Educators and home-schoolers interested in getting educational multimedia for K-12 students can now find it in Apple’s iTunes U.

While iTunes U originally was created to support the distribution of educational podcasts for colleges & universities, it’s been expanded to support elementary and secondary education as part of an initiative  by several state education agencies and the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

The new iTunes U K-12 section features content from schools and agencies in Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Utah. It also includes content from museums and other educational institutions.

The goal of the initiative is to provide state, national and global access to educational content, including curricula, learning materials, news, best practices and other resources.

“This comprehensive collection of quality digital content offers teachers and students a single location to access resources on topics from Florida history to the Navajo language to nano technologies,” said Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of SETDA. “The new K-12 resources on iTunes U address the critical need to engage students through technology-based resources in the core curriculum areas.

Combine podcasting, either through iTunes U or independently, with a device like the Apple TV, and you’ve got a very inexpensive platform for distributing audio, video and other materials to schools for presentation, and to student’s personal media devices for studying.

via The Journal

TinySong.com is a unique service for social media users that combines streaming audio, music search and URL-shortening to let you send music via Twitter, text messages and other services.

Here’s how it works:

Do a search at TinySong.com:

View the search results and select the song that you want to send:

Despite Steve Jobs’ best efforts to spin the new iPhone 3G‘s cost, the real user costs are starting to emerge, and it’s not pretty.

The iPhone 3G isn’t just more expensive to buy with an AT&T contract, but it’s more expensive to buy if you plan on using it “unlocked”:

• Subscribers can buy the iPhone 3G for $199 for the 8-gigabyte model or $299 for the 16-gigabyte version. Those prices require two-year contracts.
• Existing AT&T subscribers who don’t qualify for an upgrade discount can purchase the iPhone 3G for $399 for the 8-gigabyte model or $499 for the 16-gigabyte device. Both options will require a new two-year service agreement
• A no-contract-required option will be available in the future for $599 for the 8-gigabyte iPhone or $699 for the 16-gigabyte iPhone.

With the iPhone 3G, the biggest innovation appears to be tuning the way the device is sold to maximize profits. The real innovation is likely to come from the iTunes App Store & 3rd party developers.

Silicon Alley Advisor’s Michael Learmonth has an interesting analysis today about Hulu – calling it a consumer success, but still a small business:

We estimate Hulu will sell between $45 million and $90 million of advertising during its first 12 months — April 2008 through March 2009. By the time it pays off its content partners, it will book between $12.5 million and $25 million in net revenue.

On the low end, we estimate that Hulu.com will generate close to the revenue generated by, say NBC.com, which is said to generate “tens of millions” in revenue this year. On the high end, Hulu would net $90 million in gross ad sales — in the same league as some estimates for YouTube.

Hulu is a sexy Internet video service, but a thin-margin, tough business.

It’s a good analysis – but Learmonth misses a key difference between Hulu and YouTube:

Hulu has built a library of long tail content with advertisers lined up to sponsor it; YouTube has built up a library of long tail user-generated content that’s very difficult or, in some cases, impossible to get sponsors for.

This difference highlights one of the key challenges of making money with podcasting, vlogging and other user-generated media: advertisers are much more comfortable working with known content from established sources.

Hulu isn’t perfect, but it’s done a lot right. Hulu’s biggest challenge is lack of distribution: it needs to get on Apple TV and other Internet TV devices to really take off.

This video, via BloggerHelp, looks at how to create a podcast with Blogger.

Elisabeth posted a note earlier today about new media and podcasting in China, and how local coverage paints a picture that may be surprising to many in the West.

Chris raised a question in the comments, though, that is worth addressing:

“I thought I read that RSS was banned in China. Does anyone know if this has changed recently?”

There were multiple reports last year of RSS feeds being banned in China, and there’s been a lot of discussion recently about the draconian lockdown China may put on Olympic coverage.

You can check to see if your site is banned in China using WebSitePulse, a web server monitoring service. They have a Web-based form that checks your Website (or RSS feed) from Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong:

As mainstream media promotes itself to new heights (depths?) over the upcoming summer Olympic Games in Beijing, and with the International Olympic Committee raising hackles with its severe restrictions on blogging, podcasting and new media, it seemed like a good time to look at citizen media efforts coming from China itself. This week’s edition of the Beijing Review, an english-language publication about China, has an article about the growth in the use and popularity of podcasts in China.

The article talks about the proliferation of blogs and bloggers in the country. They cite statistics from November 2007 that “one of every 30 Chinese citizens or [one in] four netizens was writing his or her own Web log.”

Indeed, a flurry of blog, video and podcast activity by citizen-journalists in China cropped up in the aftermath of the devastating May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. Blog, video, and podcast entries have progressed over the past six weeks from posting information about the disaster, to using these new media for inspiring and coordinating disaster relief efforts.

The article continues,

“Podcasting, which emerged at the end of 2004 in China with the launch of the first site in this regard, is also gaining popularity at a speed faster than that of any other Web service. According to official statistics, there were more than 200 podcasting sites in China in 2006, registering more than 10 million podcasters and having a viewership of 76 million. A lot of emergencies, news and gossips [sic] have been recorded live and made known to the public by home videos posted on the Internet. Prominent examples in recent years include those about the infidelity of a famous TV sport anchorman, which was brought to light by his wife at a public gathering, and a pet cat being tortured by a cruel man.

“Due to the large number of users and wide coverage, blogs and podcasts have also become major outlets of public opinion. Many bloggers and podcasters use their posts to discuss public affairs, raise suggestions and air complaints. At the same time, a growing number of officials have opened blogs to do real-time communication with the public, which is widely hailed as a new way of government transparency.”

The Beijing Review article says that most blogs and podcasts created and consumed in China, however, tend more toward entertainment than public opinion, government transparency, or citizen reporting of local news as in the Sichuan earthquake.

Image credit: blogger-china

Podcast network Wizzard Media announced today that they have archived over 118 million words using their proprietary “admatch” technology process. Of those, they have identified more than 10,000 words as keywords with potential significance to prospective advertisers. The database of keywords was populated by processing over 800,000 hours of audio and video programming available on the Wizzard Media Network.

“This is a huge accomplishment for our publishers. Search marketing plays a major role in the plans of most advertisers and we are positioning our publishers to participate in this advertising marketplace.” said Chris Spencer, CEO, Wizzard. “This tool [also] plays an important role for consumers in the discovery of new shows which can significantly accelerate audience growth.”

Paid search continues to garner the largest chunk of the online ad industry, according to eMarketer’s online ad spending report from November of last year. The report noted that paid search’s share of online ad spending will continue to hover in the 40% range through 2011, accounting for more than $50 billion over the next four years.

Rhapsody is offering 100,000 free album downloads through July 4th to promote its DRM-free digital music service:

If you’re one of the first 100,000 to create an account by Independence Day, we’ll automatically apply a $10 credit to your first album purchase. The credit must be used by midnight Pacific time, July 4, 2008. Limit one per household.

The new Rhapsody MP3 Store lets you listen to entire songs before you buy them*, provides recommendations, and delivers DRM-free MP3s that can be played on any MP3 player.

*Full-length song plays are limited to 25 per month for non-Rhapsody members.

Google and Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, have teamed up on a new project to bring short, original animated videos to the Internet.

In September, MacFarlane, will introduce Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, a Net-only animation series. Google will distribute the series through AdSense ads to thousands of sites that match the show’s target audience. Instead of putting a regular banner ad on a page, Google will insert a short animated comedy video, along with a sponsor’s message.

“We believe the revenue could be formidable,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. “What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at.”

The short videos promise to be edgier than MacFarlane’s Family Guy. MacFarlane believes that the public’s appetite for raunchy humor and coarse language is expanding and that television networks like Fox are having a harder time getting viewers because they had to tread carefully or risk fines.