I'm not even close to being one of the first people to react to the release of iTunes 4.9, but that doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. So for whatever it's worth, here it is.

I downloaded 4.9 to my wife's computer as soon as the word hit and then fired the program up to see what they had. As a podcaster, my first concern was being able to find MY podcasts and make sure the links and information are correct. To my great relief I did find my podcasts present, but most of my feeds were buried in the "Audio Blog" category. Thankfully, my NY Minute podcast was properly categorized under Travel. Not surprisingly, that's the only one that has seen a significant jump in subscribers, nearly doubling my audience. My other 'casts have seen a small bump, but if folks can't find them in iTunes then how can I increase listenership as a result of the new release?

One thing I'm planning to do is put together a quick guide to finding and subscribing to my podcsasts in iTunes so that folks who want to use iTunes have as little pain as possible. I figure that doing this comes with the territory of promoting a podcast. I am a bit perturbed though, as are many others, that Apple has created a proprietary XML format which producers must use in order to keep their feeds properly tagged and organized in iTunes. It would take a ton of work for everyone to rework their RSS to match Apple's requirements. Why not make a move like Odeo and allow producers to claim and manage their own feeds? Because Apple loves acting like a closed book. For now, Feedburner customers will have the option of having the Apple tags inserted on the fly. Thank you Feedburner! But what about folks that manage their own RSS feeds? They're getting the shaft and Apple is practically forcing them to use Feedburner if they want to have their podcasts properly categorized in iTunes.

So it's a mixed bag. The launch of iTunes 4.9 means more options for listeners and a generally larger user base for podcasting. That's a very good thing. The proprietary xml format and miscategorization of podcasts are bummers with a capital B. As a committed podcaster, I'm going to have to live with it though.

CEOs should know better. You would think. Not so. What the hell am I talking about. I started reading a seemingly innocuous article about MySpace, the online community for so many indie musicians. If you've read the blog recently you know that I enjoy MySpace as a recent member who is quickly making contacts there and making friends. In fact, I recommend that every podcaster who wants to build an audience head over there and set up a profile.

So while I'm reading this article ab out how MySpace is adding unique content to attract new members, I'm hot with the following quote in the fourth paragraph.

"Podcasting is probably more hype than people are using it, particularly since the majority is talk radio or bad talent, but it's a good fit for MySpace because of the personal connection," MySpace.com CEO Chris DeWolfe said.

Excuse me. More hype than people are using it? Sounds like a dude who's worried that people will start making connections via other channels besides MySpace. This dude better take a moment for a reality check. The Foo Fighters supposedly have a podcast somewhere on MySpace but I couldn't find it anywhere. That's because it's a "fodcast". That's short for fake podcast. The Foo Fighter profile page on MySpace links to some streams of an interview with Dave Grohl with a link that says [PODCAST!] at the bottom of the page. I tried the link and it was a bust. I got an error page. Even if I had gotten to the MP3 file, there was no RSS feed to subscribe to.

I can't understand why their top dog would take such a ridiculous dig at podcasting. Maybe it's a misdirection play. I can tell you this. The technology used on MySpace is five years ago. There are no RSS feeds to be found and the interface is weak and hardly intuitive. I frequently run into error pages where I should be finding content. You'd think they were in an early beta. For their sake, they should take their service to the next level (and soon) or they might just find themselves considered a fad in six months time.

What is Loomia? I saw a site called Loomia hitting my web server logs recently with the following url: http://dev.loomia.com:9000/loomia/site. Being the curious type I went over and checked out the link. It looks like they're building a service to help with finding, subscribing to and consuming audio and video casts. Their tag line for the site is "Find Good Stuff." They also say:

...the best way to find the latest in syndicated audio and video.

* Find thousands of new podcasts using the powerful Loomia search engine

* Share your opinions and get personalized recommendations on what you might like

* Organize and rate your favorite podcasts in one easy location

They are currently in an invitation only beta, but you can still browse around the site and see what you can find.

***

Meanwhile, Odeo has launched their official public beta. I found this out when I got a second invitation, evidently generated because I gave my email address way back when. Looking at the site, there's a lot more activity with the top shows now having over 200 "subscribers."

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Finally, last night's NYC Pod Squad gathering was a smash hit. Some of the best podcasters from the NYC area showed up to talk podcasting and make plans for our special...ahem...event later in the summer. More on this in a future post. Our goal is to raise awareness of our podcasts and podcasting in general. It should be fun. I've got a podcast prepared from the event that will be available sometime this afternoon on the NYC Pod Squad site or via our RSS feed.

Audible Does What? Podcasting Huh?: "

Audible is just starting ramp up their business model entry into the podcasting space. Right now there not letting anything out of the bag other than a white paper, but on June 24th they are going to roll out their...

"

Looks like Audible is on the cusp of a big announcement regarding the monetization of podcasting. There's a bit of info here. I hope to god that their solution doesn't include any DRM. Otherwise, I look forward to hearing what they've come up with.

The latest version of iPodderX has been reeking havoc on podcaster's stats recently. The updated product has a bug that causes the podcast client to continually request the same file over and over again. I heard about the bug a couple of days ago and checked my server logs. Sure enough, requests from iPodderX were up ten fold. I don't think it's affecting my bandwidth, just the records for numbers of hits. So it's a nuisance and I'd like the folks at iPodderX to fix it.

Meanwhile, over at LibSyn the new and cool stats engine has been down for a couple of days. supposedly it's due to them re-tooling as a result of the iPodderX issue, but I can be sure that's the whole story :(

Also, I see on the blog over at Podcast Alley that they will soon be offering a "My Alley" service to streamline the management of podcast subscriptions. The space is starting to get crowded with Odeo, Big Contact, PodNova, PodBlaze, PodFeed, Podcast Alley and others jockeying to be THE place for finding and managing podcasts.

For the record, I never send my listeners over to Podcast Alley to vote. Why should I promote another site who'll make money due to the fact that they'll sell advertising based on the readers that I send them. I also don't like their rating system. Why should someone have to vote every month? It's ridiculous and certainly doesn't help me to find podcasts that I will enjoy. It only helps people to find the most "popular" ones, or at least the ones who know how to rig the voting best.

Finally, I see there was a big new release by the folks over at the iPodder podcast client. Hopefully there won't be multiple file hits coming from this release.

I just got done checking out Dave's Imaginary Sound Space over on MSN Spaces. He's got a great resource there on podsafe music in his podcasting category. It includes links to all the great services, blogs or podcasts that help people to find and manage podsafe music podcasts. It's a highly recommended resource for anyone interest in podsafe music.

I signed up today for two services that every podcaster should be checking out post haste. First off, there's Ourmedia. Ourmedia is on a mission to create a grassroots movement to expose digital creativity. In order to forward that goal, Ourmedia offers free storage and bandwidth for your video, audio, text, pictures, whatever. Holy s#^t! That's a great deal. I heard about this service a couple of months ago and just got around to setting up my account.. So far I've uploaded three of my original songs and made a blog post. You can check out my page at http://www.ourmedia.org/user/24110. I plan on uploading a few videos as well to test it out.

It seems like this is a great opportunity for podcasters and vidcasters to jump into media distribution without spending hundreds of dollars a year (at least) on hosting. Sure you can use our media to host podcast content. Leo Laporte over at This Week In Tech is doing just that. I won't be far behind.

I also signed up for My Space today as well. Just about every band that I've featured here on Podcast NYC has a presence on My Space. So what not get in on the fun? My Space is a great networking site, especially if you're a podcaster who's into podsafe music. It's also a place to build your audience. Check out my page at http://www.myspace.com/podcastnyc, listen to my promo and see who my friends are. Hell, I've got ten friends and I've only been there a day.

Take my advice and figure out how to integrate these great sites into your podcast ASAP.

I had a nice converation with Alex Williams from the Corante Podcasting blog this weekend about digital music, the RIAA and podcasting. During the conversation Alex mentioned an event that Corante is hosting that sounded very cool and interesting. The event is called The Podcast Hotel and it will take place on September 6th and 7th at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon.

The whole place is going to be tricked out for creating media, blogging and podcasting. According to the event announcement: "Rooms will be for recording, editing and producing. The court yard will be a media lounge. The underground club will be for podcast concerts. And the city of Portland will become our stage."

It sounds great, and it runs right into the MusicFest NW music festival which runs from September 8th - 10th. The folks at Corante are teaming with MusicFest NW to create an "unconference". No boring panels, just conversation.

I like the concept and the format sounds great. There should be plenty of indie musicians on hand to join in the conversation on music, podcasting and digital rights. Let's get those musicians podcasting and make the major labels quake in their boots!

Hopes for legal music podcasts rise | CNET News.com: "Hopes for legal music podcasts rise | Digital DJs, record labels are discussing ways to simplify music podcasting, in talks that could help accelerate format's ascent. | June 16, 2005, 12:45 PM PT | John Borland"

This article and the revelations contained therein underscore some major problems with both journalism and podcasting. On the journalistic side, once again an author presents a narrow picture that lacks depth and fails to present both sides of the story. The fact is that we don't need "hope" for legal music podcasts. There are already hundreds of legal music podcasts and counting. They represent the majority of the music podcasts that you'll hear on the internet. So we don't need hope because there is a thriving community of podcasters playing independent (non-RIAA) music with the direct permission of the artists and record labels. Hell, we've got Sub Pop, The Association of Music Podcasting, Podcast NYC - Podsafe Music , Daily Source Code and much more. So I've got news for the author of this piece. Hope ain't on the way dude, it's here!

My second gripe has to do with podcasters like the dude from Coverville who insist on playing RIAA owned music in their podcasts and then spend their time trying to ask permission of the RIAA for doing so. Sure, the guy has the right (or maybe he doesn't according to the RIAA) to play what he wants. But why engage in free promotion for artists, many of whom are backed by record companies with marketing budgets in the tens of millions of dollars? What's the point? Here this guy is providing free promotion, playing songs that you wouldn't hear on the radio in a million years and he still has to go hat in hand to the RIAA and any number of other music licensing agencies in order for it to be legal. Does that make sense? Of course not. The RIAA has never shown itself to be a rational or intelligent organization, so why should they start being one now? They remind me of a group of people trying to prevent falling snow from hitting the ground.

So here's my advice to Brian Ibbott (and podcasters everywhere.) Play the music you want to play on your podcast. If you take my advice, you won't play any music controlled by the RIAA and indie musicians everywhere will be better off. If you do play RIAA controlled music then ignore the RIAA. Act like they don't exist. The RIAA has yet to prove that playing RIAA music within podcasts is illegal. If you want to be a pioneer, make them show their cards. But by going to them and asking permission, you allow them to control the dialogue and make them feel important. Make them feel as disconnected from technology and the music listening market as they are. Isolate the RIAA and make them want to beg the controllers (podcasters) of this new world distribution network to work with them on a partnership level. Once you've done that then (maybe) things will change.

I've posted an overview of my Odeo experience on my Front Page Podcast. Unfortunately, as of 9:13 Eastern Time, Libsyn is crapping out and no one can get to the file. Let's hope these guys don't become a subject of one of my service rants.

***Update***

Looks like there was about a three hour outage. Some jack@$$ forgot to cover his watch shift on the servers. Pretty poor if you ask me, but they've apologized and it's back up now. So LibSyn has escaped my full rants...for now.

Batman Begins Featured in Debut Podcast: "

Cinematical.com, a Weblogs, Inc. blog devoted to movies, has announced its debut podcast. The show features a review and discussion of Batman Begins.

"

Cool, maybe Tom and Katie will podcast their wedding!

While tooling around Odeo I found some of Bravo TV's podcasts. They have a pair of podcasts for the Queer Eye For The Straight Guy series. One is the Queer Eye Episodic podcast and the other one is the Queer Eye Hip Tips podcast. There are two episodes currently available for each and I know that my wife will be loving these because she's such a huge fan of this show. From the sound of it they may have recorded these via telephone.

I'm busy testing out the listener features of Odeo right now. Thanks to Rabble for the invite. My quick assessment is that it's a very pretty looking site and a very usable application. They're doing some very interesting things and I like the fact that they're really testing it out before the release. I've already made a couple of suggestions on how they can make it better. I'm really going to use the heck out of it over the next week before making any further conclusions.

I clicked on my stats link in LibSyn yesterday and I got a very pleasant surprise. LibSyn has upgraded to their new stats display, which is much improved over their previous text based format. When I signed up with LibSyn I relied on the promise that they were working on an upgraded stats display and they came through. I'm still evaluating the numbers but my initial thought is that they've provided a very usable and elegant interface.

So I saw the press release heralding the official launch of PodBlaze, a podcast services site that claims they've made podcasting "so easy even your Mom can do it." I checked out the site and I found a thin directory of podcasts. Of course I added my Podcast NYC podcasts. I then set out to explore the features for listeners and producers. For listeners you can browse the directory for podcasts and click links that take you to either the podcast home page or a PodBlaze page with a Wimpy based flash player. People who sign up with PodBlaze will have the pages with the Wimpy player and their "podcasts" will be listed in the player.

The two observations that I have from this are first that I can't find an RSS feed on any of the pages that are hosted by PodBlaze, only streaming from the Wimpy player. So that's not a podcast. The second thing is the fact that they're using the Wimpy player which isn't the most elegant solution. Couldn't they have invested some money into developing a custom flash player? There also doesn't appear to be any meaningful way to display show notes. This is not a prescription for a great listening experience. Okay, so three observations.

PodBlaze has posted a video to describe how easy it is for a producer to create a podcast. Of course, the most difficult part of "creating" a podcast involves recording and editing the audio. PodBlaze doesn't handle any of that. PodBlaze allows the user to create a podcast "station" by filling in a few forms and uploading a file. It appears from the demo that the max file size for upload is 15mb. That's a small file size for a podcast and not very useful to people who produce stereo music podcasts or spoken word podcasts over 30 minutes in length. Once a podcast is uploaded, users who view the flash player will also see an ad on top of the flash player. All of the players currently have a link to the Verizon telephone website. I'm assuming that they get some real advertisers sometime soon.

In general, I'd say it's a disappointing product that they're offering considering that they're pitching the site as a podcasting site. The directory is thin, there are no RSS feeds to be found, the technology used is weak at best and the podcast producer section is ridiculously short on features. I can't recommend using this service if you want to subscribe to podcasts or create podcast feeds. I can recommend Big Contact which provides all the services that PodBlaze hopes to provide and does it much better.

According to the Anarchogeek weblog there are only ten bugs left to hammer out before Odeo can be released. So maybe well see this new service arriving before Independence Day (July 4th) here in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Odeo beta continues. In the past few weeks I've seen hits from Odeo in my server logs. It seems that they're using tags to identify podcasts which certainly makes good sense.

Odeo promises to provide people with a platform to Sync, Listen to and Create podcasts. But will they revolutionize podcasting? Will Odeo help to take podcasting to the next level? Perhaps. If Odeo is hosting content and can combine several very important features to create a one stop shop then they just might change things. Right now I'm using Libsyn as a file host because they offer unlimited bandwidth. I'm using a traditional web host (Namesecure) to host the pages on my site and provide advanced features that enhance the user experience. I'm using Blogger to generate web pages because it's very simple to manage and customize. And since Blogger doesn't create RSS feeds with enclosures (Anyone have a clue why they don't?) I'm using Feedburner to add enclosures to my feeds as well as providing statistics. I'm also using AudioBlog to for mobile podcast recording and video blogging. Finally, I'm using OnFolio to manage all of my RSS subscriptions, including podcasts.

So as a heavy podcaster I'd like to see a service that combines all of those features into a single account managed on the web. I'd also like a way to capture the RSS feed information locally for the times when I'm traveling and can't connect to a web. So maybe we're talking about and Odeo lite desktop client. I'd pay $30 t0 $35 a month for the services mentioned providing they include hosting for at least 500MB per month and unlimited bandwidth.

Oh and there's one more feature that could put Odeo over the top in the world of podcasting. I've heard that they plan to give podcasters the ability to charge for their content. If Odeo has a feature that allows a person to designate certain content as "premium" and either handle payment or integrate with PayPal then Odeo could be very big indeed. This would make their service into an eBay for podcasting, where they play middle man and take a cut on sales. That's a very profitable space to be in and a very welcome feature for podcasters who plan on trying to charge for content.

Internet Daily: Podcasts growing at a frantic pace: "WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Podcasting is growing at neck-breaking speed, says Dick Costolo, the CEO of FeedBurner."

We all knew they would, right? Give people the power over technology and they'll take the ball and run with it. This is a good answer to those folks in the past few months who've thought that podcasting needs Odeo, PodShow and corporations to get big. Odeo and Podshow are not really making any kind of a difference now and corporations are just starting to dip their toes in the water. This has been a grass roots effort and still will be for a long time coming. All we need is the desire to create (which many people have) and the tools to make it happen. Many individual people are now making it happen.

Dave Winer thinks he's more influential than Bob Dylan or John Lennon. Is this dude freakin kidding or what? Those two gentlemen are pop culture icons (and music legends) who've sold millions of records worldwide. Dave Winer is a well known person in the world of technology. There's a big difference there my friend. You're not even close to having that level of influence. I hate to see a seemingly sane and intelligent person get such a big head. You're a dude who's done some excellent things in the world of technology, but it's a comparitavely small audience that you're speaking to.

Yet more proof that I've put together the most popular Podsafe Music collection on the internet. Podcast NYC's Podsafe Music page is the top search result in Google for the search "podsafe music", ahead of PodShow and Accident Hash. I guess that all that investment cash doesn't guarantee Ron Bloom and Adam Curry the top spot anywhere. It's not just about hype boys. You've actually got to deliver high quality podcasts.

In the past week, Adam Curry has played two podsafe artists that originally debuted right here on Podcast NYC. Those artists are Brother Love and Orange Park, both of whom were featured earlier in the month of May. There are a couple of other artists who've originally been podcasted on Podcast NYC whose music has found it's way on to other podcasts. As far as I can see, Podcast NYC's Podsafe Music podcast has become a hub for finding some of the best podsafe music in the world.

Gov. Schwarzenegger is Podcasting: "

Is it me or are corporations/government agencies taking to podcasting more comfortably than are to blogging? I see that California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger is now podcasting his weekly radio address. Here's the feed....

"

The Governator joins the fray. Anyone who had a bit of fear about podcasting catching on with the mainstream can now breathe easy.

Sub Pop is Podsafe (Matt May): "

...some of it, anyway.

"

Sub Pop records, the folks who broke all those cool bands from the Seattle scene in the early 90s, obviously get what podcasting is all about. I'll be subscribing to their feed.

I've been away from podcasting for three days whilst attending to the birth of my new daughter. Seems like a long time. Kinda nice actually. Posting this from my Nokia 6620 at the hospital.