Apple’s Top Podcasts Of 2009

Apple has announced its picks (iTunes link) for the best podcasts of 2009, breaking them out into four categories:

• This Year’s Audio Podcasts – The Adam Carolla Podcast topped the list. Other noted include Robert Ashley’s A Live Well Wasted, WTF with Marc Maron, The Memory Palace and Norman Centuries.
• This Year’s Video Podcasts - The Suze Orman Show topped the video podcast list, followed by Old Jews Telling Jokes, ROFL, The Rotten Tomatoes Show & IGN’s Daily Fix.
• Classic Audio Podcasts – This American Life topped the list of classic audio podcasts, followed by The Onion Radio News, TWiT, ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption, and Grammar Girl.
• Classic Video Podcasts – Their pick for the top classic video podcast was Onion News Network, followed by Joe Cartoon, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 260, DiggNation and NBC’s Meet The Press.

Their picks are dominated by corporate podcasts.

Think these are the best podcasts of the year? Let me know what you think the top podcasts were in 2009!

MultiTrack App Turns Your iPhone Into 16-Track Digital Recorder

Harmonicdoc has released MultiTrack 1.1 (App Store link), a $14.99 application that turns your iPhone into a 16-track digital audio recorder.

Features:

• Stereo Recording – up to 16 stereo or mono tracks
• Fader, pan, mute and solo for each track
• Metronome – never miss that beat again
• Time Signatures – various musical time signatures
• Ruler – shows where you are in the song
• Snap – snaps the timebar to ruler lines
• Punch in/out – automatically starts and stops recording
• Auto Input – allows monitoring the track underneath until punch points
• Select left, right, or both channels of a stereo input for recording
• Speaker/receiver output selection switch (for iPhone)
• Input and Output faders
• 24 bit internal pathways
• Multi-touch pinch/zoom support
• VU meters for each track
• Extremely low latency recording
• Selectable input monitoring
• Recording perfectly synced to other tracks
• Crossfading uses cubic interpolation
• Animated popup controls

Paired with a decent external microphone, this could be a powerful portable studio.

If you’ve used Harmonicdog MultiTrack, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Corporate Social Media Use Up 14% In 2009

Corporate social media use grew 14% in 2009, according to The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Their latest study compares adoption of social media over three years (2007, 2008 and 2009) by the Inc. 500.

Highlights of the report:

• Social networking continues to lead the way. The technology that continues to be the most familiar to the Inc. 500 is social networking with 75% of respondents in 2009 claiming to be “very familiar with it” (compared to 57% in 2008).
• Twitter has achieved amazing “share of mind” with sixty-two percent of executives reported being familiar with the new microblogging and social networking platform.
• The adoption curves for different social media technologies are not all the same. While social networking and blogging have enjoyed growth in actual adoption, the use of message boards, online video, wikis and podcasting has leveled off or declined. The addition of Twitter (considered by respondents to be both a microblogging site and a social networking site) in the latest study shows that an amazing 52% of the Inc. 500 companies are already using this tool for their business.
• Social media matters and is here to stay. Forty-three percent of the 2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was “very important” to their business/marketing strategy.
• 91% of the Inc. 500 is using at least one social media tool in 2009 (up from 77% in 2008).
• The Inc. 500 companies are also seeking to protect themselves legally, with 36% having implemented a formal policy concerning blogging by their employees.

The research demonstrates that, at least among fast-growing corporations, new media and social media are being rapidly adopted, but attention is turning to the platforms that have the widest adoption.

Image: Matt Hamm

Podcasting – One Of The Decade’s Most Important Radio Trends

Radio industry news blog Radio Survivor is calling podcasting one of the most important radio trends of the last ten years:

It’s fair to say that the emergence of podcasting revitalized online radio, and even audio programs in general

In the same way that TiVo and PVRs breathed new life into television, podcasting suddenly gave listeners the ability to mold their intake of audio programming to their own schedule. At the same time, RSS podcasts feeds made it much easier to index podcasts and create easily searchable online directories organized by genre and keyword.

It’s that innovation which stimulated an onslaught of podcast production.

While Radio Survivor positions podcasting as a major radio trend, for at least some of us, podcasts have pushed radio to the sidelines.

Thanks to podcasting, it’s hard to stomach the commercials and lowest-common denominator programming that most radio stations pump out these days.

What do you think? Is podcasting an important trend in radio – or is it making radio irrelevant?

iPods Don’t Make You Deaf, Rules Federal Judge

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has rejected claims that iPods pose an unreasonable risk of noise-induced hearing loss.

According to a Reuters report:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed a 2008 district court ruling that the plaintiffs failed to show that use of the iPod poses an unreasonable risk of noise-induced hearing loss.

“The plaintiffs do not allege the iPods failed to do anything they were designed to do nor do they allege that they, or any others, have suffered or are substantially certain to suffer inevitable hearing loss or other injury from iPod use,” Senior Judge David Thompson wrote.”At most, the plaintiffs plead a potential risk of hearing loss not to themselves, but to other unidentified iPod users,” he wrote.

While the court rejected the claim that iPods make you deaf, they aren’t saying that iPods don’t post a risk – just that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that they do pose a risk.

Why The iTablet Won’t Become “Another Footnote In The Sad, Miserable History Of Tablet Computing”

Infoworld has published an article arguing that Apple’s rumored iTablet will fail big time.

According to Infoworld, “to believe that Apple can somehow succeed where all others have failed is to ignore some fundamental realities of tablet computing.”

Infoworld sums up the prospects for the rumored iTablet, saying “Unless Apple pulls something truly revolutionary out of its hat, the iTablet will become yet another footnote in the sad, miserable history of tablet computing.”

That’s a pretty strong statement, especially considering the fact that Apple’s been on a roll with the “truly revolutionary” products lately.

Infoworld’s offers three reasons for thinking that an iTablet will be a failure. Here’s why they don’t matter:

1. Your lap doesn’t work as a desk – true, but the iTablet is likely to be light enough to hold like a book and be equally usable on a table. It may not be as convenient for doing conventional computer tasks – but it will be ideal for doing new types of computing tasks.
2. Typing is much faster than writing -  this is like the argument that the iPhone would be a flop because previous phones all had keyboards. A fixed hardware interface is a liability for small mobile devices, because it means that they can only excel at one task, instead of being useful for any task.
3. Netbooks make more sense for the vast majority of users – this is true, as long as users only want to do the things that you can do on a cheap netbook. What if you want to read an interactive magazine, paint a digital picture, watch a video podcast, remix some music or play a video game? Then you find that netbooks are profoundly limited by their lack of power and their primitive interfaces.

To understand the potential of the iTablet, consider the 100,000+ apps that have been created for the iPhone. That’s 100,000+ more apps than most phones had just a few years ago.

That platform wouldn’t exist if Apple had believed the people that said that phones don’t work as computers, that you have to have a keyboard on a smart phone, or that conventional phones make more sense for most people.

The iTablet has the potential to be the ultimate tabula rasa of computing – a blank slate that can be an ereader or a video player – but also any other thing that developers can imagine.

iTablet concept image: Photo Giddy

There’s Porn On Roku. Meh.

NewTeeVee reports that there’s now porn on the Roku Internet video system:

A new channel popped up on Roku yesterday called EroticVision.TV that makes adult content available on the broadband set-top box for the first time. But the new “adult entertainment” channel hasn’t actually been approved by Roku, and it operates in a kind of limbo where the app is publicly available but not publicly listed.

For the time being, Roku seems content to let EVTV and other adult content sites operate private channels, so long as they’re not broadcasting child porn or other illegal content.

If having a “back door” to porn leads to more set-top sales, Roku can’t exactly complain.

Ever since adult videos were a driver for the adoption of VCRs, people have made the assumption that adult content would drive adoption of other technologies. Five years ago, for example, Adam Curry was predicting a podcast porn explosion that would drive adoption of podcasting.

While there are plenty of adult podcasts, adult content hasn’t done much to drive podcast adoption, or Twitter adoption, or adoption of any new media/social media technology in recent years.

Maybe it’s because people are tired of dealing with porn spammers on social media sites. Maybe it’s because adult content is already ubiquitous on the Internet.

Whatever the reason, we don’t need a “back door” to porn. We need Internet media devices that are easy to use, solve real problems and aren’t massively handicapped by outmoded media business models.

Podcasting Is The New Punk

Barney Jameson at DV247 thinks that podcasting is the new punk:

The sad truth is that these days if someone snatched my iPhone from my fingers to see what I was listening to they would be less likely to find a demo by a new breaking band than an episode of Movies You Should See. Or Super Happy Fun Time. Or Here Goes Nothing. Or Answer Me This.

I like to think that part of the reason is my ingrained love of low-fi production values and DIY spirit. Anyone can record a podcast, it takes very little equipment and even less expertise.

Far more important than the money spent on setting up is the quality of what the podcaster has to say. It’s the message that matters, not the sheen put over it. Crucially, podcasters are also highly unlikely to make any money out of their efforts, meaning they broadcast simply to be heard. If that’s not punk then I don’t know what is.

Podcasting is the new punk.

It’s the new ‘zines, too.

What makes podcasting exciting is not that CNN and ABC and NPR have podcasts – but that you can have one, I can have one – anyone can have one.

For a long time, many tech analysts were distracted by the question of whether or not podcasts could make money. Now that this has been demonstrated over and over, maybe more will reconsider the aspect of podcasting that’s really interesting – that podcasting is the new punk.

Punk Bloke: Zoria

Podcasting Definitions

Podcasting is quickly becoming a buzz word among the techie crowd. So what is podcasting, anyway? Podcasting is online audio content that is delivered via an RSS feed. Many people liken podcasting to radio on demand. However, in reality, podcasting gives far more options in terms of content and programming than radio does. In addition, with Podcasting, listeners can determine the time and the place, meaning they decide what programming they want to receive and when they want to listen to it.

What Is Podcasting?

FTC Guidelines Raise Big Blogging Questions

Update 3: The new FTC Guidelines went into effect this week. A recent WebProNews interview with Wendy Piersall, Founder of the Woo! Jr. Network, looks at some interesting points about them that you may not have considered - some "gray areas" if you will.

Update 2:  Now Cleland says, "If people think that the FTC is going to issue them a citation for $11,000 because they failed to disclose that they got a free box of Pampers, that's not true. That's not going to happen today, not ever." (via)

Update: The FTC is now saying that the $11,000 fine is not accurate, at least for the first violation. Fast company got some responses from Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC, who says:

“That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law. To the extent that I have seen and heard, people are not objecting to the disclosure requirements but to the fear of penalty if they inadvertently make a mistake. That’s the thing I don’t think people need to be concerned about. There’s no monetary penalty, in terms of the first violation, even in the worst case. Our approach is going to be educational, particularly with bloggers. We’re focusing on the advertisers: What kind of education are you providing them, are you monitoring the bloggers and whether what they’re saying is true?” [empahsis added]

Cleland addresses more of the concerns here.

Original Article: The Federal Trade Commission has released its revised guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The revisions include a focus on "bloggers" and social media users, requiring them to properly disclose when they have received payment in the form of either money or product from a company or organization and produce content regarding said company or organization. The word is that bloggers can be fined up to $11,000 per post for not disclosing.

Have you ever mentioned a free product you received online and not disclosed it? Comment here.

The reasoning behind the guidelines seems noble enough - provide transparency and keep consumers safe from hokey information. However, the concept of the government dictating how this happens does not sit well with a lot of people. The revisions (which can be found in this 81 page document [pdf], should you care to peruse them [they start around page 55]) have ruffled quite a few feathers and the conversation has become one about free speech.

Well-known author/editor/publisher Jeff Jarvis makes a really good point. He says the FTC assumes that the Internet is a medium. "It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking," he says. "So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed."

It's not hard to find echoes of Jarvis's sentiment all over the web. Although, I don't believe I've seen it as eloquently put as with the Denny's analogy. Still, not everyone sees the FTC regulations as a bad thing. In fact, Google's Matt Cutts stepped into the conversation with Jeff Jarvis, expressing a bit more enthusiasm for the guidelines.

"As a Google engineer who has seen the damage done by fake blogs, sock puppets, and endless scams on the internet, I’m happy to take the opposite position: I think the FTC guidelines will make the web more useful and more trustworthy for consumers," he says. "Consumers don’t want to be shilled and they don’t want payola; they want a web that they can trust. The FTC guidelines just say that material connections should be disclosed. From having dealt with these issues over several years, I believe that will be a good thing for the web."

Commenters essentially tell Matt the whole thing would smell a lot better if he were the one regulating it. The reasoning for this is that Matt is involved with the industry. He is not a government worker that has been one his whole life. He's been in the field. He knows the score. The argument coming from most of the opposition is not about the fundamental principle of making content more trustworthy for consumers. At the root of it, it appears that people are much more concerned about a government body of regulators who aren't necessarily involved with online content production telling them how it is, when there are many, many questions about what falls under the criteria.

A number of these questions are nicely placed in an "open letter to the FTC" from Ron Hogan at MediaBistro's GalleyCat. Here are a few of them:

 

- If an unpaid blogger at the Huffington Post "endorses" a consumer product without meeting the FTC guidelines for disclosure of "material connections" to the makers of that consumer product, who's liable: the blogger or the Huffington Post?

-  If a blogger prints out a series of blog posts and distributes those printed copies, is he now the publisher of a newspaper or magazine? If so, the Village Voice is distributed for free, so can a blogger/publisher distribute his newspaper or magazine for free, too?

-  What if a blogger confines herself to stating demonstrably proven facts about a book, its author, its contents, and the matter of its publication? Does the FTC consider that an endorsement? What if she confines herself to stating such facts and includes links to an ecommerce site? Has her writing somehow been transformed from a statement of fact to an endorsement? 

There are plenty more where that came from. The list goes on. You can probably think of a few yourself. It may be hard for the guidelines to be enforced. The FTC does acknowledge that its guidelines aren't exactly the law themselves. The FTC says:

The Guides are administrative interpretations of the law intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves. In any law enforcement action challenging the allegedly deceptive use of testimonials or endorsements, the Commission would have the burden of proving that the challenged conduct violates the FTC Act.

It should also be noted that the rules presumably apply to publications beyond bloggers and social media users, but for some reason it appears that "bloggers" are the ones with whom the FTC had on its collective mind when drafting these guidelines. You have to wonder if they are able to come up with a definition for "blogging" (others have had trouble in the past. Even those directly involved in the online content industry). The rules are scheduled to take effect on December 1st.

What questions do you have about the FTC's guidelines? Share them here.

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