A new video podcast promises to reveal the Secrets of Second Life.Franklin McMahon Studio, producers of Media Artist Secrets and the Rumor Girls video podcasts, has introduced a new video podcast, based on the virtual world Second Life, entitled Secrets of Second Life. The new podcast explores Second Life with video tours and provides tricks and tips for getting the most out of the virtual world.

PodShow, a podcasting network, today announced the debut of PodShowPRO, a podcasting service for businesses. PodShow also has announced that PodShowPRO is also the podcasting module within AOL’s new AIM Pro service, a new Internet messaging application.

PodShowPRO is built on the PodShow+ platform and lets business users create and publish their own podcasts, create personalized directories of content, and deliver “channels” of podcasts.

WildVoice, a podcast and media sharing community now in beta, has add introduced a new web-based recorder, “Shout.” The application is designed to let anyone with a PC, an Internet connection and a microphone record a podcast or post comments to other podcasts at the site.

“Podcasting is about having fun and encouraging free expression on the Web. WildVoice aims to make this as easy as possible,” said Albert Kim, WildVoice co-founder. “With WildVoice Studio, people can create high quality Podcasts from their PC that sound like a sophisticated studio radio program. WildVoice ‘Shout’ makes it even easier. It allows anyone to make a quick Podcast, record an audio comment to online posts or simply send a shout out to friends directly from our Website.”

MoveDigital has announced the availability of a new pay as you go digital distribution service. The service is designed to make it easy for anyone to share files in any digital format on a worldwide basis and eliminates monthly bills, contracts, and credit checks.A free 30-day trial, no credit card required, is available and includes one gigabyte of storage and ten gigabytes of bandwidth.

Schwartz Communications, a New England public relations agency, has introduced a new podcasting service. According to Schwartz, their offering provides quantifiable measurement of the podcast’s effectiveness as well as the ability to bundle podcasts into a comprehensive “Podbook”.

All packages include the planning, pre-production, production, post-production and evaluation needed to produce and distribute an effective, 10-minute podcast. Schwartz can also bundle individual podcasts into what they call a “Podbook” – a series of three or more podcasts to one target audience, covering different subjects or one subject with multiple perspectives.

Real Estate Buzz Box has announced what it describes as “the first complete real estate podcasting solution online.” The new service is designed to let real estate agents create audio & video podcasts with no special technical skills.”Podcasting in the real estate industry is a really exciting development,” said site co-founder Rodney Rumford. “Realtors can use podcasting for a whole host of lead generation, communication, branding, sales and marketing purposes.”

Company intranets need to add blogging and podcasting or else become irrelevant, according to a new report from Avenue A | Razorfish, an interactive marketing and technology services firm.”Employees today are expecting, and increasingly demanding, the same compelling web site experiences at work that they receive in their personal time,” said Shiv Singh, national director of the Enterprise Solutions group of Avenue A | Razorfish. Singh advises, “Adopt ideas liberally and often from the consumer world.”

Rocketboom, The Show and other daily news vlogs are getting some serious company, a daily news vlog from NBC.The Early Nightly is hosted Brian Williams, who has had a blog since May of 2005. The new vlog looks to be an attempt by NBC to tap into the growing audience for vlogs and video podcasts.

Unfortunately, at this time the “vlog” is hobbled by the fact that it doesn’t have a video podcast feed, the site isn’t compatible with Firefox, entries aren’t archived and viewers must sit through a 30 second ad to see the video.

Apple’s Keynote 4 will get podcasting support in an upcoming update, according to Think Secret’s Ryan Katz.

Keynote will gain support for exporting presentations to an iPod friendly format for presentations on the go, as well as podcasting. In addition, some level of iWeb integration through the Export command is said to be under development.

iPods are showing up everywhere, and this year’s NAMM convention, a meeting of musical gear manufacturers and retailers held in Austin, Texas July 14-16, was no exception.

One of the more unusual iPod accessories shown was the iCoustic guitar. At first, glance, the iCoustic looks like a standard travel guitar. In fact, it’s built using travel guitars from Taylor and Martin.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll find that the iCoustic has a speaker built into the guitar’s soundhole:

The speaker, along with some on-board electronics, lets the guitar be used for audio playback from iPods, digital recorders and even other guitars.