YouTube Podcaster is a free service that lets you take YouTube searches and turn them into video podcasts, which you can subscribe to with iTunes or other podcast client and view on your portable media player.

The site is a bit kludgy, so here’s a quick guide to how to turn YouTube searches into video podcasts:

1. Go to YouTube and search for something. I searched for Chemical Brothers.
2. Copy the YouTube URL. It should looks something like this:
   http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chemical+brothers
3. Go to the YouTube Podcaster tool and paste your search URL into the form field and click the “Make a feed” button.

You’ll end up with links to add your custom podcast URLs to iTunes and other RSS readers. Depending on your computer’s configuration, you may be able to just click these URLs to subscribe to the podcast, or you may have to manualy copy the URL and add it to your podcast software.

I tested this out with an iPhone, and videos showed up just like any other video podcast:

via Lifehacker

Japan is warning users of Apple iPod nanos of a potential fire risk, after two new instances in which the popular portable music players overheated and caught fire.

According to Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, Apple Computer has been notified of 14 similar cases in Japan. The ministry said the incidents were caused by four models, of which 1.81 million units were sold between September 2005 and September 2006 in Japan:

• MA004J/A
• MA005J/A
• MA099J/A
• MA107J/A

“Users need to be careful about overheating of the machines,” the Ministry said in a statement, warning that particular care is needed when recharging the iPods. “Our ministry told Apple to improve its technological development and probe the cause of the incidents so that similar incidents do not happen again.”

Apple has not responded offered an official response to the warning.

via Yahoo; image: Stephen Dinges

This demo video from Microsoft demonstrates a new technology, Microsoft Unwrap Mosaics, that can make it easy to do video special effects editing:

The representation has some of the power of a full reconstruction of 3D surface models from video, but is designed to be easy to recover from a priori unseen and uncalibrated footage. By modelling the image-formation process as a 2D-to-2D transformation from an object’s texture map to the image, modulated by an object-space occlusion mask, we can recover a representation which we term the “unwrap mosaic”.

Many editing operations can be performed on the unwrap mosaic, and then re-composited into the original sequence, for example resizing objects, repainting textures, copying/cutting/pasting objects, and attaching effects layers to deforming objects.

The software has the potential to bring new levels of special effects editing to consumer-level video software.

More information is available at the Microsoft Research site.

New research from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that people are relentlessly moving from traditional media -including newspaper, radio & television – to Internet-based news sources.

In the last ten years, the percent of people getting their news from the Internet has tripled, while the radio and newspaper news audience has declined 14% and the television news audience has declined 9%:

While many people are taking advantage of Internet options to get their news, it also appears that many young people are increasingly distracted by other Internet content, and actually following the news less. According to Pew’s research, the percent of young people not following the news has jumped 9% in the last decade.

Researchers at the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory at the University of Washington have created amazing new software technology for automatically enhancing videos of a static scene using photographs of the same scene.

According to the researchers:

Our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene. Finally, our system allows a user to remove unwanted objects and camera shake from the video.

As the video demo above demonstrates, the technology can make typical consumer videos look awesome and be used to create interesting special effects. The HDR, masking, object removal & camera shake reduction videos are amazing.

This technology is still at the research stage – but I can’t wait to see it make its way to consumer video editing apps.

via Trend Hunter

Ambrosia Software has released WireTap Anywhere, a low latency audio tool that lets you take the audio output from any Mac application or hardware input device and record it in your favorite audio recording application.

Any program that produces audio can appear as an audio input device, letting you record or process it in any other application that can record from a microphone or other audio input device. For instance, you can record both sides of a Skype or iChat conversation directly into Peak for editing.

WireTap Anywhere costs $129, is a Universal Binary, and requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later.

Apophenia’s Danah Boyd has an interesting post on wanting Olympics 2.0:

Everything about how NBC has covered the Olympics has been abysmal.

I want an Olympics where the “best” is broadcast on TV, like now. But I also want an interactive version. Take gymnastics. I want to know on each apparatus who is up live. And I want to be able to switch between different cameras and choose my own view through the stadium so that I can watch whichever competitor I want. I want to be able to watch live, all day, on ALL sports (even judo and the other weird ones where Americans are not so present). I want interactive live and I want to be able to pull down and follow any individual Olympian or team through their events at a later point. I want the Olympics to be treated as a bunch of spliceable objects that I can remix live for my own viewing pleasure. And I want to be able to see it ALL. Is that that hard to ask for? Hell, I’d be willing to pay for such interactive watching options. And I’d certainly be willing to watch ads to see things LIVE. But boy does it annoy me to watch a “live” NBC broadcast that is already well reported on in the NYTimes.

So can I please have Olympics 2.0? And dear International Olympic Committee, please don’t sell exclusive rights to the next Olympics to an organization who is doing more to curtail and configure access than to engage the market the way that they want to be engaged. And NBC, would you stop being so antiquated and leverage new media for what it’s good for?

Boyd hits the nail on the head, and addresses the same concerns we’ve had about Olympic coverage – and the same things that are driving young people away from the Olympics.

We want the long tail. We want to filter the content ourselves. We want it on demand.

And frankly, if we can’t have that, we’re going to watch something else.

Moviestorm is a new free application, available for Windows or Mac, designed for creating machinima-style animated movies and distributing them on social networking sites.

Moviestorm is designed to take users through the entire movie-making process, from set-building, character creation and script-writing to titles, credits and editing in under fifteen minutes, ending up with a digital animated movie that can be uploaded to YouTube or Moviestorm’s own site with one click.

Moviestorm Features:

• Create sets and characters based on a library of customisable templates and 3D models
• Record dialogue for characters to speak back
• Choreograph scenes using a wide range of stock animations
• Film scenes using multiple cameras, and edit the footage into a complete movie
• Upload movies directly to YouTube , the Moviestorm website and produce files suitable for other video-sharing sites.

New research shows that podcasting and social media are important technologies at the fastest growing companies in the US.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently conducted one of the first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media in corporations.

Research Highlights:

• Four out of five companies in the Inc 500 rate social media technology as important or very important;
• 21% of the companies are podcasting and 39% blogging;
• The number of companies blogging and podcasting has doubled in the last year;
• The Inc. 500 are adopting new media technologies much quicker than Fortune 500 companies.

The research suggests that companies that are using social media & new media technologies are growing faster than other companies.

Here’s a breakdown of the social media technologies the Inc 500 are using:

The new study compares corporate adoption of social media between 2007 and 2008 by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine. The study revisits the Inc. 500 approximately one year later (using the 2007 list) in the first longitudinal study on corporate use of these new technologies.

Interesting stuff. Get the details at the U of M site.

via Marshall Kirkpatrick

We’ve been following Blendtec and their WillItBlend? video podcast for several years now and are amazed at how well the company has reinvented the infomercial as something that people will actively seek out.

The company is taking its success to another level, though, as their most recent video demonstrates. In the video, Tom Dickson notes that Nike has asked him to do some custom blending, and he proceeds to do a blender shoe mashup.

While it’s fun to watch shoes get blended, what’s really amazing is that Blendtec’s is getting hundreds of thousands of people to watch infomercials for blenders – and getting third parties to sponsor the whole thing.

Wouldn’t you like somebody else to pay for your advertising?