Just catching up with the sale of the the podcasting host, Libsyn, to Wizzard Software.

The press release has some interesting stats.

The Libsyn network broadcasts over 42 million podcast downloads per month to at least 13 million people worldwide. In 2006 alone, Libsyn has had over 360 million audio and video podcast downloads.

The people behind Libsyn all have day jobs and have been working without salary. They’ve made podcast hosting affordable for us small publishers, and their pay-day is well deserved.

This is a rather depressing but funny cartoon. It has nothing to do with blogs or podcasts.

I’m usually looking after the baby first thing in the morning, and only able to listen to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme in snatches, in between shovelling porridge into his mouth and playing with his musical caterpillar. I heard enough to realise that John Humphrys reports from Basra were something special, and I’ve just been listening back to them on the Internet.

This is classic radio reporting. There is no need for pictures as the sounds and the descriptions do the job for you. Humphrys - who is normally in the studio back home - describes the desolation of the Basra Air Station, the worst sort of dirty gray desert, the acrid stench of the oil flares that get in the back of your throat, the discomfort of wearing a flack jacket in the heat, and the frustration of not being able to wander out beyond the razor wire and sandbags because ‘out there’ you are a target. These are all the details that the hardened war correspondents brush off with bravado, but which make it real to us softies back home. His work is hampered by regular rocket attacks.

He talks to real people, like the surgeon who says he can ‘have a go’ at any kind of emergency operation, and he takes a journey in a convoy with Lance Corporal Carl Rose who explains how the convoy must keep moving at all costs, and any civilian car in the way had better get off the road. Naturally this causes resentment, and shows why the troops are ‘part of the problem’, as Britain’s most senior British solider said recently. But it’s not all bad. The Lance Corporal graphically describes a visit to a village where they received a friendly reception from the kids and the local sheik. Other soldiers talk about the back to back tours of duty. You get a sense of an army of immense professionalism and dedication, but which is over stretched and under equipped, and not really making much progress. A female surgeon speaks of her anger that soldiers are badly wounded while travelling in the Ministry of Defence’s snatch Land Rovers. Another solider describe a ‘bad day” in which a mortar fell five feat away from him.

Humphrys reports are far more evocative that the one minute 30 seconds we get from Iraq on the evening TV news. They demonstrate the power of audio when done well. People’s voices somehow go right to the essence of who they are, without the distraction of pictures. The BBC still does audio better than anyone else. Of course a producer has spent days, possibly weeks, setting up the interviews, arranging the schedule (not to mention security), thinking about ambient sounds and locations, imagining how it will all fit together, and then painstakingly editing it and mixing it, which is a very time consuming process.

Podcasters shouldn’t get too above themselves. They’ve still got a lot to learn - though no doubt one day they will produce something as good as this.

I’ve mentioned my search for a good sound editor on the Mac. Well I’ve found one. It’s Sony Sound Forge. Ah, but that’s Windows only, I hear you say. Ah yes, but with Parallels, you can run Windows on your Mac, so long as it’s one of the new ones with Intel inside.

Parallels opens up a virtual terminal within your Mac desktop. If you have an XP disc and license, you can install Windows inside the terminal. It’s not hard to do. Well, if I can do it, then it’s not difficult at all.

Sound Forge runs smoothly inside Parallels, but it was hard dealing with a large sound file until I noticed that you can distribute the computer’s ram between the Mac OS and Windows as you wish. You can save files inside folders than can be accessed by either system. If you press fn alt return, the Windows screen revolves round in impressive 3D and becomes a full screen.

It’s a little odd running Windows on the Mac, especially as I don’t have a right mouse button to click. I get confused between using the ctrl button and the Apple button. Otherwise Parallels makes it a lot easier to ween yourself off Windows because you know that you can have the best of both worlds. iMovie on the Mac - a really simple and great video editor - and Sound Forge on the Windows terminal - the best sound editor.

So is Mac really better than Windows? It certainly looks nicer, and it’s easier to find your favourite applications in the bar along the bottom. I also think it’s easier to have several applications open at once, and to switch between them, partly because they tend to open at different sizes so you can see one behind the other. It’s nice the way you can dock applications at the bottom where you can easily find them again. All in all, these little advantages do add up. But it really is useful to have the option to run Windows in tandem for those hard-to-find applications.

Switching has been made even easier by the fact that these days, most of what I do isn’t on either the Mac or Windows. Many of my applications are online - Google Documents, Bloglines, GMail, WordPress, - even a quick-fix picture editor. I keep media files on a big external hard drive, which is just as well, as I will have to give this Mac back to Exbiblio one day. It’s convenient to work like this in the day of the disposable computer that lasts a couple of years at max - and besides, I like to drop down to the Internet cafe to get away from wife and baby sometimes.

I quote Scoble on Zune vs iPod. I have nothing more to add.

Last weekend Dave Winer took my son and me to an Apple store. What was on the biggest sign in the store? Podcasting. Apple gets this trend, Microsoft doesn’t.

Google Co-op, custom search engine - search all our Bloglines feeds:

Is it now possible to launch a movie without deleted scenes, trailers, and extracts on YouTube to tease the audience?

YouTube is also great for releasing deleted scenes.

We don’t normally write about “hot babes” here - not my turn of phrase - but this is the most unusual suggestion I’ve ever heard for the art of Link Baiting (gettng other people to link to your blog). It comes from John Chow, and I’m sure he’s getting lots of links and diggs just for writing this up. I’m not sure these days how legit link baiting is. A good blog should network with others per se - but this is an interesting approach.

The Trade Show Photo Trick

I meet many fellow webmasters during my party at the Consumer Electronics Show. During the party, I get a few hot babes to take pictures with the other webmasters. They love this because it’s the few occasions when they can get a picture taken with a real girl. The picture gets posted at The TechZone’s photo gallery. An email is fired off to the webmasters, and they’re instantly linking it on their sites to show all their readers what a stud they are.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to try that one out, so I don’t have a pic to go with this post.

Shel on the FIR Podcast notes how the new venture that he and others are involved in (Crayon) has had a warm reception from the blogosphere, including “competitors”. This is one of the rather nice things about social media. We all recognise that we have a common interest in each others’ success - (though we can’t help crowing when the big boys f-up). The more that businesses experience the benefits of transparent and frank conversations with their employees, business partners, and customers, the more likely they are to understand and want blogs, podcasts, etc in general.

It’s also a tribute to the way Shel and Neville have built up a network of online contacts who feel well disposed to them. This store of goodwill is invaluable. Blogging is such a great networking tool. I do believe that a podcast is, if anything, even more powerful than a blog, because people really feel that they know you when they hear your voice regularly. Of course a blog is a great companion to a podcast.

P.S. Matthew and I see ourselves as a nascent media company that does consultancy to fund ourselves in the meantime. Recently we were told on good authority that we have the UK’s second most listened to indie podcast (storynory). I have no means of confirming that 2nd biggest claim, but it’s nice that we are thereabouts. More humbly, if anyone, including Crayon, would like some top audio production skills, including mixing and editing packages and documentaries, not to mention working with actors (both of which most podcasters are not too comfortable with), then we are at your service.

A very good reason has come up to get myself equipped as a Second Lifer. My old computer’s video card wasn’t up to it, but there’s no excuse now that I’m using a new MacBook. On Thursday a new social media consultancy called Crayon is going to be launching with a presentation in the parallel online universe of Second Life. It’s a smart move. Reuters has just open a virtual bureau there. Wide coverage seems guaranteed. The people behind Crayon have been cleverly unveiling it in stages, like a striptease.

Crayon is a venture between Neville Hobson, Shel Holz, Joseph Jaffe, and CC Chapman. All are great communicators in the social media sphere. I like their motto, Our client is not the consumer, it’s the truth. The only trouble with this motto is, of course, that not everyone sees the same truth. Still, I think we know what they mean. The recent Edelman saga shows what it is not. My own motto at the moment is “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

So far Crayon’s had a very smart pre-launch campaign. I’m going to be following their fortunes, because I’m sure there will be much to learn from them. I hope to catch up with the Crayon people at the virtual launch, having missed out on meeting Neville in the pub last week. I don’t suppose the beer is quite so good when you have to imagine it.

Edelman has been smart and admitted that it’s paying for two more Wal-Mart Propaganda blogs.

Here at Exbiblio I read a motto on one engineer’s wall, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off”. This is so true of transparent blogging.

Well done Edelman for facing up to this particular writing on the wall. That’s knocked a few years off your sentence in the Bloggers’ Re-education Camp.