We’re going to be talking about cutting edge tech news and I’m sure Dave will be adding a lot of perspective from the early days of Web 2.o’s unfolding. He was there at the start and is still breaking new ground on a regular basis. It should be a fun show.

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.


Check out the play button below where you can listen to the interview using the Yahoo Mediaplayer, which was super easy to include here! It did change the color of the text on this page, though. Anyway, here’s the interview.

Dave Winer interview of yours truly.

Links we discussed include:
*The ReadWriteTalk interview with the founders of FriendFeed – where by the way, I’ve since learned that there is a lot more than just RSS going on over there. Check out that interview, there’s a transcript available too. The differentiation starts at about 8 mins in.
*The RWW Primer on Lifestreaming
*Our list of 35 lifestreaming services
*The popularity filtering service we talked about was AideRSS and the feed scraping service is Dapper.net

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there’s a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding’s research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what’s in h2 tags? that’s probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It’s fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I’ve heard yet. I’m just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I’m telling you – it’s good stuff.

Ding’s vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of “educated agents of meaning” (smart software applications is what I’m seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don’t know what else. It’s got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It’s a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers’ blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

One of the promises of the internet is to democratize access to both information and publishing. That democratization, in theory, makes voices outside of the halls of power more capable of changing the world than they would be otherwise. The jury is still out as to how real all of that is. There are lots of people and organizations giving it a try. Good deeds alone rarely pay the rent, though, and a relatively small number of people online want to watch often-depressing investigative journalism when there’s so much fun to be had in other media sectors.

Liz Gannes wrote a good article last week about the monetization challenges faced by Alive in Baghdad, a project she called “arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world.” AiB is pursuing licensing deals with major media outlets but advertising doesn’t seem to be a very viable option for sustaining this fantastic project.

Who else is doing great investigative journalism in video on the web? I spent a fair chunk of time looking, and asking other people for their favorites. Here’s the best projects that I’ve found so far. Please leave more in comments so we can all be inspired.

Each of these shows illustrates a different model for financially sustaining investigative journalism: foundation support, viewer donation and licensing/advertising. There’s a lot of overlap between examples and models, but I think the differences will be clear if you give them a look. The final example is of a project that appears to be funded by a commercial video production business; that may be the best model in some circumstances.

I’ve placed the RSS feeds of the five shows below in a SplashCast channel that you can view here. Click on the “channel guide” button to switch between series, the thumbnails at the bottom of the player to switch episodes. If you’re a video (or audio) journalist or just want to share your favorite serialized media with visitors to your website – SplashCast is the ideal way to do it.

I hope you enjoy these selections.

Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a work of historic proportions. A daily show running an hour in length, DN is broadcast on over 500 radio and television, satellite and cable TV networks in North America. It’s also available as a video or audio podcast. It’s not exclusively, or even originally, an online project – but it’s so darned good I have to tell you about it. It’s the only media phenomena that’s made me cry more than once.

Each episode starts with a hard-hitting ten minute news round-up; the remainder of the hour is filled with world-class guests related to whatever is in the news that day. It’s incredible content.

Democracy Now, according to their Wikipedia entry, receives no money from corporate, government or Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants or funding. Founded in 1986, DN is filmed in New York City and is the flagship program of Berkley, California based Pacifica Radio. The show is funded entirely by foundations and viewer donations.

Alive in Baghdad

The aforementioned Alive in Baghdad, produced by Philadelphia based Small World News, publishes video footage made by paid Iraqi correspondents and others on the streets of Baghdad. That’s how I understand it, anyway. It’s a great way to see some perspectives that you don’t see in mainstream media and to say that it personalizes the people most impacted by US policy in Iraq is an understatement. (Check it out, it’s the second show in the channel displayed above.) It’s a great project that’s also the basis of the next selection on the list (Alive in Mexico) and plans to launch more outposts in the future.

If the Alive series can sustain itself, it will go down in history as one of the most important media efforts in the era of online media that’s emerging today. Small World News asks viewers for small one-time or monthly donations and occasionally licenses content. For more information about Alive’s monetization challenges, check out the link at the top of this post.

Alive in Mexico

The sister show of Alive in Baghdad, Alive in Mexico covers “everything from street battles in southern Mexico to Mexican culture and history.” “Tune in each week to learn something new about Mexico,” the website says. This too is great content, offering in-depth English language video about this very important but too-often ignored country. Mexico’s struggles are, in some ways, the world’s struggles and AiM is a great way to learn about them.

Talking Points Memo TV

Joshua Micha Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog is one of the leading liberal political blogs online. It’s now expanded into a small media empire – including Talking Points Memo TV, a show that TPM makes for video blog network of networks, Next New Networks. The group says it broke and pushed to center stage the Alberto Gonzales/U.S. Attorneys scandal.

How do they do it financially? Though monetizing a liberal political blog is not an easy thing to do, it’s probably easier than any of the above models. The video component specifically is paid for by Next New Networks. NNN has raised $8 million in venture capital. In order for a company like Next New Networks to pay a video show’s producer, I imagine, it will have to have a lot of potential to make a lot of money.

Collateral News

Collateral News is a well produced series produced by Philly based WoodShop Films. It appears they do commercial video production to support their investigative journalism. Or they do investigative journalism that borders on conspiracy theory to drive traffic to their commercial video production business. Just joking, that’s not very likely. In a world where there’s relatively little demand for investigative journalism in online video – there is HUGE demand for commercial video production for media and marketing companies (some of the kinds of clients WoodShop lists.) Though they aren’t puting out an hour a day with high faluting guests, like Democracy Now!, or paying correspondents in remote, war torn parts of the earth – for what they are doing Collateral News may have the most viable model for financial sustainability yet. Some of their politics (and pedantic attitudes) really irk me, but it does seem that they are doing a good job so far.

Honorable mentions

Journeyman Pictures describes itself as “London’s leading independent distributor of topical news features, documentaries and footage. We’re like a video encyclopedia of the world.” Embedding turned off from YouTube, though.

People of the Web is the new Yahoo! project from Kevin Sites, intrepid reporter hired to run the Hote Zone series. Both are good, and People of the Web is pretty good – but it’s a little more fluffy than investigative. Definitely worth a watch though, and I love the site design.

Hot Air with Michelle Malkin is a really well produced video series. I’m sure some of the reporting is good, and I tried to include one conservative source in this list – but the content is just too offensive to post live on this blog.

LinkTV is something I don’t really understand, but it looks good. I think it’s a satelite TV station that buys documentaries from independent producers. Some good stuff, anyway.

So those are some of the best investigative journalism video projects I’ve found online, what about you? If you’ve got favorites, leave them here in comments – or better yet, build a SplashCast channel to show off your favorites on your blog, Facebook or MySpace page.

Know of any more business models being explored for this work? Have any thoughts (or clarification) on the ones mentioned above. We could all use any information you’ve got, dear reader, because the world needs more critical media online.

What is a podcast?  The term has been defined as serialized, shortform audio delivered by RSS – but they aren’t always short, they aren’t only audio (video podcasts are big) and a high percentage are viewed on web sites instead of by RSS anyway.  Serialized online media might be key concept.  It’s an unfortunate misconception that an iPod is required to consume podcasts.

To be honest I used to listen to far more podcasts before I got a good web enabled mobile phone, an EVDO card and the excellent services of the City of Noses dog walkers here in Portland.  All caveats aside, here’s my list and a SplashCast player so you can check out my favorites right away.

IT Conversations – not all episodes are of interest to me, but many of these interviews and tech conference talks are not to be missed.

Democracy Now – a daily audio and video show about current events that delivers some of the best investigative journalism and world news you’ll find anywhere.  This show is an international media phenomenon of mind-blowing proportions.  It’s broadcast on over 500 cable access and community radio stations in addition to being available as a podcast.

The Vloggies Show – Irina Slutsky’s comedy and commentary on the state of the video blogosphere is fun and informative.

Rabbit Bites – two sassy bunnies, with subtitles.  This one isn’t in the SplashCast player because something funky with the RSS feed prevents it from being included.

Textra – If you can get over the assumption that Natalie Del Conte is little more than Beauty Myth eye candy, you’ll find that she actually does some good research into the tech stories you might not have read closely over the week.

1938 Media – Loren Feldman is not a nice man but he’s smart and I can’t stop watching his show about people on the internet.

That’s about the extent of my current list of favorites.  Here are some shows I used to listen to a lot that you might enjoy as well.

The Gilmor Gang – Rest in Peace.  Ever since this weekly two-hour tech round table stopped publishing, podcasting has felt far less meaningful to me.  I mean that literally.

For Immediate Release – Another long show about online communication – PR especially.  Always timely, if a tad uninspired in its analysis (sorry guys).

Diary of a Shameless Self Promoter – Heidi Miller speaks at trade shows but also does a great podcast about promoting yourself as an independent professional.

Those are my favorites!  I’ll be putting this SplashCast player back in my redesigned blog sidebar here and adding individual videos I find and want to share in there as well.

What are your favorite podcasts?  New ones I like can be really hard to find so please let me know.  The practice of tagging people and asking them to blog about something in particular isn’t one I’ve ever been very comfortable with.  You’re reading this post – would you like to participate and list some of your favorite podcasts?  Go for it, link here or to Dawn’s post and we’ll all get to discover more content.

Results are different from searching YouTube metadata, so subscribing to feeds for both searches would probably be a good idea. There are a number of ways to do that, including Vixy’s YouTube RSS generator or through the official capacity with an URL like this: www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss That’s of course most useful if you want to subscribe to YouTube videos tagged “monkey.”

How many people are going to want to subscribe to searches for words used in YouTube? A whole lot, I think.

If you’re in the mood for podcasts, the most recent edition of the Gillmor Gang is not to be missed if you’re interested in new media vs. old and the changing advertising landscape. Amanda Cogden from RocketBoom, Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine/About.com/NYTimes and Richard Edelman, head of the PR firm that represents Walmart and is smart enough to employ Steve Rubel, are all the guests. And it’s only 30 minutes long! So if you are put off by the usual hour length of one of the best podcasts online – this could be your big chance to check it out. Very forward-looking stuff in this one.

Tags with selected links elsewhere: Podcasts, advertising, Web2.0, change

My co-worker at Net Squared Britt Bravo has posted an excellent list of 10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs. Check it out.

Possibly even cooler than that is Britt’s 7 Ways Nonprofits can use Podcasts.

• Who’s the #1 blogger amongst people who have identified their favorite reads in the new Technorati Favorites system? Steve Rubel, a prolific blogger who covers the new PR at MicroPersuasion. He did a great interview with Brian Oberkirch of Weblogs Work, just posted today. He talks about blogging his brains out and the emerging roll of blogs in PR. About 30 minutes long, it’s a good listen.
• After being told by Dave Winer in comments here to stop worrying and listen to his most recent podcast on OPML 2.0 explained in an understandable way – I admit that I do feel a lot better. I don’t think his explanation is as accessible as he thinks it is (I’m going to try and write up an even more straight forward one here asap) but if you are interested in OPML it’s a great thing to listen to. It’s at this link: OPML 2.0 Podcast
• Also worth listening to is Dave’s conversation with John Palfrey, founder of toptensources.com, and director of Berkman Center at Harvard Law School (very cool group). If you’ve never checked out Top Ten Sources, you really should it’s really neat. That’s what this podcast is all about. The fascinating Irina Slutsky of GeekEntertainmentTV is the west coast editor there. That interview with Palfry is here: Palfrey Podcast file.
• Marnie Webb just posted a short but info-packed podcast interview she did with Chris Law about Net Squared, its parent organization Tech Soup and her work personally. Law was one of the founders of the very hip social networking site Tribe.net and now blogs about tech startups at 1000 Flowers Bloom. Tech Soup and its parent Compumentor are huge organizations that move a staggering amount of resources to the nonprofit sector. (Disclosure: I work for them right now, in case you didn’t know that.) This is all good stuff to learn about and Marnie’s interview will give you a pretty fast intro to it. That file is at: Webb interview podcast.

Ok, enough about all the great interviews other people have done that I’ve been listening to! I have to sign off here and go write up interviews of Gloria Pan from MediaCenter.org, Jesse Salinas from the Hands on Network and Chris Blow from Progressive ICT Review. Those will be posted over at Net Squared interviews as soon as I can get them up.

An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.

Without further theoretical ado, I’ll tell you how to use these files and then tell you what I’ve put in them.

In some RSS feed readers you can just copy the links below and paste them into the Import OMPL (or Subscriptions) by URL field. In others you may need to download the file connected to these links and import it from your computer – no big deal there either.

In Newsgator, for example, follow these links: Add Feeds, URL and Import, Import, enter the linked URL of your choice below.

In Bloglines (where it doesn’t end up looking nearly as pretty as it does in NewsGator by the way) take the following route: My Feeds, Edit, Import Subscriptions (at the bottom of the left pane). Users of other systems should all be able to figure out how to import OPML files, except maybe MyYahoo users for whom I don’t know how feasible this will be. You can delete any of these feeds individually at any time, too.

To subscribe to these groups of feeds what you want are the links or files behind the subject heading links. To see what has already been delivered by the individual sources, click on their particular links.

Let me know if you have any problems with this. I am just learning how to do this and I’m sure it could have been done more gracefully. Info on how I made these can be found in this post.

So here they are…

• International Free Speech News

  Contains feeds for:

  1. ACLU free speech press releases
  2. Article 19: Campaign for Global Free Expression
  3. Index on Censorship
  4. Institute for War and Peace Reporting
  5. Amnesty International news

  Note: None of the above organizations provide these feeds; for information on how they were grabbed see my post “International Free Speech News via OPML”

• Big Picture Eco News

  Not local, not issue specific, not neccesarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

  Contains:

  1. Popular recent items tagged “environment” in Del.icio.us
  2. Environmental News Network
  3. Gristmill, the blog of Grist.org
  4. Sprol.com, using maps and pictures to examine eco troubles world wide
  5. Tree Hugger, eco news for the hip and urban – I think.
  6. WorldChanging, a great group blog on many issues including eco solutions.
• Non Profit/Net Squared

  Feeds from non profit groups using Web 2.0 tools to share news about the non profit sector.

  Contains:

  1. The 501c3 Cast, a great podcast about non profit work.
  2. Items tagged Net2 in Del.icio.us, a news wire promoted by Net Squared
  3. Net Squared Interviews, interviews of folks using Web 2.0 tools explicitely for social good.
  4. Net Squared Blog, group blog by staff and participants in the Net Squared community.
  5. Non Profit Online News, long one of the most respected sources on the subject.
  6. Today in Tech Soup, news from the non profit technology assistance group Tech Soup, parent of Net Squared.
• Political Audio

  Three of the most moving and informative news audio shows online.

  Contains:

  1. Democracy Now!, a daily hour of powerful media.
  2. Free Speech Radio News, daily half hour from correspondents around the world.
  3. The Global Shortwave Report, weekly highlights from English language shortwave radio world wide – a paradigm shaker.
• Vlogs (video blogs)

  Contains:

  1. Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth – Video, world traveling social justice multi media activist.
  2. Brave New Television
  3. Geek Entertainment TV, funny interviews with interesting people in the Web 2.0 world.
  4. Vlog – Flux, awesome radical street videography – last 10 episodes shot in Katrina aftermath.

So those are some of my favorite sources of online media – now you can subscribe to them in groups with just a couple of clicks. I hope that OPML files will spread and multiply beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. They sure seem to have a lot of potential.

Update: I’ve added all of the above to the 35,000+ OPML files and RSS feeds searchable at OPMLsearch.com. Wow!

TagCentral Tags: OPML, RSS, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, multimedia, sharing, feeds, Web2.0, nptech,

Alternatives exist! Check out the Educational Podcast Network, where you can find everything from the Countryside 4th Grade Podcasts to the School Improvement Industry Weekly podcast.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
education, podcasts, iTunes, DRM, podcasting

I’ve been thinking about beginning to more aggressively email people and organizations that I find on the web who I think might be interested in my podcast. The conceived email would just include a short introduction and invitation to check out the show. I’m sensitive about the unsolicited emails that I receive and this has me thinking, what is spam? If I take the time to find people that I think might be interested in something that I am doing, and send an email to the person, should that exclude me from junk mail category? What if I personalize each email? What if I don’t and just bcc every address? If the email is readily available on the web, does that mean that the person is open to receive solicitations?

My response was that emailing bloggers for coverage (as well as print publications) and then having people learn about your project there, perhaps email their friends about it etc. was a better way to introduce your work to people than unsolicited emails. I’m really not sure, though.

I pointed readers towards a list of the best articles I’ve found on pitching bloggers (http://del.icio.us/tag/pitchingbloggers)
and suggested that subscribing to the RSS feeds of searches for both links to your site and key terms was an important way to engage with the conversation.

What do you think? Is unsolicited email to introduce your project to people you think would be interested – is that spam? Any other thoughts on promoting a podcast about non-profit work? I hope you’ll go over Corey’s post at Net Squared, put in your two cents and check out the conversation (as well as Net Squared itself). I also hope you’ll listen to or subscribe to Corey’s excellent show, the 501c3Cast.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
promotion, email, spam, bloggers, 501c3cast, nptech

So it’s been a pretty busy day so far for me, but not as busy as these folks! The coolest thing I’ve found online today has been this awesome 1975 musical performance titled “Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office.” Give the little play button a click and check it out as you read the rest of this post!

Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office

Isn’t that awesome! I found it via on one of many MP3 Blogs now available online, this one called Aurgasm. The post for this song itself, with comments etc. is here.

Other MP3 Blogs I’ve found (via my awesome brother Tom) include The Hype Machine and Elbo.ws but there are lots and lots online. Del.icio.us contains 607 items tagged “mp3blog,” though at least some of them are probably directories of mp3blogs. The most popular items in that tag space are here and include The Hype Machine, Aurgasm (so my brother knows what’s hot) as well as sites like 3Hive (looks very cool) and music.for-robots.com.

These sites are on less that fully solid legal ground, but they are pretty darned cool if you ask me. Standard practices include posting links after every song to buy the album from the artist, a message on the sidebar urging you to pay for music at least some of the time and a note to anyone who owns copyrights on any of the music posted saying “just let me know if you want me to take your song down and down it will come – no problem.”

Snip… out goes the discussion of competing theories of intellectual property rights.

Anyway! So you might be wondering, “how do these sites put little play buttons that enable me to play these files without leaving the page?” Like these:

Rhythm’N'Brass by The Special Guests
Via 3Hive

Galaxies, by Laura Veirs (very beautiful song!)

Via music.for-robots.com

I don’t even have these songs on my server! And you can listen to them without leaving my site – wow!

How did I do it? Hours of painful toil! No, it wasn’t that hard actually. I just viewed the source code of the Aurgasm buttons, copied and pasted them into my blog post here, and changed the URL of the song being pointed at. Wow! It’s all made possible via Fabricio Zuardi and Andre Cardozo’s awesome open source XSPF Web Music Player. To learn more about this rad tool, check out this page and this page, both on the open source community site Sourceforge.

You don’t need to know about that stuff though just to use the tool. I am going to try to figure out how to make a bookmarklet for this code, but I don’t have time right now. But you can copy and paste the code from my site, replace the parts here with the mp3 filename you want to play and the title, and paste it into your own site.

It’s taking me too long to make the code appear as code in this blog post, so just go up to your browser’s View menu and “view source code” for this page. I’ll surround the code you want with asterisks and you can copy and paste it into your own blog posts or site.

Just look at the letters and symbols right around the file URL real close before you paste over them. You can do this! It’s not really very hard. Feedback: My brother just emailed and reminded me that it would be a good idea to include a direct link to the file that this tool streams, so folks can download it too.

Does this have you totally pumped up or what? (I’m stoked.) Well here’s something else to listen to, my Net Squared coworker Britt Bravo explaining how volunteers can plug in to the Net Squared community. Maybe your enthusiasm will spill over and you’ll go profile a non-profit group or two.

Britt Bravo on how you can help Net Squared (6 mins)

While you listen, here’s Britt’s blogs at NetSquared and at her Big Vision Career and Project Consulting.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
music, mp3Blogs, blogging, audio

The above link is an interview I did yesterday with Norris McDonald, President of the African American Environmentalist Association (AAEA). We talked for about 18 minutes about a variety of topics including:

• The AAEA Blog and the AAEA Hollywood Blog and Norris’s experiences with his constituents on these blogs.
• Will podcasting take off or do most people prefer their talk on the radio and music on their iPods?
• Nuclear power. The AAEA supports it as the solution to all the problems of fossil fuel dependency. Norris also argues that advocating for decreased consumption in the US is unrealistic. He recommends the site GreenSpirit for more info.

The interview was done via the Gizmo Project a VOIP program very much like Skype. Gizmo was every bit as easy to use and has a one-click record function, something that is a real nightmare in Skype. To read more about Gizmo Project check out this reviews on the bottom of the Gizmo page. Gizmo saved the call onto my desktop in .WAV format with a filename based on my caller’s username. Much thanks to my sound engineer brother who cleaned up the background info and um’s. I think it sounds great. Hopefully this is the first of many interview podcasts we’ll be doing.

Technorati Tags: podcast, interview, AAEA, NorrisMcDonald, environmentalism, nuclear, blogging

The things I look for in a podcast search engine are these:

• RSS feeds for my search queries – this is by far most important to me.
• Can I listen to excerpts where my search terms are used?
• How big is the engine’s index, or is it able to find shows about my topics of interest?
• Is it easy to submit a podcast for indexing?
• Is it easy to download the podcasts from the search results page?
• Are there any other features that I didn’t expect?

So what are our options and how do they compare?

Podzinger
RSS feeds are included, this is what interested my in this service. According to the search results page though, “RealPlayer and IE 5.0 or higher are required for audio playback.” You’ve got to be kidding. That means I won’t be listening to excerpts. At least the occurence of my search terms is time stamped. Podzinger has indexed is 20137 podcasts, seems to be growing and finds good results in my areas of interest (non-profit, social justice, ecology, etc.) It is very easy to submit a podcast to be indexed. Unexpected features? Check out the Podzinger registration page, where you can find code to insert a search for your own podcast into your web site. Nice, but does it rely on RealPlayer as well?

Conclusion: I’ll be subscribing to feeds from Podzinger and might consider recommending it to people who want to add a search function to their own podcast’s web page. I won’t be visiting the Podzinger site itself very often as I find its requirements to listen to excerpts frustrating.

Yahoo Podcast Search
Feeds? Nope, and that’s surprising given how well RSS is embraced generally at Yahoo. Can I listen to excerpts? Nope. Listening is through a proprietary Yahoo podcast listener thing that I don’t really trust, but worse than that – you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download the files! Once I do that even, I’m taken straight through to loading the audio file on my browser! I want to click a button and chose to download the file onto my hard drive, thank you. I don’t see how many files are indexed, though I imagine lots of people have figured out how to submit to this service. I am so upset by how dumbed-down and locked up this interface is that I don’t even want to look at Yahoo podcast search anymore! As for interesting features, the searches do separate podcast series that are described using your search terms vs. episodes in which your search terms are said. Additionally, there are listener reviews, tagging, etc. Yahoo has so much money and status that I’m sure you can probably find lots of interesting things with it, but the difficulty in downloading, the lack of an RSS feed and the requirement that I login with a Yahoo ID all make me so angry that I will probably never recomend this search engine to anyone.

Blinkx.com
I love Blinkx. They were the fist service I found that offered an RSS feed for searches, and their customer service has been incredibly helpful and engaged with problems I’ve had with them! I love them! Unfortunately, there are problems here too. Search results only deliver the episode title and not the source show or podcast series name. That’s strange. You can’t listen to excerpts around your search terms, that too is a real shame. But it is very easy to download the files in your search terms. I can’t tell how many podcasts they index, but it is very easy to submit podcasts for indexing. Innovative features include a slider to prioritize date or relevance in the order your search results appear in. I like Blinkx best of all of these options, though I wish some of the feature omissions weren’t an issue.

Podscope
I rarely use this service because there is no RSS feed for my searches! Executives from the company said in an interview I listened to that they would be supporting RSS soon…and that was months and months ago. Whoa, I take it back! Upon visiting the site again I see that they have added RSS. Yay! This is a new contender for my absolute favorite. The search results are displayed beautifully. You can easily listen to excerpts based on your search terms, it’s easy to download the files, there are great links to the podcast’s home page, the search-discovered episode’s permalink and the podcasts RSS feed. It is easy to submit a podcast for indexing and they too now offer a search box for your show’s site. Wow! This is great, go check it out and click on some Adsense.

Conclusion: I think that Podscope may be my new favorite. I am so excited to see the changes they’ve made.

Feedster Podcast Search
I love Feedster. They offer customer service almost 24-7 via IM! And it was really helpful customer service when I contacted them. They do, of course, offer feeds for searches. You cannot listen to excerpts around your search terms, you can select either series descriptions or episodes to search inside. Download is easy and you can chose either date or relevance as priority for display of your search results. I can’t tell how hard it is to submit or how big the index is. The front page says “Currently Indexing feeds from different podcasts.” Well isn’t that nice?

Conclusion amongst conclusions: When I have multi-media research needs for myself or a client, I am most likely to subscribe to feeds for my queries from Blinkx, Feedster and now Podscope and Podzinger. If I am doing a one time search for audio content, I am going to search inside Podscope so that I can listen to excerpts around my search terms. If I’m looking for shows about a certain subject, as opposed to particular episodes that mention my search term…I might begrudgingly use Yahoo.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, search, podcast, audio, RSS, Yahoo, Blinkx, Podscope, Feedster, Podzinger

In related news, I didn’t know that The Mommycast, a podcast about raising kids, just got a $100,00+ sponsorship from Dixie paper products. It’s a cool show, with no political pretense, so good for them!

Podcasts for broadcast have really enriched my life, and I know they have the lives of others as well. They don’t have to be just for public consumption, though. I wrote an article earlier today over at the blog of RSS Applied about IBM’s use of podcasts for internal communication. That’s a very exciting concept. One resource I did not know about when I wrote that article was a podcast just uploaded today! It’s at over at John Furrier’s site and is titled Inside IBM. I’m going to go walk the dog and listen to it right now!

Update: That IBM podcast is pretty boring until 10 minutes in. You can get the gist of who the interview subject is by visiting the link above, but the first 10 minutes are largely about entertainment podcasts. The whole interview is 16 mins long and the last 6 minutes I found worth listening to.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, podshow, sponsorship, monetization, expansion, internal_communication, intranets

Here’s the MP3 file.

Notes:
Blogoposium1 attention stream – explaining web2.0 to non-geeks

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Podcast Tags: Tagging, Web2.0
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