From Rob Walch, creator and host of Podcast 411, and VP of Podcaster Development at Wizzard Media:

“Usher has made a music Video. He is allowing podcasters to include it as an item in their feed.  This is a get out the vote message, and the version below has an intro from Senator Obama.   You can also put the video player on your site. Usher has been very active in the get out the vote message.”

The link to the video is here, the enclosure tag (for your RSS feed) is here, and the video embed code for the single player version is here.

No word yet as to whether McCain supporter and reggaeton superstar Daddy Yankee is making a podcast-friendly video to help get out the vote.

comScore today released a study of blog traffic in the U.K. that found that 41 percent of the total U.K. Internet audience visited a blog in August.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” said Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director, comScore Europe. “They’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie.”

Other highlights:

• Blog Platforms – In August, the most popular blog platform in the U.K. was Google-owned Blogger.com, which attracted more than 9 million visitors, followed by WordPress (4.8 million visitors) and Six Apart sites (2.7 million visitors).
• Top Individual Blogs – Two of the most popular blogs in the U.K. are gadget blogs Engadget.com, which ranked as the top individual blog in August with 243,000 visitors, and Gizmodo.com, which ranked third with 223,000 visitors. Reality TV blog UnrealityTV.co.uk (225,000 visitors), gamer blog Kotaku.com (210,000 visitors), and community blog Metafilter.com (207,000 visitors) rounded out the top five.
• U.K. Bloggers are Younger and Tech Savvy, with a Sense of Humor – Heavy blog users were found to be 142 percent more likely than the average Internet user to visit a site in the humor category, a testament perhaps to the sharp wit often associated with blogging. They are also likely to be tech savvy, as evidenced by their skew in visitation to the Web hosting and technology news categories, and younger with a focus on education, as evidenced by their heavier than average visitation of the community – teens and education-information site categories.

RADUS today unveiled a new media hub platform that lets you simultaneously discover, search, share, and view rich media across leading computer, mobile, and social networking services, including Facebook and MySpace.

RADUS (ray-dee-us) was designed to address one of the major issues confronting online content delivery—the lack of a consistent user experience. RADUS lets you view videos, photos, blogs and other content within a consistent interface.

The consistent interface is very sexy – but it’s not as fast or as efficient to use as sites’ native interfaces. It does let you search across media types, though, which can be very efficient.

The site lets you customize the content that is shown on the home page, so you can have a media hub customized to your interests. You can also embed RADUS, as shown below:

Netflix today said that it has reached a deal with TiVo to provide digital movie streaming to many of the 800,000 broadband-connected Tivo subscribers.

The companies are testing the new service in several thousand U.S. households and expect it to be broadly available in early December.

Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” Web streaming service, with a library of more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes, is offered free to its more than 8 million subscribers.

“The YouTube service on Tivo is extremely popular,” said Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager of content services at TiVO, who said over 65 percent of its broadband-connected subscribers were taking advantage of the broadband features.

“I think everyone’s trying to figure out the right business model, and they want to get their content on as many platforms as available,” she said.

The Blogger & Podcaster Media Network is a new media network startup that promises a “six-figure income for all.”

It’s not clear from the site if they are promising a six figure salary for everybody that signs up, or if everybody that signs up will just be asked to split it up equally.

Here are the membership benefits touted by BPMN:

• Revenue. The mission is to provide members with a six figure income from multiple revenue streams, including an affiliate program.
• Stock Ownership. All members who sign-on prior to December 31, 2008 will be gifted equity in the company. This way when the BPMN is successful, all members who helped get the network launched will benefit too, not just the guys at the top.
• Promotion. Through the SocialRank search engine and our network of Blogger & Podcaster Guides (distributed through mainstream media), BPMN members will have their content promoted to millions each month.
• Healthcare. BPMN is working on creating a healthcare program that will enable members to have access to quality healthcare if they desire to make blogging/podcasting a full time job.
• Discounts and Freebies. Members will include access to exclusive deals and promotions provided by BPMN partners. At launch this will include $2,000 in services from PR Newswire, a powerful promotional service.

The Network, formed from a merger of four companies: Fuel My Blog (a UK blog social network), Podcast Pickle (a podcast social network), SocialRank (blog search engine) and Blogger & Podcaster Magazine plans to launch in the first quarter of 2009.

Call us skeptical, but we’ll keep our eyes open for more BPMN news.

via TechCrunch

I recently discovered that the University of Oxford offers quite a few interesting podcast series. I was looking for some resources on Beowulf for one of our children, but was pleasantly surprised to find an incredible variety of topics presented in podcast format.

Some of the 99 podcast feeds offered:

refugees and forced migration around the world
philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics)
Practical ethics in modern life
World War 1 Poetry Digital Archive Project
seventeenth century writer John Milton
Monty Python trouper Michael Palin narrating podcasts about “Oxford Today” (The episode about student life is worth a watch, even if you’re not college-bound).
German politics
Fruit flies (drosophilae) and neuroscience
Schrodinger’s cat – quantum nanotechnology
Climate change

There is even a series about Oxford itself, and about preparing for and applying to university, PodOxford.

“Members” of the university community (I am guessing this means students and faculty or staff?) are invited to create their own podcast series and use the institution’s “OXITEMS” publishing service. The university says, “Podcasts give educators an opportunity to deliver course materials and lectures outside a conventional classroom environment.  Academics at Oxford have already embraced this new technology to great affect.”

Put this in the unsubstantiated rumor category – but AppleInsider is reporting that iPhone firmware 2.2 will add support for wireless downloads:

A tipster shared with us some screenshots of the new firmware, including what appears to be the ability to download podcasts directly to your iPhone (and presumably your iPod touch). This could tidily explain why Apple rejected the Podcaster app last month. The option to “get more episodes” doesn’t appear to work in this firmware build, however.

This is different than wireless syncing; it looks you’ll be able to browse and download specific episodes. 

It’s also not clear if this will be supported just on WiFi or if it will be available on AT&T’s wireless network. If it’s supported on AT&T’s wireless network, it could ratchet up the traffic significantly.

Professional podcast training event company and publisher The Podcast Academy is “opening the vault” for a week, offering for sale a set of audio recordings of all the sessions, panels, and keynote addresses from the 2006, 2007, and 2008 New Media Expo.

“I decided to offer a historical look at podcasting,” said Podcast Academy editor-in-chief Michael Geoghegan. “I’ve gathered all of the New Media Expo content [of the past three years], plus bonus files from the Podcast Academy.”

The recordings include keynotes, panels, and presentations by a wide ranging cast of new media experts, and include Leo Laporte, Veronica Belmont, Andrew Baron, C.C. Chapman among many others.

Some session recordings are “vintage” ones from pioneers of the podcast industry. “Many of these presentations have not been publicly available for years,” Geoghegan said.

A more comprehensive list is below, after the break.

Read more »

ZDNet’s Tech Bits is declaring Blu-Ray dead:

Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.

16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?

Who dreamed they could both lose?

Well…..since ZD asked…..

In June of last year, we said: 

Internet TV is already good enough to make users realize that high definition video discs are a tangent to the real future of video delivery – Internet TV. “

At the beginning of 2008, we called the Blu-Ray Death Watch. Earlier this month, we said that Steve Jobs had delivered the Blu-Ray Coup de Grâce.

Why?

Blu-Ray is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It’s likely to become a widely accepted standard, like HD Floppies, that ultimately doesn’t matter very much.

The leading edge has already moved on beyond DVDs to Internet video. Apple’s MacBook Air has eliminated the DVD, iTunes is delivering HD, and Apple TV lets you watch HD Internet video. 

If you’ve got a 50″ HDTV, Blu-Ray is going to look a lot better than HD Internet TV. By the time these giant TVs are mainstream, though, HD video downloads will be, too.

Video analytics and distribution company Tube Mogul looked at the past several months of metrics for You Tube videos featuring U.S. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama:

“John McCain’s campaign appears to be shifting resources away from YouTube. Overall, they are launching 39.8% fewer videos than last month, and 29.7% fewer than August. Perhaps not unrelated, McCain also hasn’t taken the lead in daily views for all of October…. And sadly, two of the four the clips mentioning him in the 100 most-viewed videos across sites this past week ending last Friday were of gaffes…. Ominous signs, perhaps.”

The GOP candidate has made some attempts to take advantage of social networking tools, putting a blog on the campaign’s website, and creating profiles on MySpace and Twitter.

However, foregoing “no-brainer” opportunities to broadcast your campaign’s message and to showcase your candidate using the media where voters are turning their attention seems ill-advised. Letting gaffe-ridden videos overshadow a dwindling number of “on message” videos seems downright foolhardy.