In the midwestern (US) city where we live, there is a sixty-year, very goofy tradition of not sending the children out to beg for treats on Halloween. Fearful of what might happen if 1940’s era trick or treaters mixed with older “hooligans” on October 31, our community decided to sugar-ize the little ones on “Beggars’ […]

MessageLabs reports that spammers have introduced MP3 music files into their expanding toolbox of stock spam techniques, with 15 million emails identified in October 2007. We’ve been concerned for a couple years about the potential of audio spam. With the rise of speech-to-text based search in products like PodZinger, it’s only a matter of time […]

Dayton, Ohio-based Wright State University is among the first schools to make available rooms dedicated to podcasting. “We wanted to bring what’s up-to-date, fun and common for today’s students to the library here at Wright State,” says Sue Polanka, who is the head of references and instruction for the Dunbar Library. “Myself along with a […]

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. announced a smaller loss in the third quarter (ending at the end of Sept. 2007) as the company added subscribers. It still hopes to gain regulatory approval in order to close its deal to merge with XM Satellite Radio this year. Sirius lost $120.1 million in the quarter that just ended, […]

UK podcast directory Podcast Nation has announced that it will be expanding its community by offering a new media enthusiasts’ social network, run on the Ning API, at http://podcastnation.ning.com. Podcast Nation Editor-in-Chief Mark Crook said, “Podcast Nation is a great way for both finding and promoting podcasts, and by developing our community at Ning, which […]

Satellite radio company XM revealed this week that in the third quarter, its losses were up a whopping 70 percent over last year.¬† Analysts blame the losses on a 22 percent drop in sales at chain retail outlets like Best Buy. On a more positive note, XM announced an increase in subscribers to their satellite […]

A new version of Expressivo text-to-speech software has been released. New with version 1.3 is integration with iTunes, making it easy to automatically translate text-to-speech and get it on your iPod. Any text read by Expressivo is automatically added to your iTunes library as an audio file. Texts read by Expressivo can also be played […]

A new site, TheFunRide lets you search for videos across YouTube, Google Video, Metcafe, Daily Motion and 70+ other video sharing sites. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do it very well yet. We searched for a variety of popular video search terms, with terrible results: Pamela Anderson – this search returned lots of skateboarding videos, but no […]

PodCamp Boston 2, taking place October 26-28 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center, Boston, MA, promises to be one of the most interesting new media unconferences ever. PodCamp Boston 2 is a three-day event focusing on blogging, podcasting, social networks, video on the net, and new media. More than 1,200 people are expected to […]

Viacom has unveiled a new site for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart that’s designed to offer an alternative to YouTube and other video sharing sites. Viacom is also demonstrating that it’s figured out how to compete with YouTube: give people what they want. The new site offers 13,000 high-quality clips, from episodes dating back […]