Three new podcasts on IT Conversations

Three new podcasts on IT Conversations:

iPod nation: Steven Levy, the chief technology writer at Newsweek and author of
"The Perfect Thing," speaks with Dr. Moira Gunn about all things iPod - it even shuffles culture.

Political networks. Zack Rosen of CivicSpace and Jon Lebkowsky discuss leveraging the networking power of the internet in national campaigns.

Managing Vendors Before They Manage You: One of the major issues in technology is how to make services available to the less knowledgeable, making them so-called"grandparent compliant." Britt Blaser of Open Resource Group and Doc Searls, senior editor for Linux Journal, discuss the new paths  of technology and how they relate to the average consumer.

Podcasts beginning to reach non-geeks

San Jose Mercury News:  Podcasts beginning to reach non-geeks. One in eight baby boomers has downloaded one.

Making money at podcasting

Spent a while yesterday at Podcamp West with Michael Geoghegan, who's figured out how to make money at podcasting better than almost anyone. His Grape Radio podcast is sold out of sponsorship positions for the next three months. Michael, the co-author of the book Podcast Solutions, talks about what Grape Radio did right. Apologies for the less than stellar lighting. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

Tim Street on French Maid TV

Ever since Vloggercon, I've been meaning to catch up with Tim Street. So at Podcamp West yesterday, I interviewed him about his wildly viral videoblog, French Maid TV. Ooo la la! (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

Doug Kaye on the state of podcasting

At Podcamp West yesterday, I interviewed Doug Kaye, the second person who began podcasting after Christopher Lydon — and before Adam Curry — so it's odd that Wikipedia doesn't mention Doug in its history of podcasting. We talk about IT Conversations, The Conversations Network and Gigavox Media. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

At Podcamp West

Got back a little while ago from the first day of Podcamp West, a gathering of 150-200 podcasters at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. Among those on hand: Chris Heuer, Chris Pirillo, Michael Geoghegan, Steve Rhodes, Chris and Uta Ritke, Tim Street, Corey Denis, Doug Kaye, Charles Hope, Robert Scoble, Angelique Acevedo, T.J. DeGroat, Eli Spector, Steve Sloan and Craig Syverson (a fairly male-skewed crowd).

Spent more time outside talking to podcasters than inside at the panels, but came away with a few nuggets from the on-stage participants:

Kris Smith: "Find your voice." Experiment. Try out different styles. Don't think you have to put your first recordings online.

Vic Podcaster: "Don’t let the technology get in the way. You want to focus on the content."

"Be honest, be real, speak from the heart."

"Don’t worry about how many listeners you have, that’ll drive you nuts.

"Listen to the feedback from your audience."

"Want traffic? Add a Technoratli tag that says 'live nude girls.' "

"Trade links with other podcasters. Second Life is a good traffic driver."

"Don’t expect 5,000 downloads of your podcast in the very first week. It takes time to build up."

I'll be posting three video interviews I conducted at Podcamp West soon.

Amber and Leo live

Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte have a new live, interactive podcast, net@nite. 500 participants took part in the first one.

Pluggd: Search within a podcast

At the Web 2.0 Summit this week, I interviewed Alexander Castro, CEO and co-founder of Pluggd, an innovative podcasting service out of Seattle that lets users zoom in on the portions of a podcast of interest to them. Through the use of artificial intelligence, a search on Pluggd will show you "heat maps" of words or phrases of interest.  (Ourmedia page | watch video)

A different podcast network

New and worth checking out: POLARiTV, a new podcast network from Drew Olanoff and the folks at the Best Damn Tech Show, Period. (Drew interviewed me about Darknet a few months back.)

Podcast downloads on rise

Washington Post via San Jose Merc: Podcast downloads on rise, survey finds. 38% say they listen to radio less often. Excerpt:

A recent report from Nielsen Analytics found that more than 9 million Internet users in the United States downloaded podcasts to computers and mobile devices last month.

Ten percent of the study's 1,700 respondents said they download eight or more podcasts a week, and 38 percent of those said they listen to the radio less because they're listening to podcasts.

More than 75 percent of all podcast listeners are male. ...