Podcast.com News

To select a wine from a particular country you aren’t familiar with and have no recommendation for, you have no choice but to find the nearest wine retailer, read the labels of bottle after bottle and eventually make a choice based on (what you hope is) an educated guess. That was before podcasting. Now, before you even make the trip, you can experience the sound of a glass pouring, the look of the wine swirling in a glass, and learn all about the history and production of that wine AND an entire country’s wine through podcasts — direct from the people who know. Head over to our wine, beer, and spirits collection to find podcasts from the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, who produce an audio and a video podcast that details regional and varietal wines from Australia, hosted by Australian wine writer Max Allen and ‘regional hero’ Ben Glaetzer, respectively. The podcasts are a hit, as 15% of wineaustralia.com’s visitors downloading the podcasts, or 10,000 downloads, since their launch in April 2007. Now those outside Australia can worry less about a plane ticket to Oz and a series of wine tours and more about which Australian wine they’re going to buy next from their local shop.

UC Berkeley is again leading the charge to incorporate podcasting into higher education. Their new project, OpenCast, is being created to allow participating universities to capture, process, and distribute podcasts to their students. The OpenCast site gives a long list of prominent schools who are interested in this technology, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, UCLA, Duke, Oxford, and many more.

read more | digg story

Yeah, we did it — you can now log in to your Podcast.com account or sign up for a new account right from the front/center of our home page. In case you missed the big green and black signposts to do so, click all over the log in image and get ready for action!  We still have a lot of unfinished business on this site, so please excuse the mess — and email info [at] podcast.com if things don’t make sense to you.

For editing single audio files, Audacity has been the only free download worth noting in the past few years (no, that doesn’t include Garageband that comes pre-installed on Macs). It’s full of features, easy to use, and extremely light on the pocketbook. So it’s good to see there’s finally an alternative: WavePad by NCH Swift Sound. It’s also free and full of features including text-to-speech, voice activated recording, and batch processing to apply effects to multiple files at once (you have to pay for that last one, sorry). I’m using it now and it seems to do most of the things I want it to do, and most everything I use Audacity for. It doesn’t have access to the VST effects that I use Adobe Audition for, and seems about as useful (not very) as Audacity for mixing together multiple audio files, but what can you expect for free these days? (Like an old professor used to tell me, there’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’, but then again he must not have known about free software.)

The BBC, a longstanding producer of both video (although not currently) and audio podcasts, has announced a series of music podcasts that will feature 30-second clips of programs previously broadcast on BBC Radio. BBC Radio 1’s Chart Show, a rundown of the Top 40, is already rolling and November 17 will bring Folk & Acoustic with Mike Harding from BBC Radio 2, Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone from BBC 6 Music and the BBC Asian Network Chart. We’ll make them all available at bbc.podcast.com for your listening pleasure.

We’re on a roll now — we’ve updated PSP.podcast.com for you to browse our site using your Sony PSP. Also, if you’ve registered for the Podcast.com beta, you can see your podcasts by navigating to my.podcast.com/[yourusername]/psp. Fantastic!

Microsoft has upgraded the Zune media player, both the new 80, 8, and 4GB Zunes as well as the first-generation 30 GB Zunes, with a new interface and features. In celebration of this, we’ve added a “Add to Zune” button (left) to every podcast page on our site (click the image on the right to see how it works) . So you now can put podcasts made available by Podcast.com on your Zune, if you installed Zune Marketplace 2.0. We shoot — we score! (And so do you.)

Fans of the Office (both versions), Office Space, and nutty reality TV spoofs will be drawn to the IT Room, a new Internet-only show that debuts November 11. It’s a show about the geeks who control the computers at the company you probably work at. You can subscribe to trailers for the show (which are already are getting hyped through a number of video websites) from the IT Room website — and yes, that is a monkey telling you to subscribe, and you need to do what he says.

We have a lot of ways to receive comments from you guys about our site (what’s good, what’s bad, bugs, etc.):  the ‘Send Us Feedback’ link on the left of every page on Podcast.com; the comments on posts in this blog; and the comments under each FAQ.  You can also email us at beta [at] podcast.com to hit us directly.  Either way, we’re seeing everything you write and considering each comment, and everything is helpful to us — so keep your ideas flowing.  We have enough feedback right now to swamp us under; we’ve prioritized your comments and tried to deal with the biggest issues first.

Now back to squishing those bugs …

Step right up, step right up — to the right side of the Podcast.com homepage, where we’ve beefed up “Our Featured Podcasts” collection. You can get more of everything in every category in both audio and video. We’ve been loading ten podcasts in each category with links to our Channel pages, and they’re hand-selected for your listening and viewing pleasure.

We’re also creating subdomains for most of the folders of that same directory, which means you can go to arts.podcast.com, comedy.podcast.com, kids.podcast.com, and the rest of the category names followed by .podcast.com. Any folder with two names will soon have two separate subdomains with the same podcasts, such as news.podcast.com and media.podcast.com. We hope these subdomains will be easy for you to remember the next time you’re looking for podcasts on a certain subject.

Also, we recently hit a big milestone: we have over 25,000 podcasts on Podcast.com (now over 55,000)! Expect our collection to get larger and larger as we work to search the Web for great podcasts. Don’t forget to submit the RSS feed of your podcast or your favorite podcast if you don’t think we have it!