News out today that podcast host LibSyn has been bought by Wizzard Software.

Wizzard is the company that purchased burgeoning podcast host SwitchPod a couple of months back.

My bad. Fruitcast and Castfire are still going strong. Both had blogs that were inaccessible which I took to mean that there was no more news and therefore nothing happening.

James from Forty Media corrected me on the last post. And now Christoph from Castfire has chimed in as well with these comments:

"It's been a long time since that we met in the early days of the NYC podcast users group. I want to assure you that we are still around and doing well. We are just about to release a new product that should revolutionize (well, that may be overstating things, but it should definitely be buzzworthy :) audio and video presentation and distribution on the web."

"The blog was taken down because we are in the process of moving data centers and are trying to keep things static until it is over. Once we are all settled in, we promise to start blogging on a regular basis. We should have our website updated in the next couple weeks with all the details. Stay Tuned and keep up the great shows."

So I will leave both of these companies in my community forum post on the Podcast Advertising Landscape and add any more that pop up in the near future.

My advice, for whatever it's worth, to anyone retooling is to find a way to keep the blog alive so people covering the industry can stay up do date. I understand that a little operational security is necessary, but some teasing can help as well.

Auto insertion advertising player Fruitcast has temporarily shut down operations. A visit to their website yields nothing but the image to the left of this post.

A surf over to the Fruitcast Blog yields the old 404. If there is indeed something more coming then why not keep the blog going?

Fruitcast isn't the only ad insertion player to go dark in recent months. The formerly buzzworthy CastFire has fallen off the radar as well. A trip to their blog yields a database error.

Kiptronic is still going strong though. They had a booth at the Podcast Expo this year. How many podcasters have actually gained a paying sponsorship via Kiptronic? At least they're still around to help make it happen.

***UPDATE***

James Archer of Forty Media got in touch to say, "I just wanted to assure you, though, that we haven't even come close to hitting the skids. (If anything, we're just peeling out of the driveway now!) Like the site says...stay tuned! ;-)"

So the rumors have been greatly exaggerated. Keeping the blog alive would prevent the reactionaries like me from jumping to conclusions. There is the Forty Media blog which I have now found due to James' response.

Adam Curry apologized today for media not being available on the PodShow network for a couple of days. I heard that the Podshow.com domain actually expired. Can you believe it?

Adam acknowledged that himself, Ron Bloom and Go Daddy CEO Bob Parson's were responsible. Evidently Go Daddy is the domain registrar for PodShow. Although he believes that, "...there's no reason for Go Daddy to let that happen to one of their bigger clients."

The question that I have is this one. If you're starting a business that you plan to be a media empire, why would you only register the domain for a single year? It's not like the cost is prohibitive.

To be sure this has happened before to bigger companies. I once heard that Microsoft let the Hotmail.com domain expire.

Frank Nora produces The Overnightscape audio podcast. Originally the show was produced weekly and then moved to a half-hour daily format. Now that Frank is up to episode number 561 he has moved to a weekly format but he's still providing the same amount of content.

So his latest show is three hours plus and the file weighs in at 89MB. I'm not sure that this is such a good idea. It could take the average user several days to get through his single podcast. And one long file means that people listening on mobile devices might have to do a lot of fast forwarding to get past the content they've already heard.

Frank is never shy about breaking new ground though. He's moving from the "most produced" podcast show in history to the "longest podcast episode" in the history of podcasting.