According to the analysts at Compete, the Podshow podcasting network is one of the top five movers and shakers of 2007.

Here’s what PodShow’s Adam Curry has to say about the news:

This is a report I‚Äôm extremely proud to post about. According to Compete.com PodShow grew 29144% in 2007, making us the third fastest growing site, sans pr0n content even 🙂

Congratulations to the independent producers who are our partners in this success.

There are a lot of reasons why PodShow is growing – but the biggest is that they’ve done a good job of getting talented, attractive video podcasters that create content that’s of interest to a broad audience.

Compete also notes that there’s a larger trend at work here:

Among the fastest growing sites, eighteen of the twenty offer a prominent peer-to-peer communication platform. Even in the adult video category, sites that function almost identically to YouTube (redtube.com and youporn.com) represent the fastest growing.

The numbers attest to the efforts of PodShow and all the talented podcasters that are making this type of growth possible!

At the 2008 Winter NAMM Show – the largest North American music industry convention, Numark introduced an interesting iPod Turntable.

The TTi iPod turntable is a turntable that includes a Universal Dock for iPod, USB audio interface, a metal platter and pitch control, making it one of the most versatile turntables ever produced. The included software archives records directly to your iTunes Library for transfer to CD or any MP3 player. The software also automatically reduces pops and clicks inherent on some old vinyl recordings.

Owners of iPod (Classic or 5th generation) and iPod nano (2nd or 3rd generation) can record from vinyl directly to an iPod without a computer. People with other iPod models can transfer captured vinyl recordings to their iPod by using iTunes to transfer the tracks after recording.

Numark’s TTi turntable will be available Q2 Р2008 from most musical instrument retailers with an MSRP of $449.

The amount of money spent in the US online advertising market will double, to $50.3 billion in revenue, by 2011, according to research from the Yankee Group.

The internet accounts for approximately 20% of overall media consumption in the US, but advertisers currently invest only 7.5% of their budget online. There is tremendous potential for marketplace growth as advertisers bridge this gap. By 2011, nearly 25% of all media consumption will be online, drawing 15% of the advertising dollars.

Online advertising will grow rapidly in the coming year. The factors driving this continued growth are:

• Increased online audiences
• The development of new types of advertising
• The creation of new publisher business models that help sell interactive advertising

“With internet connectivity nearly ubiquitous, online advertising growth is inevitable,” said report author Daniel Taylor, senior analyst at Yankee Group. “And yet the internet is still a relatively new digital medium. Steady growth in online advertising will require publishers to invest extensively in new media and advertising product development.”

CNBC has an interesting interview with Steve Jobs, in which he confirms our take away from his MacWorld announcements: Apple is killing off the DVD:

Don’t underestimate the power of the new iTunes movie rental service either. I asked Jobs whether this meant the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was over, with Apple the big winner. Clearly, he said, Blu-ray won, but in the new world order of instant online movie rentals, in HD, no one will care about what format is where.¬† Funny how fast tech can move.

Signing all the major studios is no small feat either.¬† Warner Bros., Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Paramount — they’ve all jumped on board iTunes.¬† Substantially all of Hollywood.¬† AppleTV, take two, has a real shot.¬† The power of technology.¬† The power of Apple and Steve Jobs.

Jobs also offered some his opinion of the state of the Zune:

I told Jobs that I had sat down with Microsoft’s Robbie Bach last week at the Consumer Electronics Show.¬† I mentioned that Bach was particularly optimistic about the new Zune, that it was now a worthy alternative to Apple’s iPod.

Asked Jobs:¬† “Was he inebriated?¬† Do you even know anyone who owns a Zune?”

Sprint has announced that it will be cutting 4,000 jobs and closing 8 percent of its stores:

The company said it would cut 125 stores and eliminate more than 4,000 sales outlets within retailers.  Sprint expects the measures to trim labor costs by an annual rate of $700 million to $800 million by the end of 2008. It will record a first-quarter charge for severance costs.

Sprint has been losing ground to bigger rivals such as AT&T amid network and customer service problems that drove away high-value post-paid customers who pay monthly bills.

Sprint also reported net losses of 683,000 post-paid subscribers and 202,000 prepaid subscribers for the quarter. In total, Sprint’s subscriber base was 53.8 million at the end of 2007, including 40.8 million post-paid and 4.1 million prepaid customers.

When you read that Sprint lost nearly 700,000 subscribers to AT&T and other rivals in the last quarter, you have to wonder how much of this is a side effect of the iPhone introduction.

Go into any Apple store, and you’ll see a lot of people checking out and buying iPhones – people that a year ago might have been shopping at a Sprint store.

As buyers demand more capable multimedia phones, we’re going to see more audience for podcasts, video podcasts and other Internet media grow. We’re also going to see some painful disruption in the phone industry, though, as companies struggle to deliver cutting-edge devices and services that can compete with what Apple and AT&T offer.

Seesmic is a web-based video sharing platform that is designed to make posting short videos to the web trivially easy. The site can be used to create video blogs, engage in video dialogs with other users or to quickly create content to embed at other sites.The BBC has a seesgasmic take on the site:

It’s not often you are presented with a vision of the future of online video in a pub in London.

But that’s exactly what I was shown last night by celebrated French blogger, well-connected entrepreneur and Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur.

“YouTube is not a conversation,” explained LeMeur. “As one Seesmic-er said to me, ‘YouTube is about the videos, Seesmic is about the people in the videos’.”

Users can record videos via webcams and upload directly to Seesmic, or record using YouTube and post from that site.

“People are fed up of seeing the same footage on the mainstream networks. With Seesmic they can go in a different direction,” he explains.

We’ve been experimenting with Seesmic (look for podcastmama). We’re impressed with how easy the site makes it to capture video and share it as a video blog. The site also encourages you to actively engage with what you watch, because it makes it so easy to create video responses.

Revision3, the video podcasting network launched by the guys from Digg, has introduced a new weekly show, The Digg Reel, that offers 15-minutes of highlights from the highest-rated videos on Digg for that week.

“There’s so much crap out there, it’s great to have the Digg community filter out the best, but no one can watch it all,” said Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.

You can preview Digg’s crap-free, but NSFW, Digg Reel below.

Tooble is a new program for OS X that automatically downloads, converts and imports any YouTube video to play on your video iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, or even on your computer with iTunes.

Tooble’s browser lets you search YouTube, play videos, select the ones you want and then download them and load them into iTunes.

Here’s how it works:

1). Go to Tooble and download the app. It’s free – so give it a try! When you install it, it may ask for you to install a dependency, Perian, which Tooble will help you install.

2). Open Tooble, browse or search for videos you like. Select ones you like and click the download button:

3). Video downloads are added to a download queue:

4). Once they are downloaded, videos get automatically converted and copied to iTunes:

5). There is no step 5 – Tooble just makes the process a no-brainer.

Writer’s Guild of America members plan to launch Strike TV, an Internet fund-raiser to help members affected by the strike. Set to launch in February, the online channel will feature original video shows created by working professionals in the TV and Film industry.

“Strike TV videos will not be about the strike,” according to the Web site. “This is a chance for writers to do what they do best–be original and tell stories. These shows will be self-funded and owned by their creators.”

WGA members including showrunners, staff writers and screenwriters have expressed interest in participating in Strike TV. “One of the goals of Strike TV is to demonstrate that these kinds of creative ventures can be done on the internet under union jurisdiction,” according to the Web site.

We reported earlier today that Robert Scoble was leaving PodTech to move to Fast Company.

In a post on his blog, Scoble explains why he is making the move:

“I don’t love doing much except for interviewing and blogging and my family. I’ve run the books at UserLand Software. I hated that. I’ve tried managing people at PodTech and found that I wasn’t particularly interested in doing more of it (which is one reason why Rocky’s going to play a key role in the development/production of the network, it’s important that we build a strong team, but I’d rather focus more of my energies on getting great content than on finding and keeping great people).”

He goes on to offer four things that he’s learned about media since working at PodTech:

1. Content. This should be obvious, but you’ll see where I’m going with this point later. Key here is to make content that no one else has. Content that’s better quality. “Special” in some way. Gets viewers access to something they couldn’t otherwise get access to.
2. Revenues. If you don’t have them, it’s hard to buy cameras, lights, microphones, or take the time to do things right. Yeah, you can bootstrap for a while like Rocketboom did in its early years, but at some point if you don’t have cash coming in you’ll need to find a real job and stop working on media production.
3. Distribution. If no one sees your videos you won’t get revenues, so getting viewers/participants is key. Now, you can either get viewers by doing stunts (like Gawker Media did at CES) or you can get it by making deals to distribute your videos into places that have high viewership. Revision3, for instance, has reportedly made deals to distribute its videos into several airplane video systems. Mansuetto’s magazines have more than a million readers, which will make it easier to get people to come visit the new network.
4. Scale. The SuperBowl has all the above three, right? But the place it really makes sense? Is part of a network. Why? Because then there’s more for audiences to engage with than just one football game a year. Also, there’s economies of scale since the camera crews can work on other stuff while they aren’t working on the Super Bowl.

Fans can watch for Scoble’s new work at the Fast Company site.