... .16 inches thick at its narrowest point, .75 inches at its thickest (!?!). Fits in a manilla envelope. It has a backlit 13" LED display (that's lower power consumption... nice touch). The screen trackpad has multi-touch just like an iPhone too. It can be skinny because it's using iPod hard drives in it. "Ships with 80GB drive, option of 64GB SSD." So, not a notebook for storing a ton of stuff, but they didn't compromise on speed... its got a full Intel Core 2 Duo in there that's slower than the other MacBooks, but it's probably because it's 60% smaller than the ones in the MacBook line.

USB port and a headphone jack on one side, but no internal optical drive. Apple has an interesting new system that allows the MacBook Air to "borrow" an optical drive wirelessly from other Macs on network. External USB drives are available too for the people that need to spin a DVD or CD. 5 hour battery life... this sucker ships in 2 weeks... $1799.

MacWorld keynote tomorrow

What's in store for us tomorrow? The dribbles of rumors suggest some new hardware and perhaps even movie rentals, but the most intriguing bit of info comes from the sneak peeks at banners showing us that "There's something in the air." Lots of speculation from expanded wireless features to (get this) wireless charging of new notebooks. I think I agree with the good folks over at the Apple Blog: "I’m guessing no one really has a clue." We'll see... I plan on skipping a regularly scheduled meeting to follow a bunch of live-bloggers' accounts beginning tomorrow at noon ET/9 PT. Check back here on the blog for thoughts on the revelations...

Wizzard Media: Over 1 billion served

Amazing news today regarding podcasting... Wizzard Media, owner of LibSyn and other hosting platforms announced it served over 1 billion podcasts in 2007. This is (I believe) certified via their partnership with Nielson announced last September, so the numbers aren't inflated - an allegation that has dogged PodShow in the past year, rightly or wrongly. ("Perhaps it too topped a billion but was concerned that no one would believe them," writes Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.)

Rob Walch, Wizzard VP of podcaster relations had this to say to Podcasting News:

There is a lot of misguided talk about podcasting being dead. We just are not seeing it. We continue to see growth in the numbers each month. To us, at least, podcasting keeps growing.
* * *
We hope that 2008 will be the year that advertisers stop thinking of podcasting as an experiment, and start thinking of it as a necessity for every campaign.

Good news all around!

Best of CES

A lot of talk at CES this week about the battle over HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray (hint: go with Blu-Ray, it seems) and a lot of robots. Beyond that, I'd say the best product was one I first heard about on Leo Laporte's show a month ago, that's apparently one of those rare "too good to be true" things that actually delivers.

The Eye-Fi wireless SD card sits in your digital camera like any other storage card. However, it also automatically sends your photos via wi-fi to a host of storage sites like Flickr. Yeah, automatically... no syncing, no looking for that USB cable... nothing. I was skeptical when I first heard of this, but apparently it works like a charm.

Speech recognition meets the law

I am always interested in seeing technology poke its head into legal applications... check out this video where a young attorney figured out how to integrate voice recgonition software with templates for often-used forms he uses in his law practice. Wish I had that ten years ago!

CES this week

The Consumer Electronics Show is this week in Vegas... there's already been a lot said about Bill Gates' last keynote before the assembled masses as Microsoft CEO. The real feature is the new gear that gets announced. I'll filter through the announcements and give some thoughts here this week.