In April, we reported on Arbitron/Edison Media Research’s latest report on the podcast audience. 

At the time, we were struck by their stats for the podcast audience, which showed that the audience for audio podcasts grew 38% in the last year, and the audience for video podcasts grew 45%.

Edison’s Tom Webster also has offered his take on the implications of the report, The Podcast Consumer Revealed 2008 (pdf). 

Highlights of his analysis include:

• Podcasting is a viable alternative means to target attractive consumers who are otherwise proving difficult to reach with traditional advertising. Consumers who go through the process of selecting a program (rather than passively consuming whatever is on traditional media), downloading it and potentially moving it to a portable device are exhbiting an increased level of engagement with the programs and hosts of the shows they select. This engagement may translate to an increased credibility and level of trust in the show’s sponsors and advertisers. 
• Podcast consumers are extremely attractive advertising targets, though difficult to reach via traditional interruption models. Podcast users are far more likely to have attained at least a college degree, and are also more likely to live in households earning in excess of $75,000 per year, than Americans who have not consumed podcasts. Furthermore, Americans who have watched or listened to a podcast are more frequent online shoppers and spend more money online than other Americans. Podcast listeners and viewers are also far more likely to block pop-up ads, SPAM, and use non-traditional means to view television.
• Podcast consumers are heavily involved with social networking. Over a quarter of persons 12+ who have ever consumed an audio/video podcast have a profile on MySpace, and the percentage of podcast consumers with profiles on other social networking sites is significantly higher than the percentage of non-podcast consumers. Podcast consumers also spend markedly more time on the Internet every day than the average American.

Social messaging/microblogging site Twitter today addressed some of the most frequently asked questions about the site’s infrastructure, frequent downtime and what the company is doing about it.

One of the most interesting comments they have is that Twitter power users are responsible for the site’s downtime:

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users – that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following – perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.

In other words, when people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan, Jim Long or Guy Kawasaki (top spewers per Dave Winer) tweet, it can take the site down. When these guys post a thought, Twitter has to deliver their messages to personalized feeds for tens of thousands of people.

Twitter can’t handle the load created by top users because the site was slapped together as an experiment.

Senuti is a simple app that lets you copy songs from an iPod back to your Mac. 

Got multiple Macs? This could be an easy way to put your music onto your extra machine. 

To copy songs back to your computer, all you have to do is select the songs and click the transfer button in the upper left hand corner of the application (above photo).

Features

• Finding Songs — You can search and sort in any combination of ways that you want. That’s not quite enough sometimes, though. Sometimes you might want to know if you’re copying the right song. Know how it goes, but don’t know if that title is quite right? Play it! That’s right, Senuti will play songs directly off of your iPod. It can even double as a jukebox player for your Shuffle or any other iPod.
• Playlists — Senuti not only reads the playlists that you made on your iPod, but it allows you to transfer them back to your computer as well. A simple drag and drop action within the application will not only copy songs to your computer and and add them to iTunes, but it will make a new playlist with the same name and add all of the songs to that list.
• Seamless Integration — Adding songs to your computer, you’re probably going to add them to iTunes right after that, right? What if you didn’t have to, wouldn’t that be great? Well you don’t have to. Senuti will do all of the work for you. What work you want it to do is up to you. You can have songs added to iTunes if you want. You can have all of your music organized into folders by artist and album, too. The option’s yours.

Common Craft follows up their simple takes on podcasting, Twitter & RSS with Social Media in Plain English.

Jim Louderback, CEO of podcasting/new media network Revision3, has an explanation for why his site died over Memorial Day weekend: they were hacked and attacked by MediaDefender, a company that works for the music and film industries doing anti-piracy work.

According to Ars Technica, MediaDefender uses “its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.”

Revision3, the network behind DiggNation and other video podcasts, uses P2P file-sharing for legitimate reasons – as a way to keep down distribution costs for its shows. Louderback explains:

Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores.

Despite the fact that Revision3’s use of P2P technology was legitimate, MediaDefender targeted the network.

“Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes, without our approval,” says Louderback. “They willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server.”

If you want a fast Internet connection, South Korea is the place to be, according to content delivery network Akamai’s State of the Internet report. South Koreans are three times as likely as Americans to have broadband conections.

Based on Akamai’s Q1 2008 research, South Korea had the highest measured levels of “high broadband” (>5 Mbps) connectivity. In the United States, Delaware topped the list, with over 60% of connections occurring at 5 Mbps or greater.

At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, Rwanda and the Solomon Islands topped the list of slowest countries, with 95% or more of the connections to Akamai from both countries occurring at below 256 Kbps.

In the United States, Washington State and Virginia turned in the highest percentages of sub-256 Kbps connections. However, in contrast to the international measurements, these states only saw 21% and 18% of connections below 256 Kbps respectively.

Microsoft has announced that it is expanding its video offerings through the Zune Marketplace.

Here’s a list of what’s coming.

Amazon.com is planning to take on Apple’s iTunes Store with a new video-on-demand service, the company has revealed.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, speaking at the All Things D Conference, described the service as a “new version of video on demand” that will begin showing videos instantly on personal computers. Videos will be sold on an a la carte basis.

“We’re very serious about the video business, but it is much more difficult because there are so many market participants,” Bezos said.

Bezos did not provide details on the upcoming service.

Remember last month’s blogging can kill you hysteria?

In April, the New York Times – yep, the Gray Lady of journalism – ran an exposé on the health risks of blogging:

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

At the time, we were skeptical – bordering on WTF? – and it turns out that our instincts were right.

There’s still no official diagnosis of Death By Blogging and it turns out that blogging is actually good for you.

Japanese electronics and telecommunications companes are developing a Linux-based TV-killer which will let users watch streaming video and browse the web using a remote.

The TV Portal Service Corp syndicate, made up of Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba, is expected to announce a new tech standard for Internet television as early as next month. With the backing of telecommunications giant NTT, it will lobby the International Telecommunications Union to adopt it for global use.