Family Fun magazine has a series of very short video podcasts on projects grown-ups can do with children. Past episodes have covered everything from ladybug cupcakes (Junior Mint spots!) to thumbprint daisies painted on shirts, to toilet-paper-tube puppets (I know, I know, goofy – I like it anyway). All these videos show and tell, in less than 90 seconds, all you need to know in order to complete a simple project.

In case your Thanksgiving day isn’t busy enough with cooking and scrambling to get the house clean before the relatives arrive, or even if your day is plenty busy, but you choose to spend a little time doing a kid-friendly project, check out Family Fun’s Thanksgiving videos. There is a featured video for making marshmallow pilgrim hats, with little more than melted chocolate chips, marshmallows, striped shortbread rounds, and yellow storebought icing for the buckle on the hat.

If you run short on time, you can just eat the components: marshmallows dipped in melted chocolate chips, chocolate-striped storebought shortbreads, and frosting. Kids like doing even that, as long as they get to do it with their grown-ups.

They also have a bunch of short video recipes that seem to feature turkey as a main ingredient, but I must draw the line at (eek) “Tex Mex Turkey Tacos.” Zoinks!

The Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA) has a podcast series, entitled, “Insight From The Inside.” The program gives listeners a glimpse inside the prestigious culinary college through the eyes and personal testimonials of its students.

“Insight From The Inside” also includes interviews with some of the CIA’s celebrity chef alumni. The current episode features an interview with Michael Symon, CIA Class of 1990, and the winner of Food Network’s Next Iron Chef. Chef Symon is also the chef-owner of two restaurants in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio; Lola and Lolita. Chef Symon graduated with his associate degree (A.O.S.) from The Culinary Institute of America in 1990.

For those not familiar with the Iron Chef programs, competitors are given sixty minutes, a professional kitchen, and a single secret ingredient whch must make its way into every dish in a multi-course meal. The secret ingredient might be a variety of gourmet peaches… or might be a range of sardines. Yes, sardine-infused dessert. Perhaps this podcast can serve as inspiration for making a wide variety of leftover-turkey dishes this weekend, after the U.S. Thanksgiving feast.

The Culinary Institute of America’s “Insight From The Inside” podcast feed is here.

The Beatles’ second feature film, “Help!,” has just been re-released on DVD. To herald the event, “Monty Python” alumnus Michael Palin narrates a podcast series about the 1965 hit movie.

The podcast mixes dialogue from the movie with Palin’s narration and bits of audio from commercials, songs, interviews with individual Beatles, supporting actors, and director Richard Lester (who also directed their mockumentary movie debut, “A Hard Day’s Night“).

Lester describes, in the first podcast, how he conceived of the story of “Help!” as a fictional story of how, in their real (mid-1960’s) lives, the tension and stress they were under made them “prisoners of their fame.”

“Help!” is, nominally, about a strange “eastern” cult, a missing ring worn by a sacrificial virgin that gets stuck on Ringo’s finger. The Beatles get chased all over the globe by members of the cult (including actor Leo McKern), two mad scientists who want to rule the world, and a mysterious beautiful woman. And a tiger who is pacified only by the singing of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

You can preview the Help! podcast below, or subscribe by adding this podcast feed to your podcast client:
http://www.thebeatles.com/help/assets/downloads/rss.xml

PodCamp Ottawa, an unconference focusing on podcasting, is scheduled for Sunday, November 25 in Ottawa, Canada. The goal of PodCamp Ottawa is to learn about how to create podcasts (technically and as a host/producer), make them available and listen to them.
Organized by Mark Blevis, Andrea Ross, Bob Goyetche, Maurizio Ortolani & Jeff Parks, the unconference is limited to 80 attendees.

Schedule:

• Date: Sunday, November 25, 2007
• Time: 10:00am – 4:00pm (welcome at 9:45am)
• Location: National Arts Centre, Panorama Room

More details are available at the Podcamp Ottawa site.

Billionaire blogger & HD video guru Mark Cuban has an interesting perspective on the controversy over the issue of Internet companies blocking P2P traffic:

“BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC , PLEASE,” asks Cuban.

“As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders,” he adds.

“Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime. “

For those freeloaders that use P2P for sharing music, Cuban offers this tip:

If you are trying to do distribution of audio or video, why in the world would you use P2P when Google Video will host and distribute it very efficiently and for free ?

To help those of you who can’t understand how to distribute audio on Google Video, here is a hint: Re encode it with a little video, a couple pictures, whatever. Then it it wont be an audio file, it will be a video file.. Ta da. You get distribution by the best distribution network on the planet, for free.

That’s right – now you know how the billionaires do it.

The latest numbers from the Newspaper Association of America show that newspaper advertising revenue is plummeting as attention and ad dollars move online.

The numbers are downright ugly:

• Total advertising expenditures at newspaper companies were $10.9 billion for the third quarter of 2007, a 7.4 percent decrease from the same period a year earlier.
• Spending for print ads in newspapers totaled $10.1 billion, down nine percent versus the same period a year earlier.
• Among the major print components in the third quarter, classified advertising fell 17 percent to $3.4 billion.
• Retail declined 4.9 percent to $5.1 billion and national was down 2.5 percent, coming in at $1.7 billion.
• Within the classified print category in the third quarter, real estate advertising fell 24.4 percent to $1 billion.
• Recruitment dropped 19.7 percent to $882.4 million.
• Automotive was down 17.7 percent to $796.6 million. All other classifieds were up 2.7 percent to $713.3 million.

Newspapers Struggling To Get Attention Online

The one bright spot for newspapers is growing online revenues, but these aren’t growing fast enough to replace the tremendous offline revenue drops:

• Advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 21.1 percent to $773 million in the third quarter versus the same period a year ago.
• The increase reflects the fourteenth consecutive quarter of double digit growth for online newspaper advertising since NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004.
• The continued year-over-year gains have demonstrated the importance of newspaper Web site advertising, which now accounts for 7.1 percent of total newspaper ad spending, compared to 5.4 percent in last year‚Äôs third quarter.

The Association offers a positive take on the relatively dismal situation.
“Newspaper Web sites continue to generate substantial revenue by offering advertisers access to the nation’s most desirable group of consumers,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm.

“At the same time, broader economic issues are impacting our industry the same way they are impacting other media – the continued fallout from declines in the housing market clearly affects real estate, recruitment and retail advertising. Newspaper companies continue to take aggressive measures to prepare for the future during a period of economic challenges for the industry.”

Image: swanksalot

BrightSpot.tv, a Internet television startup that promised to pay viewers when they watched advertisements, has shut its doors.
A notice on the site explains the situation:

Dear BrightSpot.tv Member

BrightSpot Media would like to thank all of our valued members for participating on BrightSpot.tv and taking advantage of the partnerships that we had established. We regret to inform you that as of Monday, November 19th, 2007, the BrightSpot.tv site will no longer be available.

Over the past 14 months, many of you have provided terrific feedback – what has worked well and what has not worked as well – all of which we will utilize as we develop the next iteration of BrightSpot.tv.

Again, than you all for your support.

Unless that feedback involved tips on getting more funding, it looks like BrightSpot.tv has gone dark.

This is so funny that I though I should blog about it, and maybe Twitter about it, and then maybe mention it in the podcast, and tell my Facebook friends…..

via Cinnamon Pants

Nine Inch Nails has been planning for a long time to try an interesting experiment with their latest album, Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D.

The release features fourteen tracks from the group’s Year Zero album, remixed by a select group of Trent Reznor’s heroes, friends, and strangers. Along with the release, NIN is including remixable Ableton Live files, separated by instrument, for every track from Year Zero, so that anyone could make their own mix of the CD. The band also planned to have a dedicated website for uploading, sharing and rating user remixes.

At the last moment, Universal music has thrown a wrench into NIN’s plans, sicking its lawyers on NIN, warning the group not to put up a website for fan remixes.

Trent Reznor explains the situation:

On Saturday morning I became aware of a legal hitch in our plans. My former record company and current owner of all these master files, Universal, is currently involved in a lawsuit with other media titans Google (YouTube) and News Corp (MySpace). Universal is contending that these sites do not have what is referred to as “safe harbor” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and therefore are in copyright violation because users have uploaded music and video content that is owned by Universal.Universal feels that if they host our remix site, they will be opening themselves up to the accusation that they are sponsoring the same technical violation of copyright they are suing these companies for. Their premise is that if any fan decides to remix one of my masters with material Universal doesn’t own – a “mash-up”, a sample, whatever – and upload it to the site, there is no safe harbor under the DMCA (according to Universal) and they will be doing exactly what MySpace and YouTube are doing. This behavior may get hauled out in court and impact their lawsuit.

Because of this they no longer will host our remix site, and are insisting that Nine Inch Nails host it. In exchange for this they will continue to let me upload my Universal masters and make them available to fans, BUT shift the liability of hosting them to me. Part of the arrangement is having user licenses that the fans sign (not unlike those on MySpace or You Tube) saying they will not use unauthorized materials. If they WERE to do such a thing, everybody sues everybody and the world abruptly ends.

While I am profoundly perturbed with this stance as content owners continue to stifle all innovation in the face of the digital revolution, it is consistent with what they have done in the past. So… we are challenged at the last second to find a way of bringing this idea to life without getting splashed by the urine as these media companies piss all over each other’s feet. We have a cool and innovative site ready to launch but we’re currently scratching our heads as to how to proceed.

It will be be interesting to see where these remixes do end up.

“Social talk radio network” BlogTalkRadio today announced the creation of the new ‚ÄúBlogCritics Radio‚Äù Channel in partnership with online magazine BlogCritics, on BlogTalkRadio.com. The new channel will feature a group of BlogCritics writers and editors covering pop culture, news, sports and technology.

BlogCritics network hosts will have their own live talk radio shows and be able to conduct round-table discussions with listeners, sharing their views and opinions as a complement to their written commentary that appears on BlogCritics.org.

Shortly after the conclusion of each live (sometimes call-in) BlogTalk network show, the episode is made available for download as a podcast.

Eric Olsen, Blogcritics founder and publisher touted the partnership as an “opportunity to make our coverage … more immediate and interactive, as well as opening up topics that … time constraints do not allow us to address.”

BlogTalkRadio and BlogCritics representatives touted the partnership as the means to offer advertisers and marketers opportunities to cross-promote their brands on both sites, reaching more than 3.5 million users a month.