In a bid to stay afloat in an industry in crisis, magazine and newspaper publishing giant Hearst Corp. is getting set to launch an “electronic reader” later this year, a device designed with periodical-reading in mind. Hearst publishes a number of titles, including magazines Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle. Fortune […]

VersatileMonkey.com has released PodTrapper for the popular Blackberry phone/portable media device. The PodTrapper is a podcatcher, or download manager and player of podcasts. The $9.99 application allows users to consolidate podcasts a single device, rather than schlepping a Blackberry for phone and texting, and a separate portable media player for podcasts. Simon Sage of IntoMobile […]

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” Today Creative Commons announced that they are looking for summer interns to work […]

The sight of workers with smudgy foreheads yesterday when I was downtown reminded me that it was Ash Wednesday, and the beginning of the Lenten season which leads up to Easter. The Catholic Online website reports that Massachusetts-based blogger and musician, Susan Bailey, is publishing a daily podcast during the forty days of Lent. “Theosis” […]

The New York Times jokes that CBS is “taking the iPhone where no iPhone has gone before.”  The announcement must be the inspiration for a million bad Star Trek jokes, but today, CBS Interactive released an iPhone application for its TV.com site. The new application lets users view full episodes of TV series, ranging from […]

Nationally syndicated radio show host Adam Carolla was recently, unceremoniously, fired when the station he broadcast from, Los Angeles’ KLSX 97.1 FM, changed its format to a pop music station. Declaring that terrestrial radio is “heading for the sh*tter,” Carolla has launched a free daily (Monday – Friday) podcast. “For now, it’ll be very stripped […]

Podcast network Wizzard Media today announced an agreement with Ando Media to automate their audio advertising campaigns. “Non-intrusive” advertisements will be “stitched” to the beginning, middle or end of participating audio podcast programming in the Wizzard network. Wizzard and Ando Media’s first joint ad campaign, already underway, will be for Cisco’s Webex, a digital tele-conference […]

A recent psychological study has found that students who listen to class lectures in podcast form actually score better when tested on the material than students who heard the lectures in person.

Bad science?

Or is podcasting the future of education?

Writer and designer Andy Clarke and developer Brian Suda have announced the “soft-boiled” launch of a simple site, TweetCC, to help users set their Creative Commons licensing for Twitter. Clarke was writing a book, in which he was hoping to include some tweets (posts) and avatars from Twitter. His publisher told him, in order to […]

Uptime and performance monitoring service Pingdom has done a study of social network uptime in 2008. They looked at some of the more heavily-used sites – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and Imeem. Twitter and LinkedIn experienced the greatest amount of downtime in 2008, […]