Podcasters Across Borders, a Canadian podcasting unconference, has announced its schedule for the 2008 event, being held June 20-22 in Kingston, Ontario:
Natural/organic supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, is launching Whole Earth Generation, a video podcast series dedicated to raising environmental awareness among young people.
The podcast project is beginning with a search for six “fresh-faced personalities” aged 8 to 17, to be auditioned as hosts of this green-themed series. Children from all over the United States and Canada are invited to try out for the online series, premiering today and running through April 29.
“We are excited to celebrate Earth Month with this series … about eco-friendly actions and how they can make a difference,” said Heather Kennedy, Senior Coordinator of National Marketing for Whole Foods Market. “So many shoppers tell us they have learned how to be more environmentally conscious by listening to their kids. We hope this program takes that trend to an even broader audience via the Internet.”
Topics on the podcast series will address topics generated by “Generation Y and Z,” (which we guess means kids and young adults). Highlights of the series will include interviews with celebrities and peers, ideas for a sustainable future, cool green products, and how to convince skeptical families and friends that green is the way to go.
The Whole Earth Generation youth host casting call kicked off a couple days ago on YouTube. Additionally, in-person casting calls will be held throughout the month of March in some of the chain’s stores.
Submissions can be uploaded to this spot on YouTube, or youngsters ages 8-17 can show up at one of the Whole Foods Market stores on the designated audition date in New York, Chicago and Austin, for auditions.
Six winners — three from the YouTube entries and three from the in-store auditions — will be selected.
“The six young hosts will be the on-air personalities with the charge of engaging their peers and showing that tweens and teens can really influence how we protect our planet,” said Kennedy.
Robert Scoble left PodTech in mid-January to work for business magazine FastCompany. His new videoblogging gig, FastCompany TV, launched today. In his welcome video, Scoble lolls around on the beach in a seaside frolic (not kidding), and explains the company’s initial two video channels.
FastCompany Live, the more immediately interactive of the channels, will feature video shot with a little Nokia N95 cell phone/camera and Qik.com. Viewers can watch the broadcast live and post comments, which show up on the screen. As one might expect, the quality of these live videos is, as Scoble puts it, “intimate, but brutal to watch,” jerky and blurry. Viewers are invited to submit their own videos and video responses.
The second channel is ScobleizerTV, more polished interviews and profiles of technology and business innovators. These will be shot with HD cameras, decent microphones and lighting. One of the more interesting things (for me) about this channel is Senior Producer Rocky Barbanica, who is described as a guy who “Used to be a software developer at NASA before going to film school,” who is putting together the production and media team at FastCompany.TV.
The jury here is still out on what we think about FastCompanyTV. The FastCompany Live content (like a test-drive of the experimental $98,000 Tesla electric sportscar) is compelling, but the quality of the sound and image are awful. The Scobleizer channel has some interesting upcoming interviews. We are cautiously optimistic that, as Scoble (and, in two weeks, “Naked Conversations” coauthor Shel Israel) make the foray into Fast Company’s more mainstream business publishing, they’ll keep talking to, and listening to, innovators both in and outside the corporate fishbowl.
Each video short features “Heroes” footage set to select tracks from the album. Nada Surf’s “Weightless” provides the soundtrack to the first video, which debuts today on the Zune Marketplace and MSN. Four additional music video podcasts will be published on Zune Marketplace between now and the soundtrack album’s release on March 18.
The podcasts will feature new releases “He’s Frank” by Brighton Port Authority featuring Iggy Pop, “Not Now But Soon” by Imogen Heap and “Keeping My Composure” by The Chemical Brothers featuring Spank Rock, as well as “Man In The Long Black Coat” by Bob Dylan.
“This podcast series is part of our plan to make more original content available via Zune Marketplace,” said Richard Winn, director of entertainment development for Zune.
Gravitas is a unique video podcast that pairs original music compositions with computer graphic simulations of the universe in motion.
Here’s the podcast description:
GRAVITAS is a visual and musical celebration of the beauty in a dynamic universe driven by gravity. Animations from supercomputer simulations of forming galaxies, star clusters, galaxy clusters, and galaxy interactions are presented as moving portraits of cosmic evolution. Billions of years of complex gravitational choreography are presented in 9 animations - each one interpreted with an original musical composition inspired by the exquisite movements of gravity. The result is an emotive and spiritually uplifting synthesis of science and art.
Astrophysicist John Dubinski combines a knowledge of cosmology, galaxy dynamics and computer graphics to create breathtaking portraits of a universe in motion. Composer-pianist John Kameel Farah merges the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension.
The podcast explores deep ideas, expressed entirely through visuals and musics.
You can subscribe to the podcast by adding this feed URL to your podcast client software:
NBC & Pando Networks, a provider of P2P content delivery services, announced today that Pando will be providing video delivery services for the NBC Direct service.
While it’s interesting to see a mainstream network using P2P to distribute video, it looks like NBC Direct is going to be another misbegotten proprietary Internet television offering. It requires a special player, it won’t work with Macs and it won’t work with most successful Internet media platform, Apple’s iTunes ecosystem.
What NBC Direct will offer is ad-supported downloads, via a custom Windows player, of programs across the NBC prime time line up. Pando’s p2p solution will ensure protection of copyrighted material using hash matching, digital fingerprinting and content watermarking technologies. Good for NBC - but it means that you’ll be locked into viewing videos on NBC’s terms.
Viewers will also be able to select shows that they’d like automatically delivered to their computers, in a sort of proprietary podcast-like fashion.
Programs currently available include “30 Rock”, “The Office”, “Heroes”, “My Name Is Earl”, “Medium”, “American Gladiators”, “Celebrity Apprentice”, “Friday Night Lights”, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
Kent Nichols - one of the viral video gurus behind Ask A Ninja - has an interesting new post at his site. He looks at the state of Internet video, calling it the golden age:
“The Indie TV movement is on the rise. The club of show runners is now open to anyone with a dream and the entrepreneurial skills.This is the golden age. Sundance in the 80s and 90s. A time when you can create something new and fresh, get seen by millions and have the chance to retain ownership over that property as it enters the big media system.
Yesterday I tested out the iTunes rental feature by renting “Once” — the film that won the best song at the Oscars. It’s a sweet, sentimental and sad at the end. Something you don’t get in the Hollywood system.
Put aside the fact that the dude is 37 and is dating her (she’s only 19 and they’ve known each other for five years — creepy).
$160k was the budget for 86 minutes of content or about $2k/finished minute. Not bad and definitely in the range of where webseries are right now. It also shows you what you can accomplish at that budget range.”
Kent goes on to say:
“We are still looking at the seeds of an indie driven TV movement like the American cinema saw in the 60s and 70s.”
A no-budget exposé on the meat industry can result in the largest meat recall ever. A low-budget movie can win an Oscar. A well-placed video camera can capture the next “macaca” incident and end a political career.
It’s an amazing time. Making a television show, a documentary or maybe even a movie is within your reach, right now.
With the release of Apple TV Take 2, Apple is putting podcasts and video podcasts front and center in people’s living rooms. This means that your podcast now needs to look great in HD.
Here are 5 ways to update your podcast for Apple TV Take 2:
Increase the resolution of your video podcast. Apple strongly encourages you to increase the resolution of your video to 640×480 or 640×360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Video podcasts at this resolution look good on Apple TV and still play on iPhone and video-compatible iPods. They recommend that you encode using QuickTime’s “Movie to iPod” preset or Compressor’s “Apple > Apple Devices > H.264 for iPod video and iPhone 640×480″ preset.
Enable video fast starting. When you perform the final encode on your video, enable fast starting. Most recent versions of QuickTime enable this setting automatically. But it’s easy to undo the setting by making changes to the file after the encode. If you do make a change after the encode, be sure to “Save As” again.
Increase your podcast art resolution. Apple TV displays a large version of your podcast art. Use a 600×600 square JPG or PNG file.
Make sure your host is up to snuff. iTunes and Apple TV use byte-range requests in some circumstances. For example, Apple TV 2.0 employs this functionality when the user accesses the podcast directly over the Internet. We recommend hosting episode files on HTTP/1.1 servers that correctly support the HTTP byte-range request specification.
Make sure your server is configured correctly. Make sure that your HTTP servers return the correct MIME types in the Content-Type header. Failing to do so can create errors. A list of MIME types can be found in the iTunes podcast technical spec.
You may want to review Apple’s full recommendations for podcasts to make sure that your podcast is optimized for the company’s devices.
Natural/organic supermarket chain 
Robert Scoble left 
With the release of 
