Podcasters from throughout North America gathered in Kingston, Ontario, last weekend for the third annual Podcasters Across Borders conference.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the coverage of the event by participants and presenters at PAB08:

Financial Aid Podcast and social media superhero Chris Penn talks a little bit about the “battle” (heated discussion) between himself and Chris Brogan. The spirited but amicable argument pitted conversation against monetization, community vs. marketing. I’m not sure the outcome of the dispute has to be an all-or-nothing solution, but I do know that such discussions are not usually resolved with light saber battles (brilliant!) as was the case here.

Speaking of whom, Chris Brogan’s short “jolt” presentation at PAB08, “Making Money Isn’t Evil,” was filmed by worthy adversary Chris Penn. The upshot of the presentation, says Brogan, is that while “it’s not evil to want to make money, [you must] be very wary how you try to do this off your community.”

Here’s a highlight – Chris Brogan and Chris Penn’s “epic fight over conversation vs. monetization, over community vs. marketing”:

Brogan also had an insightful blog post about FlackLife public relations man Bob LeDrew. In addition to being a PR guy, Bob puts on small house concerts, and he bravely got up and sang in front of PAB attendees. His alternate take on his performance was dramatically different from Brogan’s, but had a takeaway message: “that few things are as bad as they seem.”

PAB Conference co-organizer Bob Goyetche gives a nice overview of his experiences at the conference here. He says:

“Our hope this year was to help people “Bring it to the next level”.. The speakers sure did. These people brought their “A” game to the event, and we all benefited from it. It was very hard to remind ourselves that these people weren’t professional speakers, but passionate content creators. If you boil down the weekend to it’s essence, that’s really what it was all about- creating compelling content and reaching your community.”

If you went to Podcasters Across Borders last weekend, and want to share your insights about the gathering, or share your blog or podcast links, please leave a message in the comments, below.

In 4 steps, Jordan’s Queen Rania shows you how to create video clips designed break down stereotypes.

It’s fascinating to watch what Rania is doing with YouTube and how she’s using it as a platform to encourage understanding between cultures.

Does it still count as citizen media, though, when you’re the Queen of Jordan?

A (very young) midlife crisis at 30 inspired Gary Vaynerchuk to start his video podcast, Wine Library TV, which is primarily about wine, but also about action figures, the New York Jets, thunder, and of course Vaynerchuk himself and his quirky onscreen persona.

That quirky persona and unpretentious wine expertise has propelled “Gary Vee” to popularity on the Internet and in the mainstream media, bagging television appearances on “Ellen” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and other shows. More recently, Gary Vee has authored a book, Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.

Topping off this list of accomplishments, Internet television network Revision 3 today launches Wine Library Reserve, a condensed version of the weekday Wine Library TV program.

Vaynerchuk was in our hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, this weekend, for a book signing at East Village Books. Podcasting News’ Publisher, Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, sat down with Vaynerchuk beforehand for an exclusive interview.

Torrent site isoHunt has added 10,000 albums of free downloadable music from Jamendo, a site that publishes music licenced with Creative Commons license:

“I’m proud to announce our partnership with Jamendo, a premier archive of Creative Commons music from a network of independent musicians. You can now see Jamendo originated torrents highlighted by white tabs labeled “Jamendo Verified” in our search results, and here’s a list of their torrents indexed on isoHunt. Their torrent descriptions also come in full HTML glory, like this one. In return, Jamendo is choosing isoHunt as their search engine for global torrents beyond their music database.”

Because it’s distributed with Creative Commons licenses, you can copy the music and share it freely, and, in many cases, use the music to create new works, such as podcasts and video podcasts.

via TorrentFreak

If you’re trying to make money with your podcast, Pete Barlas at Investors.com has good news for you. According to Barlas, “more advertisers are starting to spread their ad dollars to audio and video podcasts in an attempt to reach certain consumers.”

Investors is bullish on the prospects for podcast advertising:

Podcast ad revenue represents a sliver of the multibillion-dollar online ad market. But U.S. ad dollars spent on audio and video podcasts are expected to jump to $435 million by 2012 from $165 million last year, says eMarketer.

“There is a pretty substantial growth curve ahead, and it’s been building slowly,” said eMarketer analyst Paul Verna.

Advertisers seeking large niche audiences are warming up to podcasts, Verna says.

“With podcasting, the audiences tend to be very specific, very targeted,” he said. “That takes care of your challenge as a brand marketer.”

For long-time Podcasting News readers, there’s nothing in the article that’s new. It is, however, interesting to see trends we’ve been watching for years start to get mainstream coverage.

The latest in the series of participant-organized, Open Space “unconferences,” PodCamp Seattle debuts today (June 21, 2008) at the University of Washington Communications Building.

Colleague, friend, and Edelman Digital social media expert Eric Weaver is one of the event’s organizers. He says that the focus of the Seattle PodCamp will diverge somewhat from previous PodCamps hosted elsewhere:

“Typically, podcamps draw technology enthusiasts. We’re going to shift this one slightly by including marketers and people interested in corporate social responsibility. ”

Toward that end, the day’s sessions are split among four tracks:

Introduction to podcast and new media topics
Marketing – PR – Advertising
Technology (nuts and bolts of online tools)
Social Good

Each track has four sessions planned, with space available for a fifth if topics and facilitator/presenters emerge at the event.

Confirmed presenters include two people whom I’ve either interviewed (Paolo Tosolini, Microsoft Academy Mobile) or heard speak (Kathy Gill, University of Washington), and a whole host of other experts in photography and video, public relations and marketing, podcasting, microblogging and advertising and beyond.

If you happen to be attending PodCamp Seattle, leave us a note in the comments, and tell us your highlights of the day.

Podcast creators, podsafe musicians, and friends and families of new media mavens will be gathering this weekend at the third annual Podcasters Across Borders conference in Kingston, Ontario. Participants and presenters are coming from Canada, the United States, and from as far away as Argentina.

The conference is organized by members of the Rogic Podcast Conglomerate; Canadian podcasters Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche as well as Cathy Bobkowicz and Andrea Ross.

What’s new about this year’s event? The organizers say that this year’s offering

“[is] all about bringing it to the next level. Sure, podcasting is about creating compelling audio or video, but it’s so much more. It’s about building and engaging communities, using social media dynamics, and honing the skills we use in all aspects of our online presence.”

PAB is unique among podcast/new media conferences, in that it is not strictly free to attend, like previous PodCamps have been. But, unlike commercial or “monetization”-focused podcast conventions, PAB charges a modest ($125 CDN) registration fee, and plows all the proceeds back into the conference. The organizers maintain that PAB “first and foremost [is] a community event. There are no vendor tables, no ‘How do I monetize my podcast?’ sessions. PAB is about people.”

The conference features a single track that all participants can attend. Today’s (Friday’s) sessions included a workshop on video production, the “science” of social media, and LD Podcast’s Whitney Hoffman talking about the importance of creating community among your viewers, readers and listeners. The conference runs through Sunday, June 22.

We hope that Podcasters Across Borders attendees will let us know what they’ve been seeing and doing, leaving us notes in the comments, below. Readers can also find out more about PAB 2008 by searching online for the tag PAB2008.

Numark has introduced the iDEC, a professional rack-mount solution offering playback and recording for iPod.

iDEC’s Universal Dock for iPod permits playback of audio and video from any docking iPod through integrated outputs. It can also record incoming audio in real time at CD-quality 44.1 kHz sampling rate, directly to the docked iPod.

The Numark iDec is expected to be available Q3, 2008. Pricing has not been announced.

Social media guru JD Lasica interviewed Hayden Black, the creator and star of the Internet video hits Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary, at the recent Digital Hollywood conference.

Black offers some background on his shows, but also touches on things anyone should consider when creating an Internet video series.

It seems that Hayden Black is on a roll these days: he also was profiled this week by Kara Swisher in the “All Things D” column of the Wall Street Journal.  In that interview, Black underlines the importance of pre-production development to help make a hit of your video series.

In a recent note to Podcasting News, Black listed off a number of recent profiles, articles, accolades and projects with which he’s involved:

“It’s been a great month for mainstream press coverage.  The London Times published a glowing review of Goodnight Burbank last week; Q Magazine (the UK Rolling Stone) also raved about GNB as did Channel 4, and there’s an upcoming feature in the LA Times.  GNB – which is about to launch on Hulu, the NBC/Fox site – was also nominated for a prestigious Webby for Best Online Comedy and both shows are entered to win Emmys.

We’re also going into co-production with a hollywood production company to do a brand new sci-fi comedy and set to do a UK TV pilot presentation for Goodnight Burbank (titled “Goodnight Salford”)!  All that and we’re now up on a bunch of mobile platforms.”

In his note to us, he also asks that people also enter the competition to win a set of iPod speakers “from Abigail,” the star of the “X-Rated Teen Diary” video podcast. You can enter here.

Video conversation / social networking community Seesmic moved out of beta and opened up to the general public last week. The company launched in the fall of 2007, and raised $6 million in its “A” series of funding late this winter.

Today, Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur announced that the company has raised an additional $6 million in funding. The “B” series investors include Wellington Partners and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

LeMeur commented on his blog about the investment:

“We were not raising funds as we had just closed the A round and that is probably the best way to raise money, when you do not need it! It is more about Pierre and Eric joining us than their investment per say, which we are very happy to have of course.”

This announcement came on the same day that Seesmic made available and embeddable video player that can display threaded comments, which can be used on other sites and platforms, such as Facebook, MySpace, “anywhere you can put an embeddable player.”

The advent of the new embeddable, threaded video player has itself sparked a fresh round of controversy, however. Dennis Howlett has a great explanation of the row in his Enterprise Alley column at ZDNet, positing that “this new addition would appear to break its own terms of service.”