Patent for podcasting? Seriously?

A company you’ve probably never heard of before announced today that it has been awarded a patent on podcasting. VoloMedia was awarded U.S. Patent 7,568,213  titled "Method for Providing Episodic Media" yesterday. I think the fact that VoloMedia’s Murgesh Navar posted an entry defending the patent before anyone even knew about it underscores just [...]

Ups and Downs for Podcast Hosting in 2008

Back in October, Dickson and I announced that we were shutting down our hosting service Podcast Spot. At the end of November, we disabled uploading and are now in the final transition phase for downloads and RSS feeds. In February 2009, the site will be taken offline completely.
We’re not the only podcast hosting service [...]

Podcast Spot: What would I have done differently?

Last night I presented in the VenturePrize Seminar Series with James Matsuba of IdleTime. The seminars are meant as a primer for this year’s competitors on business plans, building a company, and pitching ideas to investors (and judges). When I attended the seminars back in 2006, I found the most useful part was getting [...]

Podcast Spot is shutting down

As some of you undoubtedly know by now, Dickson and I recently made the decision to take Podcast Spot offline. We started notifying our users a couple weeks ago, and today made it public on the website. Here’s our message to users:
We regret to inform you that after two years of helping you share [...]

Yahoo! Podcasts is dead

I’ve seen a few blog posts on this now, and I wanted to add my own thoughts. Some time in the last couple days Yahoo added a message to the top of their forever-in-beta podcast directory site that reads “Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007.” [...]

Happy Birthday Podcast Spot!

The big news today of course is the launch of Halo 3, but it’s also important to me for another reason. It’s kind of hard to believe, but it was on this day a year ago that we launched Podcast Spot. We had no idea what to expect for our first year, but I think [...]

Talking Tech with pacificIT Radio

I was invited recently to be a guest on Robert Sanzalone’s pacificIT Radio, a “fun, casual tech talk show where listeners from all over the world share their questions and experiences on tech.” We recorded the episode live last night using Talkshoe, with me here in Edmonton and Robert all the way around the world [...]

Some Thoughts on the Association for Downloadable Media

Last week a new organization calling itself the Association for Downloadable Media launched. The ADM aims to provide standards for advertising and audience measurement for episodic and downloadable media. From their press release:

The ADM will focus primarily on the world of podcasting, downloadable media and portable content monetized by advertising and sponsorship. The ADM will [...]

SSDD – Podcasting is just a word!

I don’t know how many times this is going to come up, but I’ll keep posting about it until I don’t have to anymore. Podcasting is just a word. It means different things to different people. All that matters is the idea or technology or process that we use the word podcasting to refer to.
PodZinger [...]

Podcasting Lectures at the U of A

Duane Szafron is a Computing Sciences professor at the University of Alberta. He’s also a podcaster. Sadly, being both a podcaster and a professor is currently a fairly rare combination, but I hope the work of Szafron and others will change that:

“I think it makes it harder for people who give fairly boring lectures. I [...]

Odeo bought by SonicMountain

Back in February I posted about Evan Williams and Obvious Corp. trying to sell Odeo. I hadn’t heard anything since then, so I kind of figured they were unable to find a buyer. Turns out they did though. From TechCrunch:

Details are just coming out, but New York based SonicMountain, a new startup, has acquired Evan [...]

What we have is a failure to communicate!

Tom Webster of Edison Media Research was on hand at the recent Corporate Podcasting Summit in London, where he talked about a new research report that shows podcasting isn’t growing much. There’s been a lot of discussion about the findings, but I don’t think they are cause for concern. I think Tim Bourquin has nailed [...]

Download Requests Alone Are Pretty Useless

Back in December I said that podcasters should gather and share as much statistical data as possible. It is now exactly three months later and, surprise-surprise, I still feel that way. The topic resurfaced on Saturday when Adam Curry from PodShow posted about the number of download requests the PodShow network has received:

For the record, [...]

Use podcasting to get your book published

Interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday about authors using podcasting to get noticed and ultimately, to get their books published. Podiobooks.com founder Evo Terra was interviewed for the article:

“Compared to audiobooks these authors break every rule in the business, including using sound effects,” Mr. Terra said. The podcast books also use music and [...]

Northern Voice Conference Day

We just finished recording the keynote session with Anil Dash at Northern Voice 2007, and I am now in the “Blogging 101″ session. The recording is going fairly well, and the audio recorders have picked up the presenters better than I expected given all the background noise you get when everyone has a laptop in [...]