Podcasting for schools: a natural application

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Clearly, podcasting can be a huge benefit for schools. I can think of a few applications right off:

  • Classes (obviously)
  • School announcements
  • Teacher reports to the parents
  • Guest speaker presentations
  • Internal School news magazine
  • Faculty development

Here’s an article written by Russell Educational Consultancy and Productions, “Exploiting the educational potential of podcasting“. Take a read and post your comments here. Thanks to Podcasting News for catching this one.

iPodder’s last breath: a new update

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You just gotta love the guys at iPodder, makers of a great podcatcher (I use it and love it). They know they’re toast because iTunes is coming and of course MS can’t be too far behind (if not ahead???). So what are they doing? They’re goin’ out with style by delivering the lastest version 2.1 with a collection of cool features as posted by Podcasting News:

  • In response to user voting on the ipodder-dev mailinglist, one-click subscription support has been enabled
  • Ability to synch subscriptions to remote OPML files (works with feedmanagers like podnova)
  • Auto cleanup: Ability to specify on a per-feed basis that older episodes should be cleaned up.
  • Genre overriding in iTunes.
  • New right-click option for feeds: Open downloads folder
  • Right-click menus in the episodes and downloads tab link to show notes and hyperlinks found within RSS item description.

Way to go iPodder team! You guys rock! You should have made tons of money and been able to retire by now. I’m very sorry to report that you only got a few scraps in your cookie jar instead. I don’t think this is a good example of the Open Source model.

iTunes 4.9 with podcatching coming really, really soon

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If you heard Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” yesterday you heard him mention that iTunes is coming in two weeks or less.

Get ready all you podcasters for the avalanche of 38Million iTunes desktops coming to a podcast near you. I hope this means my stats will crank up another notch!

Podcasting is cranking

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Those of you that would like to see some hard numbers in terms of growth should check out this Feedburner report: Podcasting on the Rise

Some notable quotes:

On Growth:

It took us nine weeks to manage our first thousand podcasts, and we added our most recent thousand podcasts in under a month. As you can see, the rate of growth changes in bursts. We added about 800 podcasts per month initially, then 1000 a month, and now we’re adding about 1400 a month.

On subscribers:

Just as interesting, podcasts managed by FeedBurner have an average of 33 subscribers, up from an average of 15 subscribers in February. If you discount the feeds with less than 5 subscribers, the average number of subscribers per podcast is 65.

In February, we managed 20 podcasts with over 100 subscribers and hundreds of podcasts with more than 10 subscribers. Now we manage about 20 podcasts with over 1000 subscribers and hundreds of podcasts with more than 100 subscribers.

Just wait until iTunes integrates podcatching.

Blogging for Business

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I had the great honor of leading a panel of bloggers in Hawaii including Roxanne Darling, Burt Lum, and Ryan Ozawa for the International Association of Business Communicators.

We were lucky to record nearly the entire 1 hour presentation. If you want to know more about corporate blogging or business blogging, this podcast is really worth your time. I know that 1 hour is a long time to listen so I broke out the timing below in case you want to jump around:

Listen to this mp3 file Listen to this Panel Discussion

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 03:55: Survey (out of 40) of who uses blogs, rss news readers.
  • 04:48: Context of blogging as part of the social revolutions in human history.
  • 06:38: How powerful are blogs? Clinton, Rather, George Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Moveon.org, all affected.
  • 08:05: How blogging creates main stream media (MSM) reality .
  • 10:20: How blogging affected the Hawaii Duke Bainum campaign.
  • 12:18: What do blogs look like?
  • 14:00: How a blog is really just another Web site but it uses specialized tools and standards, like RSS, to publish its content.
  • 14:33: (low volume) viewing a blogging Web site through the eyes of a news reader and how RSS plays an important role
  • 16:19: Tracking different news sources with an RSS reader (Pluck)
  • 16:53: Question: what’s the difference between going through an RSS newsreader or a Google News Alert
  • 19:30: How your daily routine changes when you use news readers and blogging tools. You read blogs and write blogs.
  • 20:15: What’s different about this model. How blogs reach a very targeted audience and RSS feeds continue to review your content.
  • 21:26: Businessweek quote about 40,000 new blogs created per day and how even a small sliver of a targeted audience can make a blog worth it.
  • 22:36: Will blogging take over MSM or will they co-exist? Story about Clear Channel creating a false blog to talk about their own radio stations.
  • 24:20: Overview/ review of what a blog is.
  • 25:52: Question (low volume) that talks about and RSS news reader (hard to make out)
  • 26:20: Comments about copyrights and blogging. How bloggers can cut and paste, potentially violating copyright. Additional discussion of how the cut-and-pasting that bloggers do a lot of actually helps MSM.
  • 31:10: the wrong reason to use corporate blogs is to create a press release. The purpose is to increase transparency.
  • 33:10: The GM blog and Bob Lutz as a good corporate blogger
  • 34:00: How corporate blogging gives you great free market research
  • 35:20: The corporate cultural changes that one might need to be ready for. How the GM blog caught a lot of heat about bad cars, yet how they responded intelligently to the LA Times scandal.
  • 36:35: If you’re going to get involved with blogging you need to be ready for the truth and be prepared that in the blogosphere, you’re not in control of the message, although you are in control of your message.
  • 37:00: How blogging lets you create your own media so that you can respond instantly to events and not rely on MSM.
  • 38:00: What is the voice behind your company’s blog? It’s important to understand who the company bloggers will be and what their tone will be.
  • 40:00: How the blog can be just another good old fashioned tool to display information. It doesn’t have to be controversial.
  • 41:00: What should corporate HR policy be with respect to blogging? Employees have been fired for blogging. Hawaii is home to one of the first bloggers who lost his job due to blogging, Ian Lind.
  • 43:28: Question & Answer: Are there tools to find out how many subscribers you have to your RSS feed?
  • 46:00: Reviewing Feedburner statistics that show subscribers and how Sitemeter can track statistics.
  • 47:00: Using Google to track how many links are going to your site.
  • 47:50: You need to have a commitment to regular content publication. There is a major cultural change required for your company.
  • 48:20: How people will start linking more often to your site with good practices of publishing content on a regular basis.
  • 49:00: Question: How often should we be posting to our blog? Simple guidelines on posting to blogs. At least once a week and about an hour for that time, perhaps 20 minutes if you get efficient.
  • 51:00: Blogging is here to stay. Recognized by Business Week online means a lot. Blog now and get it or be left in the dust in 5 years.
  • 52:30: Others will be blogging about your company so it’s important to counteract and balance the grass roots blogging that might take place.
  • 53:00: You have to have information about your company going out, otherwise perhaps negative information about your company may be the published authority. How a scathing critique of a restaurant became the highest ranking page instead of the official company web site.
  • 54:42: Question: how do you get corporate folks up to speed with what’s going on with blogging? One way is to create an blogging Intranet.
  • 56:18: Another way is to get management that the blogosphere is part of the media that needs to be dealt with. Once that’s done, it’s easier to get corporate to pour resources. You should have google alerts working and be using newsreaders to get into the blogosphere.
  • 57:30: The corporate blogging efforts should be part of a package.
  • 58:00: What’s a good example of a corporate blog: besides the gm blog already mentioned, Microsoft has created a bunch of blogs at blogs.msdn.com
  • 59:41: What are the demographics of blogging?
  • 60:30: What’s the fastest way to get a blog started? Use blogger.com for free. Bizzycast.com is releasing a corporate blogging tool.
  • 61:48: How do you find someone’s blog? Just add “blog” on your google searches.
  • 62:30: What blogging software do you use? WordPress is a free software and bizzycast is also creating a solution. It’s really not a technical cost but rather a corporate organizational cost.
  • 64:10: What is podcasting? Here’s a video presentation on Podcasting you should look at.
  • 67:22: Question: isn’t podcasting like blogging? HawaiiUp.com is a good example of a blog that does podcasting.
  • 69:30: Why are hobbyists excited about blogging, podcasting, and video blogging?

The panelists also posted some of their own blogs on this:
Burt Lum
Roxanne Darling – Nice pictures!
Ryan Ozawa – contains video too!

Use your favorite Podcatcher to automatically download new video and audio tips as they come! Subscribe to the Podcast and automatically download new video and audio tips as they come!

Steve Job demonstrates new version of iTunes with Podcatching function

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When Apple launches iTunes 4.9, you will see a mambo explosion in the Podcast audience. There are about 60 million iPods on the market and they are all going to start download podcasts very soon.

You can read Steve Jobs presentation here, transcription courtesy of sick little monkey Ryan Ozawa, certified podcasting/iPod freak, who transcribed the whole thing.

The good guys at Make magazine also recorded the session here so you can listen in. There’s also some great screenshots of the product and it looks really great!

Podcasts coming to a cell phone near you

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Many have said that cellphones are a natural mp3 player and I totally agree. Catch this Wired article about what Nokia is doing. Here’s what really struck me:

Nokia would sell 40 million phones with MP3 digital music players this year, compared with 10 million in 2004. By comparison, Apple said it sold 5.3 million iPods in the first three months of 2005.

So if you do the math, you see that Apple will sell 20M iPods this year while Nokia will sell 40M mp3 players (in their phones).

It’s pretty obvious to see that Apple is going to have to create an iPod phone!

Mozilla’s Thunderbird gets a podcatcher

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In this CNET article we find out about yet another client that’s including podcasting support. As I’ve mentioned previously about Media Player, and about the Apple iTunes, this is a total natural. Any client that current understands RSS will soon understand the RSS Enclosures, the technology behind podcasting.

I think the podcast curve is going to be a lot bigger than we previously thought.

Microsoft Windows Media Player will have Podcatching functions built-in

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I just caught these posts on Scobelizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger and also Corante talking about how Microsoft is also (finally) working on integrating Podcatching functions in their Windows Media Player.

It was inevitable. Podcatching is such a lightweight application that integrating it into iTunes and Windows Media Player is a natural. They both already do the downloading, ripping, and synchronization functions, what’s the big deal in adding some simple XML consumption (junction, what’s your) functions?

This is fantastic news for podcasters everywhere. Within about 6 months, we’re all going to have a listener base in the many, many millions.

Fix for WordPress not recognizing RSS enclosures

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If you use WordPress and have found out that for some reason it is not automatically recognizing certain file extensions as enclosures (my personal experience was that it did not recognize .wmv files) it’s because your server doesn’t have the proper MIME-TYPE setting for that file extension.

The way WordPress automatically creates enclosures is that is queries the server with the URI of your linked file (e.g. an mp3 file) and then parses the server’s returned MIME-TYPE. If it discovers the MIME-TYPE is of either audio or video, it then creates the appropriate enclosure entry.

So, if you ain’t gettin’ your RSS enclosure automatically created, it’s because the MIME-TYPE is missing from the server. But how do you fix that? Every server is different so the fix below only applies to an Apache server with the .htaccess feature enabled.

Here’s the fix:

Just edit the .htaccess file on the local home directory of the Web server that is hosting the audio/video files and add the proper MIME-TYPE that corresponds to the file you’re trying to access. In my case I was adding a MIME-TYPE for WMV (Windows Media Video) files. I added the following line into my .htaccess file:

AddType video/x-ms-wmv .wmv

Here’s a table of other mimetypes. You can also of course Google around and find more.

CAUTION: you need to be careful/aware if you already have an .htaccess file and if so, make sure you edit that file and ADD the above line instead of OVERWRITING that file. Of course if you’re sure that file doesn’t exist then you should be able to create it.