Within the last couple of days I've been altered to the launch of a pair of podcasting relating businesses. Here are my critical thoughts on these new ventures.

The first I heard of via Podcasting News. PodshowCreator.com touts itself as "a powerful podcast hosting and content delivery solution at a critical time in podcasting." Critical in what sense? Whatever, their hosting plans cost an arm and a leg. For $24.95 per month you get 500MB of storage space and 5000 MB of transfer. So if you produce a 25MB show four times per month you would be out of space in five months. Want to increase your space? If you pay $25 more a month they'll up your hosting plan to 1GB of space. So you can be a podcaster for five more months before you have to increase the cost of your plan again. Let's not even talk about bandwidth. Because if your show gets popular you'll be paying extra money for the bandwidth costs. On the $24.95 plan you get 5GB of bandwidth. If each of your shows gets downloaded 500 times, you'll blow your bandwidth out of the water.

Sorry folks, just can't recommend these newbies. You get a much better deal at Libsyn, who provide soup to nuts podcast support. You even get a much better deal with a traditional web host like DreamHost who give you 20GB of storage space and 1 terabyte of bandwidth for $9.95 per month.

And just today I was introduced to http://www.business-podcasting.com via one of the many ubiquitous press releases that come via my news feeds. The company is founded by the world's 12th podcaster, Michael Lehman. What was the podcast? Excuse me for my ignorance.

According to their site, they are "a full-service podcasting production firm specializing in helping executives and decision makers communicate directly with prospects, customers and employees." Okay, but could we hear or see some examples of podcasts you've produced? How about links to some of their clients? The link to their podcast points to a page on LibSyn where they have a pair of text posts and no media. Couldn't they at least figure out a way to cleanly integrate the podcast into their biz website? After all, a business would want a podcast to be seamlessly integrated into their website or intranet.

Note to new businesses offering podcast consulting services. Your website shouldn't be just a pitch. It should show examples of what you propose to do for businesses to help them. And it should be elegant and well integrated in your site. Just a bit of advice from someone who always takes a closer look before spending anything on a business service.

At first I thought that Google was missing the boat with their video service by making flash their distribution method of choice. Not so. They've continued to quietly expand the feature set on Google Video. Recently they've added the ability to select a code snippet for easy embedding of video clips into a web page. Now they have an option to download videos in multiple formats, including MP4 compatible with the video iPod. Very nice. They may be onto something. You can find some of my videos on Google here.

I recently wrote an article on music and podcasting that Ariel Hyatt from Ariel Publicity was nice enough to distribute to her clientele. Thanks Ariel! Feel free to have a look and comment back here.

Audioblog is a great tool for podcasting. It's like a swiss army knife. You can call in a podcast, upload content or even record online. And despite their name the video support is very nice as well. So it was nice to see recently that Audioblog has updated their pricing plans to include unmetered bandwidth.

Good move guys. There's nothing worse for a podcaster than to experience unexpected success with a podcast only to get an unexpected bill for extra bandwidth at the end of the month.

Hilary at PodCrawl let me know that Podcast User Magazine has launched their first issue. It's available as a PDF download. Very interesting. I'll be reading it very soon.

PodcastUser Magazine » Blog Archive » PodcastUser Magazine: Issue One

I'm working on moving this site to a new server today. As a result there may be some broken links and functions that work a little screwy. Trust me, I'm workin on it! Hope to be done with all the fiddling by tomorrow evening.

Mark Tafoya is host of the Remarkable Palate Podcast. He started his really great, New York based food podcast last year and had to suspend it for a while due to professional commitments. Mark is back podcasting and he recently posted a soundseeing tour of the new Balducci's food store on 14th Street.

Mark also pointed me to the folks at Audio Collective who have their own collection of soundseeing tours from a variety of podcasts over at http://soundseeing.audiocollective.net. They've been nice enough to post my latest New York Minute Show audio podcast.

Thanks to Chef Mark and the folks at Audio Collective for making sure that the world hears some great podcasting.