Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."

This is supposed to be under embargo until Midnight EST, but heck, it involves us, so you're hearing it here first.

Things are moving very fast at Technology Evangelist, and an amazing opportunity has been presented to us that we simply couldn't pass up. We're extraordinarily busy, so here is just a quick note for now with the news:

Starting Monday, the Technology Evangelist Podcast will replace Don Imus on CBS radio until a permanent replacement can be found.

Shows will be broadcast live from Minneapolis, and simulcast on affiliates now carrying Imus' show. The MSNBC video simulcast remains dead for now.

"The people are leading the charge into podcasting, and we don't take it for granted that all they want is American Idol," says Ron Bloom, CEO and co-founder of PodShow.com, a podcast network that offers links to 60,000 podcasts in 135 categories.

Podcasts with wide audiences are not so new; the president, the pope and even the Queen of England all have them. But an increasing slice of the podcast menu is more specialized and education-oriented.

One podcast tracking site lists nearly 1,300 podcasts in its education category out of a total of about 30,000 tracked; another lists more than 1,900 out of about 32,000. On iTunes, ground zero for the podcast universe, a dozen education-related podcasts regularly rank in the daily top 100 podcasts based on subscriptions.

"Almost any category you pick in podcasting is exploding," says Dave Hitt, a talk-show podcaster (Quick Hitts) who also helps run the Podcast Peer Awards, in which podcasters vote on the best in 16 categories. "Podcasting didn't exist 2½ years ago, so the number (of podcasts) has gone from zero to estimates of more than 50,000" in a short time.

A growing number of Americans are listening to podcasts, but very few do so every day.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday that 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, an increase from 7 percent earlier in the year.

However, only about 1 percent said they download a podcast on a typical day -- unchanged from the survey earlier this year. The rest do so less frequently, perhaps only once.

***

While podcast downloading is still an emerging activity primarily enjoyed by early adopters, the range of content now available speaks to both mainstream and niche audiences," said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew. "We are at a crossroads of a major transition in the way media content is delivered and consumed."

The array of individuals and mainstream media institutions that now provide podcasts has also expanded dramatically. For example, in November of 2004, Podcast Alley, a podcast directory website, listed fewer than 1,000 podcasts for download. Today Podcast Alley catalogs more than 26,000 different podcasts, totaling more than 1 million episodes. In addition to homegrown podcasts that cover topics ranging from music and fashion to religion and politics, mainstream media institutions such as NPR, the BBC and Comedy Central now regularly provide podcasted material as an alternative way to distribute their content.

Odeo, a podcasting site started by Evan Williams, who already made a tidy little fortune selling Blogger to Google, is buying back the share owned by investment firm Charles River Ventures. A source told Valleywag, Evan made the decision to dump investors (the venture capitalist aren't happy), which leads us to believe Williams still greatly cares about the company and has plans for Odeo's future. The source also says Evans never needed the money but was scared not to take it, and Charles River is now shopping around for a new podcast companies to invest in.

Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.

Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they're focused and easy to understand)

Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently

This is Your Government on YouTube
It's true. Last night, ONDCP became the first government agency to begin using YouTube.com to post video content using the popular YouTube Web site. We hope that this ground-breaking effort will enable us to reach more Americans online and to help combat some of the misinformation that has spread across the internet regarding drugs.

You can watch ONDCP video content on
www.YouTube.com/ONDCP

So, you want to be a coffee expert? Join our experts each Tuesday in September for Coffee Conversations, a unique audio series exploring the world of coffee. Each week, hosts Scott McMartin and Aileen Carrell will take you to "Coffee College," and invite special guests to share their perspectives on topics such as entertaining with coffee, Fair Trade, coffee composting, home brewing, and selecting the coffee beans that end up in your cup.

Listeners are encouraged to share their ideas, comments, and questions via the link below, to create a fun and interesting dialogue about the delicious brew. We’ll also take you behind the scenes at New York's Fashion Week with Starbucks Salon, and to Seattle to experience the world’s first Starbucks.

MuggleCast is doing well. While many podcasts earn almost nothing, Demopoulos said, MuggleCast earns revenue. It makes money through T-shirt sales, after a printing group out of Georgia saw how well the podcast was doing and offered to design T-shirts for the show for free. Now, the hosts get $6 on each $15 shirt sold.

The site also garners about $750 a month from reading advertisements for GoDaddy.com, an Internet domain-name broker. Sims and Schoen also earn $800 a month for maintaining the site.

Visibility is high, too. Last month, the show was No. 3 on the Apple iTunes top-100 list of "Arts" podcasts. And it's enjoying an overall rank of 46th out of tens of thousands on the same site.

Podcast Alley, a directory of podcasts nationwide, ranked it No. 2 on its top-10 list. The show also has been nominated for the Nickelodeon Australia's 2006 Kids' Choice Awards, and is a nominee for the 2006 Podcast Awards People's Choice Award.

Winer intends to recreate iPodder.org (now IndiePodder.org), one of the earliest podcast directories. iPodder's architecture was unique, because it was a distributed directory built on Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) text files, maintained by people around the world.

While iPodder was one of the first important podcast directories, it was limited by speed issues, dead nodes and other problems. This quickly led to the creation of dozens of other podcast directories. IndiePodder.org is now part of PodShow, which appears to be letting the site stagnate. The site was last updated five months ago.

Winer's project is ambitious. It is faced with overcoming both the performance and availability issues that limited iPodder.org, and the political challenges that have sidelined community directory projects like the Open Directory Project.

Thanks for checking out AmigoFish, a way of finding podcasts and videoblogs of interest to you. Sign up for an account, rate some shows and shortly you will get predictions based on what people with similar tastes to yours have rated. The more shows you rate, the better the predictions get!

Nielsen//NetRatings announced today that 6.6 percent of the U.S. adult online population, or 9.2 million Web users, have recently downloaded an audio podcast. 4.0 percent, or 5.6 million Web users, have recently downloaded a video podcast.

These figures put the podcasting population on a par with those who publish blogs, 4.8 percent, and online daters, 3.9 percent. To put this in perspective, though, Nielsen notes that podcasting is not nearly as popular as paying bills online, 51.6 percent, or online job hunting, 24.6 percent.

"The portability of podcasts makes them especially appealing to young, on-the-go audiences," said Michael Lanz, analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings. "We can expect to see podcasting become increasingly popular as portable content media players proliferate," he continued.

Young people are more likely than their older counterparts to engage in audio or video podcasting. Web users between the ages 18 and 24 are nearly twice as likely as the average Web user to download audio podcasts, followed by users in the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups, who were also more likely than the average Web user to do audio podcasting.

Robert Scoble says it wasn't a defection. We all know the code words: "left to pursue other opportunities." But in the truest sense of those words, Robert says he leaves Microsoft because his work there was done and he comes to PodTech to participate in a nascent industry that promises to go nova.

An audio version of the roast of President Bush by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central rose to the rank of No. 1 album at Apple's iTunes store on Saturday, three weeks to the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. Also in the Top 10 were new releases by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Paul Simon.

The audio version of Mr. Colbert's speech was delivered to iTunes through Audible.com, a company that provides audio content for downloading, including books, radio shows and shorter performances, and costs $1.95 to download. Neither C-Span nor Audible was able to say how many downloads there had been. Mr. Colbert was traveling and could not be reached.

By many accounts, Mr. Colbert's performance landed with a thud among his influential audience of journalists and politicians, who were more overtly enthusiastic about a comedy routine involving Mr. Bush and a professional George W. Bush impersonator. But the broadcast of the speech is enjoying a lucrative afterlife online, an unusual development for its owner, the nonprofit cable network C-Span.

Earlier this month, C-Span ordered more than 40 versions of the speech removed from the popular video sharing sites youtube.com and ifilm. C-Span said it ordered the clips removed to assert its copyright on recordings of the performance, and shortly thereafter allowed Google Video to stream it free. In the two weeks since, it has been at or near the top of Google's most popular videos. Over the weekend, it was still No. 4 there.

Blog Radio kicks off Monday, May 29 on the Left of Center channel, which plays college, indie and alternative rock music. Weeknights at 10 Eastern, a blogger will host the new show and showcase his or her favorite music and provide insights into the indie rock music scene.

The audio comment window contains a Java applet which controls the audio recording and previewing capabilities. After your visitor has recorded their audio comments, they'll provide you with their name and email address and send it to our servers.

At first, my traditional side immediately thought, this is a very very bad idea. Honestly, all I could think of was being forced to listen to, not simply read spam. But is that overblown? Spammers probably wouldn't take the time to record messages?

Still, even without the spectre of spam floating greasily above the room, my traditional side still wins. I would still rather read comments on this blog. So it would have to be a specific kind of blog where you would want to hear them.

OR you can even use the entire system in "reverse" and send yourself audio comments, then mark them public, and let the rest of your site visitors listen to them - sort of like "Quick podcasting."

Internet video is booming. Apple's iTunes store has sold a gazillion videos since its debut. YouTube gets more traffic than the New York Times web site. And politically-oriented web video is on the rise:

Google teamed up with Al Gore's Current TV network to provide Google Current.

Amazon.com teamed up with left-wing comedian Bill Maher for an online talk show.

iTunes offers a discount price for Comedy Central's liberal Daily Show.

AOL joined with the Huffington Post to provide Contagious Festival, a collection of conservative-bashing short movies.

These efforts have one thing in common: they are all produced by liberals for liberals. I began Hot Air in part to bring more balance to the videoblogging world. But also because it's the next logical step in the information revolution. (See Ed Driscoll. And Power Line. London trends here. Flashback: Jeff Jarvis on vlogs in 2002.)

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn't as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there's lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

1) He will be hiring a full podcasting news team, a sort of National Public Radio for podcasting.

2) He'll build out what he calls Infotalk. This is where other people produce podcasts in partnership with Podtech, and there will be some sort of split of the revenue generated from advertising running alongside or within the podcasts.

3) He'll build out a sponsorship network. These will be businesses like Intel (you will see Intel's feature channel on Podtech's homepage) which will pay Podtech to produce and host podcasts.

To use the service, Partovi says, you sign up, call the 800 number, record the podcast, and press pound. You then embed the Gcast player into your blog and the podcasts update automatically when you save the recording. "By simply by cutting and pasting some html [for the Gcast player] into my blog, any time I update Gcast content, it updates the blog. You have to create account at Gcast and copy and paste code into your blog, but once it's set up, it automatically updates. I don’t even have to touch a computer if I don’t want to."

Partovi says that when most people think of podcasts, they think of 20-minute long-form broadcasts, but he envisions a much shorter form, perhaps only a minute for Gcasts. He says the long-form podcast is great for a commuter who has time to sit and listen for a sustained period of time, but for others, a shorter form could work better and could expand the medium. "What's out there is the tip of the iceberg because when you go to a shorter format and put the tools in the hands of anyone who wants to do it, you get broader types of content."

But Chris Pirillo, a technology pundit who runs the Lockergnome family of Web sites and is himself a podcaster, says what Gcast is doing is not really anything new. They have just put a new name on it. "Gcast sounds interesting, but it's a new spin on an old tactic. Audio blogging has been around, and you can record by phone. It can be [convenient], but it sounds like voice mail," he says, and Pirillo says voice mail does not make for a high-quality broadcast.

Advertising on podcasts, which are invariably free to the end user, is in its infancy to put it mildly," says Mr. Chapman. "However, the nature of the audience and strong growth in its numbers have already driven major brands to invest in podcast-based promotion. More advertising and sponsorship will inevitably follow, as evidenced by the sprouting up of several companies dedicated to facilitating podcast advertising and measuring its effectiveness."

In their pursuit of venues that deliver a measurable, targeted audience, online advertisers and marketers are paying serious attention to this new "anywhere, anytime" channel.

The phenomenon has earned its own label, "podfading," coined by podcaster Scott Fletcher in February 2005 when he gave up on two podcasts of his own.

"I liken it to losing interest in a hobby and then coming up with the reasons you don't have time anymore," said Fletcher, a Peoria, Illinois, computer-program analyst who has since returned to the scene with his monthly Podcheck, a discussion of podcasting news.

Although hard figures are elusive, host Rob Walch of the podcaster-interview program Podcast411 estimates at least a fifth of podcasters don't make it to their 10th show; he expects the podcast graveyard to become even more crowded as podcasting becomes easier. Walch instituted a rule that he won't interview a podcaster until the show has at least 10 episodes.

"Podcasting is one of those things that's cheap and easy to begin to do but takes a tremendous amount of time to keep going with no payoff," said freelance writer and blogger Brian Reid of Alexandria, Virginia, former host of the gender-issues program Sex Talk, who quit in August. "There was no money in it and it did nothing to push my career forward. I've got a lot of other things in my life, paying work being one and my family is another. It's not like blogging, where you can do it for 15 minutes at a time and get away with it."

Frank McMahon, who produces or hosts five podcasts, worries that podfading will kill off some of the medium's freshest, most unusual voices. After watching a recent episode of Four-Eyed Monsters, a video podcast in which the hosts spotlighted their own exhaustion and frustration with the craft, McMahon recorded a special audio edition for their RSS stream to encourage them to keep going.

PodZinger crawls the Web daily, adding new podcasts to its index. It then uses speech-to-text technology to create a text index of the audio that's searchable by keyword.

PodZinger, which was launched in beta in September, has a new interface that lets users preview a podcast by clicking on the keywords in the search results. It now supports multiple audio players and browsers.

Gervais' podcast also features his "Office" co-writer Stephen Merchant and their former radio producer Karl Pilkington, as the trio take on a succession of offbeat topics from vampires to a regular segment called "Monkey News."

The free half-hour show -- essentially a radio program that can be downloaded to a computer or portable audio player -- now occupies the top spot on the podcast charts of the U.S. and UK iTunes Music Stores run by Apple Computer, whose popular iPod digital music player was the basis for the podcast name.

General Motors Corp., credited as one of the first corporate podcasters when it dipped its toe into the waters in February, records talk-radio-style episodes about its vehicles that were downloaded 75,000 times in August. Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary in May with a series recorded inside the park. Verizon Wireless issued one a few days ago to promote a cell phone that will, among other features, let you listen to podcasts.

International Business Machines Corp., which produces podcasts for investors about the future of trends, also set up a podcast-recording system for employee communication. And many media companies, from the BBC to ESPN to The Sun, have jumped on board for simple self-preservation.

"Companies are completely losing control of their messages, and the one way to get into the game is by blogging and podcasting," said Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media. "The companies that are early adopters stand tremendous opportunity to be the winners in the long run."

You know how it works. You're sitting at your terminal, minding your own business, when the Powers That Be rush in shouting some new term. "Blogs!" they yell, "Blooooggggsss! We must have a blog!" while wildly waving some business magazine article in your face. Erk.

While you don't have much of a choice in the matter, the fact is that many hot new technologies aren't always appropriate for everyone. While they may seem hip and get written about with breathless abandon by business magazines, not all new trends are worthwhile.

They can often turn into giant time-sucks or, worse yet, end up mouldering on the server, starved for the content they need to keep going, making the company look worse by the day as the "last updated" date ages ungracefully.

Welcome to the world of "Godcasting," where religious and inspirational podcasts come from Presbyterians, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and, yes, even pagans. Depending on your point of view, these programs may strike you as fun, convenient, or blasphemous. But they're rarely boring.

Godcasts have multiplied faster than most other types of podcast programming and have emerged as one of the genre's most popular. Vonhogen's Catholic Insider program ranks as No. 3 -- ahead of programs with streaming jazz, rock songs, or general news -- on portal PodcastAlley.com, which lists 2,884 podcasts. And Catholic Insider keeps on moving up in the charts.

So are many of the other 171 religious and inspirational podcasts out there that bear such names as Wired Jesus Podcast (a program for tech-savvy Christians) and Outchurched. The latter features Ryan King and Dan Tripp, both of whom once aspired to the ministry but became disillusioned with the church. They created a blog and podcast aimed at one of the largest Christian demographics: people who have left the church. In one podcast, King and Tripp discuss why they stopped attending services. "Both of us wouldn't care if the church died," says Tripp.

And the Pagan Power Hour podcast includes information about casting magic spells and proper foods to cook for pagan holidays.

Odeo (odeo.com), a podcast directory, plans to encourage more churches, synagogues and mosques to use them, said Adam Rugel, the Web site's director of content. Odeo lists a broad variety of religious podcasts, including programs from Buddhists, Muslims and Jews.

Despite the variety of religious podcasts, Christian programs make up by far the largest segment of the category. Shows range from recordings made at the kitchen table to slick broadcasts with pulsing music and crisp audio, like that of "RevTim" (www.godcast.org/categories/revtimPodcast/).

Independent podcasters don't have the assurance of a built-in audience whose demographics they can rely upon. In fact, they struggle to even accurately count the size or makeup of their audiences -- information that advertisers covet. Some have rough ideas based on e-mail responses, site hits and, if they're lucky, download figures, but they say they can't tell how many people are listening through Apple's iTunes service, which doesn't share its statistics.

That's frustrating for folks like Cinecast's Hallgren and Kempenaar, whose show has been featured a couple of times on iTunes' homepage. The duo believe that iTunes is caching Cinecast on Apple's servers, and while they're grateful for the attention, they say that as a result users who subscribe to the podcast aren't downloading the program from the Cinecast server, making it impossible to accurately count the audience.

Many early podcasters say they're in it for the long haul and expect profits to come later.

"I think there is a lot of money to be made out of this, but it's in its infancy," said Mark Vavrick of Renegades of Comedy. "There's a lot of people with computers, but not everybody knows these shows are out there yet."

"I have 50, 60, 70,000 listeners. I could make a couple of bucks off that, but not much. If you are talking a million podcasters, and then you can kind of divide that amongst ourselves, then that is kind of interesting."

Essentially, he says, if you are doing a bass fishing podcast, someone who is selling bait and tackle will probably want to advertise on your show.

He is clear the ads will not be the traditional "in-your-face" type familiar to commercial radio now.

"We are really going to see these microcosms and commerce will be all over the place."

"Our goal is to make it easy for our visitors to discover some of the best of what's available," said Bill Wilson, senior VP of programming for AOL. "The programs we are featuring are great for novices and experts alike. Over the next few months, we will be expanding our podcast experience with more exclusive and original programming -- from AOL and from partners -- and adding more advanced search options."

AOL's first original podcast is "Sports Bloggers Live," a weekly sports talk show produced by AOL. That podcast does not currently have any ads in it, but AOL has left open the possibility of placing ads in podcasts in the future. Over the coming months, the company plans to add additional original podcasts from AOL Music, Moviefone, AOL Coaches and the KOL (kids) and RED (teens) services.

AOL has also beefed up the podcast search functions in its WinAmp media player. WinAmp now has a podcast directory called SHOUTcast Wire. In addition, AOL has inked a deal with TVEyes to integrate its Podscope search engine with AOL Search this fall.

Everyone from Disney to Newsweek to National Public Radio is now offering podcasts, and Apple Computer, Inc. last month made it a whole lot easier to find them and download them to iPods.

While profits remain elusive, there's a bigger prize out there the company that manages to become the go-to Web site for podcasts could gain enough leverage to strike favorable deals with proven content providers, and generate cash by charging for subscriptions and advertising.

She is eager for such a deal. Without one, KCRW is prevented from recording podcasts for shows that include music. That means fans of the popular "Morning Becomes Eclectic" must wait until music rights are obtained.

"The explosion for podcasting hasn't happened yet," said Seymour. "It takes off the second that someone gets the music rights."

"iTunes has done what possibly no one else could have accomplished, propelled podcasting into the mainstream," said Will Lewis, management consultant for Santa Monica, CA, radio station KCRW, which posts content in the Podcast directory. "Our servers have been swamped with a stratospheric increase in traffic. In fact, downloads have increased tenfold as a result of the iTunes 4.9 launch."

Podcasts aren't conveniently corralled together at a few iTunes-like stores, however—they're scattered across the Web at scores of far-flung sites. To keep up with the coolest ones, you'll need software such as iPodder (versions for PCs and Macs are available at ipodder.org), which displays lists of available programming, or "feeds," to give you instant access to thousands of podcasts.

I'm getting tired of people insisting that blogs are one thing but definitely cannot be another. Sure, I know exactly what Searls is talking about: the type of blog written by individuals (like, for example, this one). But that doesn’t mean that General Motors is abusing the blogosphere by producting Fastlane, which targets the consumer audience of automotive enthusiasts. I'll keep on saying it: Blogs are lightweight content-management systems, and as such, are applicable to any task the use of such a system accommodates. Consequently, we'll continue to see blogs branch out along several evolutionary paths. Some will be terrific, others will cause mass shrugging, and still others will be wretched. Those launched by organizations in order to help the company achieve business goals will require -- require --consideration of content targeted to audiences. That, of course, will not diminish the importance of the writing.

We’re excited to intruduce the beta test of Podscope -- the Internet’s first spoken-word search engine for Podcasts. If you're as excited about this service as we are, you probably already know what a podcast is. But, for those of you who don't know, a podcast is like radio program which can be downloaded and played at any time. Wikipedia has a terrific entry on podcasting.

We’re starting our beta period on April 18th as a way of seeing how the platform holds up. During this time please be patient, the beta is to evaluate the system under load to determine areas needing improvement. Believe me when I say, we are very interested in feedback. So if you’re a listener or a podcaster, please, tell us what you like and what you think should be changed.

Podcasting is hot. But it just got hotter. Paris Hilton invites you to join her on "The Paris Hilton Podcast -- Countdown to House of Wax," beginning on April 29. Join Paris and friends as she shops, parties, poses and publicizes in the days leading up to the May 6 opening of House of Wax.