Google’s shares have slid 13% after the finance chief admited that revenue growth was slowing.

It seems that Google has pushed text-adds to the limit. So what next? Mobiles, perhaps, but I don’t see people clicking through on a little screen….. Perhaps the restless and creative minds at Google will find a way to distribute non-intrusive sponsorship among podcasts… A big challenge.

I thought you might like to hear this audio report about a schools podcast which I put together for the new Id3 Magazine. You will hear their ident at the start.

Download the audio here (right click).
Or use the play button to listen now:

Last Friday, I visited The Downs Church of England School, where the ten -year-olds in Year Six make a super weekly podcast, Downs FM, under the guidence of their teacher, Mark Warner. After school I asked Mr. Warner and some of the children how they had benefited from the podcast. You will hear the children identify team work. Skills including listening, speaking in public, research, and writing scripts all come up to. I will be writing up more details for the first edition of of Id3 Magazine published in May.

The Ricky Gervais podcast that started on The Guardian, and has been the biggest success of podcasting so far, is to introduce charging. Its second seaon will be on sale from Feb 28. Episodes will cost 95 pence each or 3.75 pounds for the four-episode season. In the United States, they will sell for $1.95 each or $6.95 for the season.

“If you’ve got an account with the iTunes music store for the country you live in, you can use that — or if not, you can use Audible.com, which will work with virtually any combination of computer and MP3 player and it doesn’t matter which country you live in,” accroding to the Gervais website.

That is going to be a fascinating experiment - and one that may well determine what business model podcasting develops into. The Gervais podcast has been a huge hit, and if anyone can get away with charging he can. He has also made the right decision in going for a low price. Under a pound is not much for a show.

If he makes a go of it, plenty of other podcasts may find they can charge small sums for their shows, and the podcasting business will develop into something like the audio books industry. If he can’t, podcasts will remain free, supported by adverts and sponsors.

My own guess is that the free model is the right one. The advertisers and sponsors will realise what a great medium podcasting is soon, and there will be podcasters delivering the big audiences needed to interest big companies. There will be no need for charging, since it will only limit the size of the audience.

But we’ll find out soon enough. Certainly everyone will be watching to see how Gervais gets on.

It’s great that the Square Mile that is the City of London is going Wi-Fi. Hot spots will be concealed in Lamp posts and signs, so that you can log onto the the internet from any bench or curb. But how much is it going to cost? Their partner, The Cloud, charges £35 a month for their hotspot in the British Library. These days you can get broadband at home for £15 a month. It seems too expensive to me, for anyone but a City Slicker. Surely prices will come down.

New York - that’s the place for me. Free Wi-Fi spots abound, including one in the fabulous Public Library.

Since we launched Storynory (our children’s story podcast) in mid-November, we’ve been waiting patiently for Google to come along and give it a page rank. You need a free Google toolbar to check this. (The toolbar is worth it just for the spell checker). Google doesn’t rush to settle on a rank of a page’s importance, but I’m glad to say that it’s finally awarded 6 out of 10 to Storynory.

We’re pretty pleased. This result after just three months of existance on the web is largely due to a great Blog Relations campaign by my colleague, Matthew Lynn, who has been working hard at making sure that lots of relevant blogs in education and parenting know about Storynory. Once they started linking to us, a couple of a trade magazines, School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, wrote up Storynory. After all, the best way to boost your rank on Google, is to have lots of in-coming links, so long as they are genuine ones. Blogs are famous for linking to each other, and it follows that a Blog Relations campaign is a great strategy on the web. Beware of Search Optimisation Companies. Most of what they do is rubbish.

Two conclusions; you have to be patient with Google; and Blog Relations works.

P.S. One other possible conclusion. It may well be that Google likes rich media content such as audio files. This makes a podcast ideal for Google ranking.

The sheer oddness of the internet is what makes new media so interesting. Browsing the Technorati of the top 100 blogs shows that a knitting blog Yarn Harlot make the cut. Over at the Podcast.net ranking of the top 100 podcasts, you’ll fine Cast-On: A Podcast for Knitters. , a podcast about, as you might have guessed, knitting.

Knitting - its the future! The Gap and Hennes should watch out. At this rate, we’ll be making our own jumper soon.

The more serious point, of course, is that new media shows what people are really interested in - not what editors think they should be interested in. The newspaper style sections don’t have much about knitting in them, becuase the people who run them don’t think its cool. That just shows how out of touch with the market they probably are.

I suspect one of the most interesting technological developments of the year may well be the Super Sim, which was unveiled by by Orange yesterday at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona.

It’s a new mega Sim card you can slot into you phone, and which can store up to 130 music tracks, half a movie, 50 games, or whatever enterprising entrepreneurs can think of. No doubt they will get bigger and bigger fairly quickly, storing more and more data. That will give the iPod a run for its money - after all we all carry our phones with us most of the time, so it would be handy if we could just plug our ears into that.

Yet I suspect, it may also give podcasting its real kick into the mainstream. Use your phone to downlaod and store podcasts, then listen to them when you want to. What could be simpler or more convenient than that?

Here is a brief pitch for our video services. It plays for just over a minute.

The video steaming is courtesy of Google. The big advantage of hosting a video on Google is that it is free. It gives you some easy code to paste onto your own website, which produces the little “TV screen” containing your movie. But the large default size produces a rather blurred picture, which is why I scaled it down in size to make the picture smaller but sharper. Google also takes a couple of days to approve the video, presumably to check that it isn’t either pornography or a mountain production by Osama bin Laden.

I mentioned recently that scores of youth culture and some nastier type of blogs are hot-linking to a picture of Mr-t from the “A Team” posted on our site. Various dudes like to use him as their online identities.

So I swapped the cool, tough Mr-t for Moppsy the Rabbit. Moppsy has now appeared in Mr. t’s place on all those blogs and chat-rooms. I thought you might like to get a glimpse of what’s “out there”.

“Resist and Liberate” Blog/chatroom (with pics of neo Nazis along side Moppsy)

A guy on ebay selling blast-em-to-hell car speakers

This one is entitled, “who I would like to meet” from a blog called “hip-hop-angel”.

The Daily Telegraph is advertising for a
podcast reporter/producer, salary circa 25k. The Telegraph already has a podcast editor, Guy Ruddle.

There’s already a growing jobs market in the US for podcast skills. It would be nice to see an expanding market here. I might even become employable again.

Finding the MP3 players that best suit your needs can save you money on electronics, and thankfully lots of people write about electronics to help you find the info you need.
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Have you ever had your bandwith stolen by hot-linking?

Last Summer I posted an item called a “euro-blog-star”. For fun, I included a library picture of Mr-t, of the “A Team”. This found its way onto Google images. Since then dozens of cool dudes have hot-linked to it as their id on various online forums. One writes in German on a site called “Battlefield”. Others are chatting to their mates in street-language . At first I didn’t mind, because the bandwidth is neither here nor there. But now it’s got out of hand and our visitor stats are completely distorted by it. The Euro Blog Star Post is our most viewed page.

So i’ve changed the Mr-t picture to a bunny rabbit who is now the star of the Battlefield forum and various chat-rooms around the world. I wonder if Mopsy the rabbit will prove as popular as Mr-t?