Podcast.com News

It will be a happy new year in New York, again, when the lighted ball will come down from a 70-foot flagpole atop the tower in Times Square for the 100th year in a row. In commemoration the New York Times Only in New York podcast made an episode entitled ‘New York’s new New Year’ (the 12/27/2007 episode). Check it and have a ball!

Ah yes, the time of year when Santa rides his Harley down your chimney to deliver your presents … or is he lighting your yule log (extinguishing the menorah, etc.)? We at Podcast.com will be licking the egg nog bowl, hanging out under the mistletoe, prepping our vocal chords for a bit of that Aud Lang Syne, and all the while hanging out around our website so you can ring in the new year in style — with podcasts.

So here’s to a fantastic 2008. Feel free to hang around the site, even wear out your welcome, and we’ll be cranking out some great fun for you in the coming year. Thanks for staying tuned so far — and lets keep the good times a-rolling!

We just talked about how award-winning science fiction authors are putting out their work as self-produced podcasts, and already the bar has been raised. Novelist J.C. Hutchins recently wrote three books, entitled Descent, Deceit, and Destruction, respectively, that make up a trilogy called the 7th Son. As he wrote the chapters he read them aloud, recorded them, and released them as podcasts, along the way picking up 30,000 listeners and getting his work profiled in the New York Times. That effort paid off as Hutchins just announced he signed a contract with St. Martin’s Press to publish Descent. Congrats to Hutchins on the contract and for promoting podcasting to the science fiction world.

Satellite radio, a concept first unveiled in the early 1990s, sprung to life in the early 2000s just before the dawn of podcasting. By the time major radio personalities such as Howard Stern started jumping from terrestrial radio to satellite radio, many early adopters of podcasting thought they were jumping to/on the wrong bandwagon (podcasting being the right one, naturally). As the years have gone by, both podcasting and satellite radio are spending more time coming together — some podcasters with shows on satellite radio, and now XM, one of the two flagship satellite radio companies, with shows delivered as podcasts. XM has a stable of original programming that isn’t available over its satellite service, which gives podcast listeners some podcast options while stimulating their curiosity about XM programming available only on satellite. We’ll see if Sirius starts spending more time with podcasts as well.

We’ve seen many an award-winning media company produce regular podcasts that blow us away, but it’s not often we hear an award-winning talent put out a weekly podcast all by herself/himself. That’s what science fiction author Spider Robinson is doing in his weekly audio podcast called Spider on the Web, where Robinson tackles everything from “space exploration to technology, books, music, and anything else this writer’s fertile mind settles upon.” Robinson is already a juggernaut in the science fiction field with 3 Hugos, a Nebula, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and many other writing awards. Looks like he can add “pro podcaster” to his resume.

We’ve been experimenting with some advertisements on Podcast.com, moving ads from page to page, trying out different ad providers (we get all our ads from one place — we aren’t yet doing deals directly with individual companies to advertise on our site). We want to find the right mix of ads and design, meaning we don’t want the advertisements to get in the way of what we want you to do on our site: to find good podcasts! We’ll continue to experiment in this way, and things will change gradually (just like the design of all of Podcast.com), so thanks for bearing with us.

Interestingly enough, this comes on the heels of a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an organization that supports and tracks advertising on the Internet, that says companies will spend over 20 billion dollars to advertise on the Internet in 2007. While that is quite a bit of money, it’s still less than 10% of what companies spend to advertise everywhere (on television, on the radio, in newspapers, etc.). If you want to learn more, go ahead and click on the image to make it bigger — if you like charts and numbers (yes, a bit scary).

We’re excited that Duncan Perry, our COO and CFO, has been voted in as the treasurer of the first board of directors for the newly minted Association for Downloadable Media (ADM). Check our Treedia Labs site for more info, and cheers to Duncan!