http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=44B64495B703FFA0

Expert Village – a site that features video tutorials – has a YouTube channel focusing on how to make a digital movie. 

The channel includes information on topics ranging from creating scripts for indie films to lighting. There’s lots of information that applies not just to making movies, but to any indie video production. 

I’ve embedded the series above or you can view the channel on YouTube.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick brought to our attention a great new podcast feature from NPR that lets you mix your own podcast feed.

NPR’s Mix Your Own Podcast lets you enter in topics that you are interested in and it will create a custom podcast feed for you. 

I’d like to see them provide the ability to drag and drop the NPR features that you like to create your own Morning Edition – but even in its current state it’s a great feature.

YouTube has announced two developments: the expansion of their HD player and a test of three new landing pages.

Here are the details of the announcement:

HD on YouTube

Starting today, if you click the “watch in HD” option below any HD-enabled video, the video will automatically play in widescreen – so you can find out where the hell Matt is in glorious HD, if you so wish. As part of this launch, we have created an HD Videos area where you can browse videos uploaded in the HD format. In anticipation of your questions – including how to encode your videos to take advantage of this new feature and how to avoid the dreaded “windowboxing” – we have prepared an FAQ in the Help Center. Hopefully you’ll find any technical information you need there, but feel free to post follow-up questions to the YouTube Community Help Forums.

New Video Landing Pages

News, music and movies are huge categories on YouTube and as a result it can sometimes be tough to find exactly what you’re hoping to watch. In a bid to smooth your path to the perfect video, we are testing three new video landing pages: youtube.com/news, youtube.com/music, and youtube.com/movies. The news page will be populated with breaking stories from around the world as well as news drawn from the Google News service; music will feature rising videos alongside playlists dedicated to different genres; movies will showcase some of the most popular short and full-length movies on YouTube today. We’ll keep a close eye on how these pages perform with a view to rolling them out in other categories.

These may not seem like major announcements – but they position YouTube to be the destination site for news, music and movies.

As YouTube pushes high-quality mainstream videos via these new landing pages, though, will user-generated video be pushed to the side?

Shure SM58 & SM57 mics have a reputation for being reliable to the point of being indestructible. 

They’re popular with musicians, because they’re cheap and you can store them in the back of a van without worrying about breaking them. The SM58 is popular with podcasters, too, because it’s fairly cheap and delivers great sound for the price. 

Mats StÃ¥lbröst, editor of the Stockholm-based Studio, took the SM58’s reputation as a challenge and decided to subject a SM58 microphone to a year of sadistic torture. He used the SM58 mic to hammer nails, dropped it from heights, submerged it in water, drove a car over it and nuked it.

And the thing still worked. Here’s the proof:

The Bivings Group today announced their latest report on the use of the Internet by US newspapers, and, while newspapers are rushing to catch up blogs and new media sites – they are rushing to catch up with blogs and new media sites. 

According to Bivings Group’s Jesse Johnson, “Our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and aggressively experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites, it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.”

As it happens, MediaShift’s Mark Glaser took a look at the future of news today, and his post offers some suggestions for the news industry, including starting blog networks, classified networks, experimenting with crowdfunding, customized newspapers, hyper-local ads, local portals, paid content and niche sites. 

While these articles both paint a grim picture of the newspaper industry, they really don’t go far enough. 

It’s time for the newspaper industry to realize that carnage is inevitable – the world simply needs a lot fewer people in traditional news roles than it once did. 

We’re looking at five years of trauma for the newspaper industry, with decimation on the scale of the typesetting industry in the 80’s and the color prepress industry in the 90’s. 

Obviously news isn’t going away – but only organizations that can compete on the Internet will survive. 

News organizations are going to have to explore the types of things that Glaser outlines, but they are also going to have to radically rethink what they do and take a hard look at what new media producers are doing with their blogs, blog networks, podcasts and Internet videos. 

Will newspapers survive in some shape or form? It’s looking grim.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. 

Key findings from The Bivings Group report below.

Rockifone’s Easy Recorder (App Store link) is a free iPhone app that turns your iPhone into a dictaphone-style audio recorder. 

Easy Recorder doesn’t have a lot of features, but it lets you record audio at three quality levels and the price is hard to beat.

To sync recordings, Easy Recorder has a built-in Web server that runs over WiFi. This isn’t an elegant solution, but it works fine.

Features:

• One-button quick recording operation.
• Pause and resume recording on the fly.
• Auto-save recording before an incoming phone call.
• 3 optional recording qualities: Normal, Good, Best.
• IMA4 encoding and CAF output format.
• Sync/upload recordings to FTP server through Wi-Fi for sharing or downloading.
• Touch-to-seek playback.
• Add notes to recordings for later reference.
• Rename existing recordings anytime
• Delete single/all recordings in the app.
• Friendly and easy user interface.
• Designed for iphone, iphone 3G or 2nd generation ipod touch( ipod touch requires additional Apple stereo headset with microphone or similar compatible headset)

P2P distribution for new media seemed like a good idea to a lot of people a few years ago. The idea was that you’d be able to distribute your content over P2P networks and avoid paying a lot of money for bandwidth. 

Unfortunately for content producers, P2P distribution for new media doesn’t offer any benefits to end users. It’s an extra hoop for people to jump through, because users have to download special software. Even more damning, though, P2P is just another thing that people have to think about before they can get your content. 

Joost announced today that they are killing off their dedicated P2P video client – because it was a barrier for users. Sites like YouTube demonstrated that you could distributed video over the Internet without asking people to install any special software, and anything less than that was a kludge.

Investors will think twice before they fund startups based on P2P distribution. 

P2P distribution poses the same challenges to podcasters – it would be nice if everybody wanted to download your content via P2P, but they don’t.

Video search engine company Blinkx today announced the launch of “an Enhanced Metadata Enrichment solution for publishers” of online video.

There were lots of big, Web 2.0 press release vocabulary words to plow through (if I ever see another announcement with the word “monetize” repeated so many times, I will have to retreat to a dark room with some herbal tea for the remainder of the day).

But the gist of the story is this: Companies have a wealth of video content that they would like to put in front of viewers, who consume media on an ever-widening array of devices. Producers want to make money from their trove of video, but to do so, they must “ensur[e] that their video is supported by accurate, consistent metadata” so that the videos will be easily found in online searches. Creating metadata by hand is a tedious, costly, labor-intensive process.

Blinkx’s new addition to its Advanced Media Platform “automate[s] the capturing, encoding and indexing of rich media content.” Blinkx uses speech recognition, visual and conceptual analysis processes, along with the video’s title and/or tags, to automatically create the content’s metadata. Says Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx’s founder and CEO, “Ultimately, the greater the search- and discover-ability of videos, the greater the opportunity for monetization.” (aaaaaaa! that word!)

After the video has been transcribed (via speech recognition) and analyzed, blinkx’s Enhanced Metadata Enrichment also allows editorial input and control of the automatically generated metadata to further refine the results. More information can be found here.

Throughout the month of December, we’ve been (very) intermittently profiling some of the end-of-year holiday podcasts we enjoy. One favorite, that is actually produced by someone we know in real life, is Podsafe Christmas.

Podsafe Christmas is the creation of Kansas City-based meteorologist and musician (and weather and music podcaster) Ed Roberts. The show runs daily from the day after (the U.S.) Thanksgiving, through December 24. Each day’s program features 10 – 20 minutes of what he terms “new original and public domain Christmas songs that you often won’t hear anywhere else.”

One of the longest-running (and possibly the oldest?) Christmas podcast around, Podsafe Christmas is in its third year. Roberts clarifies, “Adam Curry had actually attempted something similar in 2005, but he only did a few episodes before he got too busy to do it.”

How does he find several new holiday songs every day? “There are great songs available through the Podsafe Music Network, IODA Promonet, Ariel Publicity,” Roberts offers. “Often, artists send their music to me, but it’s always a challenge explaining licensing to them. I’ve had to turn away several who have done covers, but didn’t tie down downloadable offline distribution rights.”

Some of the songs are original tunes, written and performed by well-known personalities in the podcast world, like Matthew Ebel and Geoff Smith. Others are by names I’ve never seen/heard before. Many of the songs are new interpretatons of old Christmas standard tunes that are in the public domain (think “O Holy Night” or “Joy To The World). All the songs are linked in the show notes to pages where you can support the artists by purchasing their music.

Ed Roberts also produces the daily KC Weather Podcast and year ’round podsafe music series Looking Out The Window.

Seesmic is launching a new experimental version of its video social networking site, at this separate address: http://new.seesmic.com. Drawing on feedback (requests, suggestions and complaints) from its user community, the Seesmic test site keeps a lot of the functionality of the original application, but with these new features, among others:

-Smaller Flash load, “except in the player”.
-White, not black, background (Illuminates your face if you’re recording videos in low-light situations.)
-Auto-refreshing timeline
-Videos now play in the thumbnails (you can watch them without having to leave the timeline)
-User and video search (plus you can bookmark your searches)
-New user profile pages
-Multiple privacy posting options
-RSS and Atom feeds for public and user timelines
–Cooliris view. Seesmic is working with Cooliris (formerly PicLens), which transforms your browser into a full- screen 3D experience for consuming online media.

Additional features from the old Seesmic that are being added quickly:
-Posting YouTube videos
-Language filters
-Upload a video

The company asks that users poke around the test site and tell them what you think.