PodCamp co-founder Chris Penn has posted his thoughts on the future of PodCamps, a series of user-organized podcasting conferences.

Penn offers six suggestions for 2009 PodCamp organizers:

1. Use the tools! 2008 showed rapid growth in every social network of note, and as organizers, the more you can help people meet and greet prior to the event, the better. Set up Twitter accounts for your event, groups on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many others, use search and readers and RSS to keep tabs on word of mouth.
2. Separate lecture from conversation. Figure out what makes your local PodCamp special and what’s just talking head stuff, and provide talking head stuff well in advance so that participants can maximize their time together. 
3. Go paid. Plan your PodCamp to run 100% participant-paid at the door. Continue to publish your ledgers publicly so participants can see how every dollar is allocated, but strongly consider going paid and having the event be wholly “sponsored” by the participants.
4. Support your local community. Pick a local charity and find a way to divert time, energy, or resources to it so that your community is a little better off for having a PodCamp.
5. Stay lightweight. Keep expenses to a minimum. The magic of PodCamp isn’t in refreshments or epic sponsored parties, but in bringing together people to learn, share, and grow their skills.
6. Add pieces along the way. Start with barebones expectations for attendees. As funding becomes available, you can add amenities later. Set expectations low, and you’ll never disappoint.

See his post for his full recommendations and some interesting discussion. 

The future should be bright for the PodCamp concept – tight budgets could make inexpensive, local conference more popular than ever.

TV By The Numbers’ Bill Gorman has posted some revealing stats on TiVo subscribers that suggest that the technology is headed for the dead pool. 

The above graph charts the change in TiVo subscribers, by month. Starting with February ’06, TiVo subscriber growth stalls and by February ’07, TiVo started bleeding subscribers. 

Gorman notes:

In the quarter ending October 31, 2008, TiVo’s total subscribers fell to 3.46 million, approximately the same level they had in Spring, 2005. As we’ve covered before, TiVo may have a valuable intellectual property portfolio, but its hardware selling business is over. For the most recent quarter, it sold fewer than 500 TiVo DVRs a day.

What’s killing off TiVo? Has the TiVo audience moved on to Internet media?

Podcast Channels is a new WordPress plugin designed to fill in some of the gaps in WordPress’s native podcasting support:

What do you need to podcast with WordPress? Nothing — WordPress puts enclosures in the feed for you. That’s the bare bones and it works well enough.

But iTunes metadata would be nice. And, how about different info in different categories? Podcast Channels lets you specify iTunes metadata for the home feed, specific category feeds, and even ‘user defined’ (‘Conditional’) feeds (see the FAQ).

The user defined feed feature basically lets you set up a podcast feed for any arbitrary collection of media files on your site. 

If you’re using Podcast Channels, let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Susan Mernit has written an interesting post about a new service for Twitter users, Mr Tweet:

Mr. Tweet is great.  Not only did I learn that I had some highly interesting followers I needed to follow back, I got an analysis and report of the influencers Mr. Tweet recommended I follow–not only their names, web sites and locations, but info on their average daily tweets, if they responded to people they did not follow, and so on.(I am now going to try using MrTweet with my dog’s twitter account and see how the algo holds up.)

To use the service, just Follow mrtweet on Twitter. The service will then DM you with its report, which includes recommendations on how you can make more effective use of Twitter. 

Mr Tweet will be big – it’s already got close to 5,000 followers – as long as the algorithms hold up.

 

Blockbuster and 2Wire, a provider of integrated broadband solutions, today introduced the 2Wire MediaPoint digital media player, an on-demand video solution giving movie fans instant access through their television sets to Blockbuster Ondemand content.

For a limited time, the MediaPoint digital media player is available “free” with the advance rental of 25 BLOCKBUSTER ONDEMAND movies for $99 at www.blockbuster.com.

The players are expected to begin shipping in time for the holiday season.

“We are bringing Blockbuster, and the thousands of movies in our digital library, straight to customers’ televisions,” said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster Chairman and CEO. “The player is simple to use, delivers DVD quality video, and there’s no monthly subscription commitment. ”

The Internet set-top box category is already getting confusing, and this just adds to the confusion. The average buyer isn’t going to have a clue what these things do or which box to buy.  

Blockbuster’s device looks very limited, but may it’s cheap and may appeal to Blockbuster fans. 

YouTube appears to be learning a lot of tricks from Hulu. Today they announced that they are going widescreen:

Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback from you about what you’d like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That’s why today we’re excited to announce a bigger YouTube player. 

We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don’t worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player. 

As always, we welcome your feedback and encourage you to share your thoughts with us on this exciting, new change happening for all videos on YouTube. 

This is a smart move, but the implementation could be better.

Most people have fairly large monitors now and this will prep the site for showing more HD content. 

But while it may be a smart long-term move, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t angered users that don’t like the way the new player displays many user-generated videos. Here are a few typical comments:

• I don’t like the player. Ok, widescreen movies look great on it, but everything else looks terrible. It would be better if I have an option to choose between the widescreen and the old player.
• This really should be optional. Especially since my (admittedly really old and terrible) computer could run the original sized player perfectly without any problems, but with this new player even the 4:3 videos slow down and can’t be watched without obnoxious hiccups. It’s not like a bigger size option wasn’t there for people in the first place. Hello fullscreen! I really hope you’ll change it back or at least give an option between the two player sizes.
• Meh, intentions were good, implementation horrid! Most of the vids have black bars left and right which IMHO look like poo! Especially poor are the people who uploaded 16:9 formatted vids!

Boxee is a funky hybrid of an application: an open source, cross-platform media center and entertainment hub with social networking features.

Sound like a mouthful of jumbled buzzwords? Suffice it to say that Boxee is a promising (if currently slightly klunky) application that lets AppleTV users (and PC, Mac, and other multimedia devices) watch and listen to interesting content, and share preferences with others via different social media like Tumblr, FriendFeed, and Twitter. The program takes your movies, music, and photos, adds to it the artwork, reviews, and trailers for those media. It also lets you stream online content (last.fm, Hulu, YouTube, etc.) as well on your computer or HDTV.

The recent AppleTV 2.3 upgrade broke Boxee. An update has restored Boxee for use with AppleTV.  Boxee notes on its blog that ~35,000 people are already using the application. That strongly suggests a large audience of Apple TV owners who want broader content choices. Users like us would like Apple to open up the Apple TV to third-party apps and content, like they did with the iPhone and the App Store.

multimedia-pcs.com says “I think Boxee is a great product.  I’m thinking about buying an AppleTV just to run Boxee.  When you have developers that ontop of a situation, you start to understand their dedication to their product.  They just received 4 million in funding and they deserve every dime of that.  Keep up the good work.”

For our part, we’ve found Boxee kind of kludgey to install and update, but we have enjoyed being able to actually watch and listen to streaming content, as well as our non-DRM’ed media, on our comfortable couch with the TV, rather than crowding around the Mac Mini in the office.

Boxee plans on releasing a set-top box to run its programs sometime in 2009.

Accepting the first ever YouTube Visionary Award via taped message, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah spoofed the famous Top 10 format from US comedian David Letterman to explain why she launched this channel.

Rania announced earlier in the year that she’d be vlogging at YouTube in order to encourage a global dialog to dismantle stereotypes of the Muslims and Arab world.

The American Veterinary Medical Association has launched “Chew On This,” a podcast about food safety and protecting the [U.S.] food supply. Dr. James Cook, AVMA President, says, “We’re going to explore and investigate many of today’s topics surrounding food – where it comes from, how it gets to our tables and why it’s important to keep our food safe, abundant and affordable.”

We mention this because the premiere episode, published this week, is a Thanksgiving show, featuring a poultry expert discussing holiday meal safety. I wish this technology had existed back in the late 80’s, when I cooked Thanksgiving dinner without my mother’s help … I baked the turkey, unaware that there was a bag of stuff inside it that was supposed to be removed first.  It was pretty gross. (I’m a much better cook now, thanks).

This begs the question: why (human) food advice from veterinarians? The association says they do this because their 76,000 member veterinarians are “engaged in a wide variety of activities dedicated to advancing the science and art of animal, human and public health.”

Pet-related podcasts are also available from the AVMA website.

A note on Mark Blevis’ blog tipped us off that PodCamp Ottawa is happening this Sunday at the National Arts Centre from 9:45 am to 4 pm.

The un-conference theme is “Fresh Thinking and Approaches.” One of the freshest things I noticed on the event main page is the advice to bring a floor pillow (no chairs/tables provided!), a pen and a notebook — but to leave the computer at home. No WiFi is provided at the venue, and face-to-face interaction is strongly encouraged.

Registration will be capped at eighty participants, to keep the sessions and conversations more intimate. For more information about the PodCamp Ottawa schedule, look here.