A story in the Muncie, Indiana Star Press serves as a reminder that there’s more to podcasting than “monetization”:

When Ben Ranfeld, Liz Ranfeld and Paul VanDemark decided early last year to start a podcast centered solely on one topic - the movie The Big Lebowski – they figured they faced one major problem.

“We didn’t really think anybody would listen to it,” said Ben, 26, who is a technical staff employee at Taylor University, his alma mater.

Turns out, they were wrong.

“We get e-mails from all over the world,” he continued, citing The Big Lebowski fans from Israel and Germany as being among the 2,500 listeners who download their program every month.

“I think the reason is, it’s such a multi-faceted film,” said Paul, a 22-year-old TU student.

Or maybe it’s Autobahn – the band of German nihilists. Or Mrs. Lebowski, aka Bunny. Or Jesus.
You can subscribe to the Big Lebowski podcast by adding this URL to your podcast client:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/lebowskipodcast

One-third of all Internet videos watched in the US were on YouTube, according to the latest research from comScore.

January 2008 data shows that YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007.

Top Five Internet Video Sites:

• Google Sites – 34.3% share of videos viewed. (YouTube.com accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.)
• Fox Interactive¬† – 6%
• Yahoo! Sites – 3.2%
• Microsoft Sites – 2%
• Viacom – 2%

Other notable findings from January 2008 include:

• More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video.
• 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.4 videos per viewer).
• 49.4 million viewers watched 534¬† million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).
• The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes.
• The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.

Podcasting network Wizzard Media has announced that it is is working with European lottery site PlayUKinternet.com on what they are calling the first international geo-targeted audio podcast advertising campaign.The three month campaign is aimed at audiences around the globe in Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Italy, encompassing over half a million ad impressions delivered across a select group of audio podcasts on the network.

“We believe their state-of-the-art geo-targeting capabilities will allow us to raise awareness of our products and services to highly-targeted audiences around the world through an innovative new media,” said Tasneem Domingo, Marketing Manager, PlayUKinternet.

Internet video viewing will grow massively this year, according to research from Accustream. Professional and “user-generated video” (UGV) views are expected to grow by 43.4% in 2008, following a 57.6% increase in 2007.

Other highlights of the research:

• Partner Channels on YouTube, for example, accounted for a 10.6% share of total video views in 2006 – 2007, forecast at 15.4% in 2008.
• Comedians/Directors captured 8.9% total viewing share on YouTube in 2006 – 2007 and forecast at 11.1% in 2008.
• Universal Music Group claimed the top channel partner position, with a 29.1% share, according to AccuStream.
• Combined, Partner Channels, Comedians and Directors made up 19.5% of total views on YouTube in 2006 – 2007, and forecast at 26.5% in 2008.

Their research also digs into the relative strengths of user generated vs professional video:

• Entertainment captured a combined 17.1 billion views, for a 33.1 share, with professional sites owning a 52.4% launch share, and UGV hosting networks the remaining 47.6%.
• Music video (including artist info, mash-ups, spoofs, tour videos etc. on UGV networks) captured 12.5 billion combined views, 55.6% owned by professionally managed sites and brands compared to 44.4% for UGV.
• News is almost completely dominated by professionally managed sites, with a 93.8% share.
• The Sports category remains largely the domain of professional, formal partner or syndication-powered websites, with an 80.7% share compared to 19.3% share for UGV networks. Sports on UGV networks typically include extreme events content and spectacular wipe-outs.

New research from comScore confirms one of the more important new media trends – that young people are abandoning newspapers for Internet media.

As a result, newspaper readership is getting smaller and older.

“That current generations are growing up getting their news online for free is an indicator that print circulations are likely to continue their decline,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore.

Younger News Consumers Less Likely to Read Print Newspapers

Heavy print newspaper readers show a strong skew towards older age segments, while the non-newspaper reader segments skew younger.

• Those age 65 and older are nearly 3 times more likely (index of 296) than average to read the print edition of newspapers 6 times per week.
• Those age 18-24 are 38 percent more likely than average to not read a print newspaper at all during a typical week.

Podcasters Across Borders, a Canadian podcasting unconference, has announced its schedule for the 2008 event, being held June 20-22 in Kingston, Ontario:

Friday, June 20, 2008

• 1:00pm Video production workshop (Bob Goyetche and Mark Blevis)
• 2:00pm Social (Media) Science (Dave Brodbeck)
• 3:00pm Community: Why It���s the ONLY thing that matters (Whitney Hoffman)
• 7:30pm PAB2008 Kick-off (Bob Goyetche and Mark Blevis)

Saturday, June 21, 2008

• 9:00am Private in Public: An actor���s approach to podcasting (Tim Coyne)
• 10:00am Creating Audiodrama (Sage Tyrtle)
• 11:00am M?�nage a Trois: Forums, podcasts and community (Marko Kulik)
• 1:00pm Feeding the Hungry by Feeding Google: A case study (Michelle Sullivan)
• 2:00pm Learning from The Beatles (Sylvain Grand���maison)
• 3:00pm Hosting Secrets From the Book of Tod (Tod Maffin)
• 4:00pm What Are the Limits? (John Meadows and Scarborough Dude)

Sunday, June 22, 2008

• 9:00am Time, Space, Media, Messages and Your Podcast (Jay Moonah)
• 10:00am What Public Broadcasters Can Learn from Podcasters, and Vice-Versa (Dan Misener and Nora Young)
• 11:00am Good Hosting: We���re not talking about your Internet Provider (Jack Ward)
• 11:40am You Shall Know Us By Our Velocity: Making sense of it all (Neil Gorman)

Details are available at the PAB site.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow is releasing his latest book, True Names, as a free audio podcast.

The book, a novella co-authored with Benjamin Rosenbaum, involves galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe’s supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe.

Here’s what Doctorow has to say about the new podcast:

Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns as our schedules allow.

I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flair for phrasing, and I hope you’ll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it!

You can preview the first episode below. More details at Doctorow’s site.

Apple Japan is researching the iPod nano for defects after one of the popular digital music players reportedly shot out sparks while recharging. A defect is suspected in the lithium-ion battery in the iPod Nano, model number MA099J/A.
The problem surfaced in January in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo, and Apple reported the problem to the ministry in March. Apple Japan did not contest the ministry statement but declined further comment. The ministry has asked Apple Japan to find out the cause of what it is categorizing as a fire and report back to the government.

Lithium-ion batteries have been blamed for a series of blazes in laptops recently that have resulted in massive global recalls.

Apple announced today that more than 100,000 iPhone developers have downloaded the beta iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) in the first four days since its launch on March 6.

According to Apple, “developer response continues to be phenomenal”. The company cites a variety of developers already working on new applications:

• ‚ÄúWe‚Äôre excited that the iPhone expands the ways our customers can solve key financial tasks wherever they might be,‚Äù said Rick Jensen, senior vice president, Small Business Group at Intuit.
• ‚ÄúWe can‚Äôt wait to show off great new versions of arcade classics like PAC-MAN and Galaga that use the revolutionary features of the iPhone and iPod touch,‚Äù said Scott Rubin, vice president, Sales and Marketing, Namco Networks.
• ‚ÄúApple‚Äôs become an important mobile game platform with the iPhone SDK,‚Äù said Jason Kapalka, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, PopCap. ‚ÄúThe new SDK gives us the tools to innovate and reinvent games like Bejeweled, Zuma and Peggle.‚Äù
• ‚ÄúSix Apart pioneered the mobile blogging experience with an iPhone-optimized blog service,‚Äù said Chris Alden, CEO, Six Apart. ‚ÄúWe‚Äôre taking it to the next level with our native iPhone application for TypePad that‚Äôs already in development.‚Äù

The free beta iPhone SDK an be downloaded at developer.apple.com/iphone/program. The iPhone Developer Program will initially be available in the US and will expand to other countries in the coming months.

YouTube today announced new features that turn YouTube into a platform for Internet video development:

We now provide a complete set of (CRUD) capabilities for uploading, managing, searching, and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube “cloud,” managed by us. We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos, and we provide open access to our sizable global audience, enabling you to generate traffic for your site, visibility for your brand, or support for your cause. Meanwhile, we provide full access to our substantial video library, enabling you to attract users and enhance the experience on your site. It’s all free, and it’s available to everyone, starting now.

This is implemented through a set of new APIs that let developers:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

The move is a smart one for YouTube, because it turns the site from a destination into a platform. YouTube provided some examples of what this makes possible:

• Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube.
• The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube.
• Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube.
• Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.

YouTube provides several resources to help you get started with the new video API’s:

• YouTube API case studies
• YouTube API examples at Google Code