Podcasts are only 5 years old – but podcasting has already gone from being a niche indie tool to being a mainstream communication channel, even for corporations.

Podcast pioneer Dave Winer, who created one of the standards upon which podcasting is based and who helped popularize the technology, has published a torrrent that aggregates podcasts from the early days:

I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.

These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.

I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.

Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.

It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded it.

Podcasting has come a long way in 5 year. But, while podcasting has changed a lot, the key feature of podcasting – that it lets anyone publish audio to the entire world – hasn’t.

Do have any favorites from the early days of podcasting?

Image: mr brown

Adobe is going to war with Apple’s iPad, as this Adobe + HP demo video shows.

Apple has demonstrated that lack of Flash support isn’t going to keep people from buying iPhones by the millions. It’s betting that the same will hold true with the iPad.

The HP Slate demo is pretty slick – and if the Apple iPad had not been introduced, this would probably be wowing people.

I’m not sure if an online Sponge Bob Flash game is going make anyone want to get the HP Slate.

What might, though, is the Slate’s ability to view video at today’s Flash-based video sites.

Do you think we’re heading towards a “full Web” vs “open Web” battle over Internet video?

YouTube has introduced a new feature – automatic Closed Captioning – and it’s starting to look like they may have brought All Your Base Are Belong To Us into a new decade.

Automatic Closed-Captioning uses speech recognition technology to translated audio from videos into text.

It’s a great idea – but it often has unintentionally hilarious results.

Dan Rickmers at Film Fail tried it out on his movie review vlog Trailer Trash.

YouTube’s automatic Closed Captioning turned a harmless review of the new movie Remember Me into a sometimes hilarious, sometimes strangely poetic tale of Robert Hansen, code name Rubber Band, who is plotting some sort of terrorist attack.

“That’s right Barbara, most part because it does whatever the party! Lots of coal.”

Enjoy the goodness below.

Apple today announced that its “magical and revolutionary” iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models.

In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

“iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Where’s The PageMaker Of iBooks?

We get that Apple thinks the iPad is “magical and revolutionary”.

But what’s really magical and revolutionary is giving individuals the power to create content that can be shared instantly with people anywhere in the world.

The Apple iPad has the potential to be an interesting new platform for doing that – but where’s the PageMaker of iBooks?

PageMaker – the most important early desktop publishing program – revolutionized typesetting when it was introduced in 1985.

PageMaker, combined with the Apple LaserWriter printer, created desktop publishing. It turned everyone into print publishers and it also helped establish the Macintosh platform.

Until Apple, Adobe or someone else comes up with an easy-to-use app for creating interactive iBooks, iBook publishing is going to be handicapped, just as iTunes LP has been.

What do you think of publishing content for the iBook? Are you waiting for the PageMaker of iBooks?

Book designer Craig Mod has published a very interesting article looking at books in the age of the iPad.

He argues that print is dying – and that it’s a good thing:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.

The airport paperback.

The beachside paperback.

We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Christiaan Van Vuuren bas been stuck in quarantine for tuberculosis for two months.

He’s sick, and not in the sense of being sick, sick.

He’s making the most of his isolation, though, learning how to record songs on his laptop and making music videos, Twittering and making friends on Facebook.

And while Van Vuuren may be quarantined, it hasn’t kept him from going viral.

He’s racked up hundreds of thousands of views for his videos on YouTube. The videos, especially his most recent one, above, are densely packed with weirdness.

You can help Van Vuuren out in his quest to get more fans than Nickleback on Facebook.

via bb

Flash is dead – at least at Virgin America.

When the Apple iPad was introduced, we said that Flash Is Dead + The iPad Is Its Tombstone.

Why?

Flash is a great tool – but users and Web developers alike are better off developing standards-based content and not being locked into proprietary tools.

Virgin America appears to have come to the same conclusion.

They’ve updated their site, dumping Flash.

“I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users,” explains Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla. “This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin].”

What do you think? Are more sites going to be dumping Flash to ensure compatibility with mobile Internet devices?

This video is a sneak preview of Penguin Book’s iBook plans for the Apple iPad.

Penguin is bullish on the iPad iBook model, because giving Apple a 30% cut could be a lot more profitable that the 50% that they give traditional retailers.

One of the things that makes this iPad iBook preview interesting is that Penguin appears to be ready to abandon traditional ideas of what a book is.

Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson explains:

“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.”

“So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.”

Makinson is thinking way beyond the shovelware idea of PDF books.

Apple TV sales are up 35% over last year, according to Apple COO Tim Cook.

The company has not revealed unit sales numbers for Apple TV. And, while the 35% growth rate would be enviable for most companies, it’s a new product category and Apple has yet to hit a home run with it.

“We’re continuing to invest in it because our gut tells us there’s something there,” said Cook at the Goldman Sachs technology conference.

You probably know that YouTube is, by far, the top video destination on the Web.

Here are some things about YouTube, though, that you probably don’t know:

5 Things You Probably Don’t Know About YouTube Videos

1. People now watch a lot of YouTube videos. The average US Internet user watches over three hours of YouTube videos per month.
2. Music is the most popular category of YouTube videos – with 31% of all analyzed videos, followed by Entertainment (15%) and People & Blogs (11%).
3. Most people don’t pay attention to YouTube video ratings. There is no clear correlation between the rating of the video on YouTube and how often it is viewed. Videos with a rating more than 4 out of 5 usually have fewer views than those with medium rating score between 2 to 3.
4. The average length of a YouTube video is 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
5. 20-to-35 year old bloggers are most active in embedding and linking to videos within their posts with 57% of total videos coming from this demographic group.

These stats come via Sysomos, which recently analyzed 2.5 million YouTube videos, along with the sites that embedded or linked to the videos.