I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the SXSW podcast & videocast is among the hottest content you can put on your media-player at this time of the year! subscribe now, content will trickle in over time!
like last year, (almost) all the talks & slides from the Future of Web Apps have been published by Carson Systems. I’ve setup an RSS-feed for those who don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading every single file. enjoy!
leading music-recommendation service Pandora introduced some community-related features earlier this week (check their official blog for the full scope). however, listener-profiles (including listings of tracks which received most thumbs-ups & -downs) and a very basic search for listeners, artists & stations can’t really keep up with advanced community-features offered by last.fm. f.e., Pandora lacks last.fm’s ‘Musical Neighbours’, a feature that connects listeners by their shared tastes. on the upside, the new user-profiles allow to instantly playback bookmarked tracks on-demand. for now, I suggest to use PandoraFM, a mashup combining the best of both of products by submitting Pandora-playlists into Last.fm’s listener-history.
ps: if you’re interested in music-theory and the categorization Pandora is based on, you might want to check out the Pandora Podcast, featuring Kevin Seal, who works as a musical analyst at Pandora.
social-news site digg.com announced a major upgrade earlier today. besides some changes in user-interface and frontpage-composition, biggest news is the integration of online-video and podcasts in the top-level navigation. podcasts can be dugg either by series or episode, playback for both audio- & video works straight from inside digg. popular footage from social-video sites like YouTube or Metacafe pops up in a slick lightbox. unlike competitor Netscape (who’s been doing video since quite a time), digg is not hosting videos on its own servers, but is rather embedding the original material. while this might be an advantage over Netscape (after all users can stick to their favorite video-service and won’t have to upload their clips to yet another site), it seems awkward that users can’t submit videos themselves - currently digg seems to fetch only the most popular ones automatically. still, I think chances are good for digg to become the single point of entry for online-video… given the plethora of video-sites launched this year, a meta-aggregator is definitely needed.
Office 2.0, the conference on web-technology and office software taking place in San Francisco on october 11th & 12th, is accompanied by Office 2.0 Podcast Jam - a meta-blog collecting live-blogging around the event, podcasts published by speakers, scheduled chats with conference hosts and presenters as well as audio-content produced by non-attendees - a great resource and a way to contribute for those not able to attend!
just subscribed to the Daily Search Cast (thanks to a recent post by Jason Calacanis). during his daily 30 minutes, Search-Engine-Watch-founder Danny Sullivan covers all the news on search engines and search marketing. yesterdays episode discusses the alpha-launch of ‘human-powered’ search engine ChaCha (I just gave it a try but was quite disappointed), Yahoo! Answers UK, Netscape Search, news from Google handing out Orkut-userdata to the brazilian government (hmm), and much, much more! this show really presents loads of targeted information in a very condensed way… I’m subscribed!
Evan Williams compared about 30 podcasting-sites by their average weekly Alexa ranking. besides well-known flaws in Alexa’s ranking and Williams probably being biased (he’s CEO of second-ranked Odeo.com), the results are quite interesting. the top-ten according to Alexa include hosting service libsyn (1), portals like Odeo (2) or Podomatic (3), content-networks like Podshow (5) and Podtech (10) and directories Podcast Pickle (4), PodcastAlley (6) and Podcast.net (8).
podcast-creators can use the ranking to check if their show is listed in the most important directories. while many sites discover podcasts automatically (probably by fingering data from other directories or the now-obsolete indiepodder.org), some might need a hint to index your feed.
update: Cameron Reilly from The Podcast Network points out that - for what reason ever - TPN has not been listed by Williams - he claims rank 10 right above Podtech…which proves what Williams points out himself: that the list is by no means complete.
BlogTalkRadio is a service giving podcasters the ability to do live call-in radioshows without the hastle of connecting streaming-servers (i.e. icecast) with VOIP-software like Skype. though this basically doesn’t fit the asynchronous nature of podcasting, there is definitely demand for such an offering among podcasters. BlogTalkRadio (currently in Beta) will allow up to five people to participate in conversations using ordinary phonelines (currently there are no clues on a possible integration of existing VOIP-clients ). an unlimitied number of listeners can tune in either via phone or Windows Media Player. additionally, every show/talk is recorded and archived.
as reported, Dave Winer has startet a free and independent podcast-directory at podcasting.opml.org. everybody is welcome to contribute branches to the directory by collecting podcast-feeds in opml-files (the outline processor markup language allows to describe feed-lists in a standardized way - Dave Winer’s OPML-Editor is a great Windows/Mac-tool to write opml). for details, subscribe to the mailing list at groups.yahoo.com.
Dave Winer recently proposed to build an open podcast directory in replacement for the now defunct ipodder.org (the domain is held by Adam Curry). a good idea, since everybody developing podcatchers, podcast-portals or similar websites needs directory-data to base their app on. using ipodder in its current state as data-source leads to bad user-experiences (think broken feed-links), as Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central notices.
I wish a possible new directory would feature a more user-friendly interface than ipodder… and why not abandon the idea of node-managers and strict hierarchy in favor of user-based tagging? Dave’s post doesn’t make clear if he plans to develop new software or just wants to revive the original ipodder on a new domain. I’m sure there is potential for a user-driven independent directory…isn’t everybody tired of iTunes, Podcast Alley and the likes?
Maybe you could explain me sometime
