It’s the next stage in blog evolution. Cheap digital cameras, free editing software, and video-hosting services have made production and publishing easy as pie. RSS aggregation technology offers the means to distribute content to loyal viewers. Broadband connections make watching it a snap. And every new iPod comes equipped with video capabilities.
I Like to Watch (The Boston Phoenix)
AMANDA CONGDON is a big star on really small screens - like the 4½- inch window she appears in on computer monitors every weekday morning or the 2½ inches she has to work with on the new video iPod. Ms. Congdon, you see, is the anchor of a daily, three-minute, mock TV news report shot on a camcorder, edited on a laptop and posted on a blog called Rocketboom, which now reaches more than 100,000 fans a day.
TV Stardom on $20 a Day (New York Times)
A trade show seemed dangerously close to breaking out here over the weekend, as vendors lined up to tout the latest podcasting wares to the milling masses. But nifty products and gizmos were ultimately a sideline at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference, where attendees wrestled with a far more fundamental point: whether this podcasting thing is — or even should be — a business.
People like you are creating, uploading, subscribing to, and sharing a vast and varied catalogue of video content online, and getting well-known for it, all with unprecedented ease. Vlog Nation, it seems, has arrived. And what’s more, it has officially hit San Antonio. With the recent opening of Node 101, a space for free vlog instruction and production located in the downtown Blue Star Arts complex, Michael Verdi — creator of Freevlog.org and one of vlog culture’s high-profile founding parents — scored the first drops in the bucket toward River City vlog awareness.
Picture this (San Antonio Current)
Yahoo Inc., the Internet giant, on Monday unveiled plans to get into podcasting with a test release of a service that will let users download and review online radio programs… Yahoo’s new service will allow users to download shows from National Public Radio, the weekly presidential address, and independent shows with subjects ranging from sports to knitting, the company said.
Yahoo launches new podcasting service (Reuters)
The podosphere may be virgin terrain for the online world, but already the race is on to figure out whether there’s any real money to be made through the new medium. Consider the vast variety of approaches that have cropped up since Apple’s iTunes upgrade this summer started delivering thousands of new listeners to podcasters who once toiled in obscurity. GrapeRadio podcaster Brian Clark is now gulping down about $1,000 a week from sponsors of his show for wine hobbyists. Grant Baciocco of the fiction serial The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd sells show-themed buttons and T-shirts and offers guest-voice roles for $50.
Podcasting Gold Rush Is On (Wired)
A video-blogger from Bergen in Norway is turning his camcorder on politicians, ahead of Norwegian parliamentary elections on Monday.Twenty-seven-year-old Raymond Kristiansen weaves quickly in and out of the crowds of locals and tourists on the streets of Bergen. He carries with him a small, hand-held camcorder that seems like a natural extension of his arm.
Vloggers get political in Norway (BBC News)
There is no doubt in my mind that podcasting is not only here to stay but will also shortly threaten established media broadcast systems. It’s not so much that they will all be destroyed by homebrew networks, but podcasts will be taking away just enough listeners to be a major concern.
Podcasting: The Next Big Thing (PC Magazine)
From unbashful bloggers to proselytizing pastors, people are using inexpensive software and high-speed Internet connections to share video clips of their lives… Nationwide, a growing number of “vloggers,” or “video bloggers,” such as Prodoehl are posting primitive videos online and inviting viewers to respond with text or video reactions. The trend is new enough that it’s difficult to know just how many people are vlogging - even leading research firms such as the Pew Internet & American Life Project have no data on it. But it’s likely that the number of vloggers is still small. One indication: A recent check of the Yahoo video blogging group showed it had about 1,200 members.
Podcasts are so last year (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Amid the general anxiety that afflicts both the broadcast radio industry and other old-line media companies, the podcast — an audio program that you pull off the Internet and download onto an iPod or similar device for listening at your leisure — seems as big a threat to radio as the Web poses to print media. But podcasts thus far seem to be more a device for time-shifting — saving radio programs to listen to them when you want to, rather than when a station tells you to — than an audio revolution. Thousands of podcasts are available, and many are indeed homemade shows of a sort you’d never hear on the radio. But many of the most popular podcasts are simply a new way to listen to popular programs from National Public Radio, the BBC and other big radio producers.
Podcasting’s Potential, Beyond Two-Fer Thursday (Washington Post)