The New York Times has an article today that suggests that “blogging is a low-cost, high return marketing tool”:

To its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.

The NYT article is a bit gee-whiz, and underplays the significance of blogging’s social media elements for search engine optimization. But the article is a sign of the mainstream acceptance of blogging as a business tool.

Podcasting Is A Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool, Too

If blogging is ready for mainstream business adoption, podcasting can’t be far behind. Small and medium-sized businesses are already using podcasting in interesting ways.

One of the most interesting examples of a corporate video podcast is BlendTec’s Will It Blend?. The podcast features the slightly deranged, but crazy like a fox, Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson using the company’s industrial strength blenders to destroy everything from iPods to broomsticks.

The podcast is low-budget, but extremely effective.

Who doesn’t want to see if you can blend Halo 3? Especially after you play it too long and it fries your XBox 360?

RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer has a new project, FlickrFan, that’s a platform for uploading and downloading Flickr images.

Even more important, though, it’s an attempt to turn your HDTV into a platform that embraces the Internet.

Here’s how he explains it:

It’s all about pictures…

Pictures from your Flickr contacts…

High-def pics from professional photographers around the world…

Your family and business associates…

All ready for your new Mac Mini and high-def TV.

FlickrFan lets you use folders on your Mac to sync content up to Flickr. You can use subfolders for tags. The app also can automatically download images from Flickr to you screen saver folder, so your screen saver can show the latest photos from your Flickr subscriptions.

The Big Screen TV Is The New Platform

FlickrFan grew out of Winer’s dissatisfaction with Apple TV and the desire to create a platform that extends the Internet to big screen TVs.

“There’s a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity,” explains Winer. “The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways.”

“Think of it as the networked living room and you’ll understand the vision,” adds Winer.

FlickrFan is in beta and it’s definitely for the first-adopting geeks. It runs within Winer’s OPML editor, which is a powerful platform, but not one for most end-users.

What’s most interesting about FlickrFan, though, is not that it lets you put Flickr photos on your big screen TV – it’s that Winer is thinking about turning your big screen TV into a platform. A platform for photos, yes, but also a platform for Internet television, web surfing and anything else that developers want to throw at it.

It’s an obvious direction for Internet media, but it’s a direction that Apple, Microsoft and others have been hesitant to take. Apple TV, for example, is a closed platform that’s more of an iTunes peripheral than an Internet television device. FlickrFan is a push in the open direction, a push towards making your HDTV a two-way multimedia platform.

You can download FlickrFan for free from FlickrFan.org.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick offers his take on FlickrFan over at ReadWriteWeb.¬† The money quote: “Though there are some kinks in it at launch, the service leverages a number of APIs to do some very cool things. ”

Last Friday, Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central (also Blubrry and Raw Voice) broke new media ground with his 24-Hour Podcast Marathon.

The event, which raised awareness and money for the One Laptop Per Child initiative, was an around-the-clock international Internet media event, featuring audio and video interviews with dozens of people in the podcast industry.

One thing that struck us as especially cool about the marathon was the way Todd combined a variety of cutting-edge technologies, including free or inexpensive online audio, video and chat services, to connect his Hawaii studio to people around the world. The technology let Todd not only cross the barriers of oceans and countries, but the barriers between host and audience.

We asked Todd how he put the 24-hour podcast together….

Morgan Webb discusses how to video podcast and shows some behind-the-scenes secrets about how she puts together her video podcast, Webb Alert.

Radiohead,¬†the poster-boy for¬†Internet music promotion,¬†is promoting its album, In Rainbows, with an hour-long canned Internet video that will premiere New Year’s Eve on Al Gore’s Current TV.

The pre-recorded performance will include all of the tracks from In Rainbows plus some “other bits”, according to the band. The event will air on Current TV and Current.com starting 12 a.m. ET on Dec. 31, and will repeat three times throughout the next day.¬†

Radiohead released its latest CD, In Rainbows, online. The album is due on CD January 1st in North America.

Messing About In Ships is a new weekly maritime podcast. The podcast is unique in that it is recorded and published from the high seas.

‚ÄúI was lucky to be assigned a ship with satellite technology that allows me to record our podcast ‘Messing About In Ships’ regardless of my location,‚Äù explains Captain John Konrad.

The podcast is an outgrowth of Konrad’s gCaptain.com site, which is the home of his blog and also a Digg clone that focuses on maritime news.

“I started by writing the blog on the site gCaptain.com and through that met some interesting people including my co-host Peter Mello.”

“I’ve always had a passion for the sea and teaching others about its rich and storied culture,” adds Peter. “If we can share a small part of our passion we’ll surely succeed in enriching the maritime community.”

You can preview the latest episode of Messing About In Ships below. To subscribe to the podcast, add this feed URL to your podcast software:

http://messingaboutinships.com/feed/

Online television just got sexy for advertisers.

According to a new report by Experian Research Services, consumers are 44 percent more engaged in advertisements inserted into online television programs than they are with the ads in programs they view on traditional TV.

Viewers are paying more attention to what they are watching online and this carries over to advertisements in Internet video.

While viewers are 26 percent more engaged in the content of television programs they watch online, their engagement with the advertising placed in the programs they watch online is actually 44 percent higher. This finding suggests that the advertising in online TV programs is especially effective at reaching consumers.

With more and more research showing that people pay more attention to content online, people moving their attention to online media and advertisers moving their budgets to online video, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas for Internet video producers.

Paul Figgiani and Doug Kaye have made a great how-to video that shows how to use Skype to get broadcast-quality recordings:

The Bomb That Is Quarterlife

British Queen Offers Christmas Broadcast As Vlog, Podcast