Scholastic has published a short guide to podcasting for kids.

In all their forms, podcasts have become a popular classroom activity during the past five years—iTunes is now populated with streams from hundreds of K–12 schools across the country. Some student podcasts are simply recorded versions of history or book reports. But today, podcasts coming from the classroom are frequently much more creative and ambitious team efforts.

Along the way, they offer some good, if basic, tips for educational podcasters:

Some teachers find that getting podcasts onto official school websites is too complicated, technically difficult, or expensive. In that case, you can use free podcast-hosting websites.

Podomatic.com’s free account gives you 500 MB of storage and 15 GB per month of bandwidth, while PodBean.com’s free hosting allows 100 MB of storage and 5 GB of bandwidth monthly. These amounts of storage and bandwidth will be more than enough for most classroom podcasts: If you post two podcasts a month at 10 MB each (about 10 minutes long), 5 GB of bandwidth would allow each to be downloaded 250 times in a month.

See the full post at the Scholastic site.

This is a quick preview of the Fusion Garage JooJoo Internet tablet.

The preview comes via Gizmodo, which has this to say about the upcoming $500 JooJoo:

The tablet actually handled pretty well, with browsing web pages, transitioning between tabs (windows) and opening up new web pages working fine. There’s an accelerometer in there to detect between vertical and horizontal orientations.

The body is solid, sturdy and graced with a bright 12-inch screen. The back is curved and made of a plastic that feels nice in your hand, and the whole thing doesn’t seem too heavy to prop up on a bed or a toilet.

In short, it’s an actual web browsing tablet that you’d be perfectly fine using.

The JooJoo looks pretty sexy, but it also betrays some horseless carriage thinking.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like Fusion Garage is trying to solve the problem of putting the Web into your lap, instead of creating the next web-enabled Internet platform. This means it may be a nice gadget, but it’s not going to be anything revolutionary.

If Apple ever releases it’s rumored iTablet, don’t expect them to make the same mistake.

What do you think of the JooJoo? Any interest in getting one?

Ustream today introduced the availability of Ustream Live Broadcaster (App Store link), a free app for the iPhone that lets you stream live video from your iPhone 3G or 3GS:

The Ustream Live Broadcaster is a free app that enables live streaming on 3G or Wifi, and users can notify their Twitter communities when they start broadcasting, and interact with their viewers using chat or Twitter through Ustream’s Social Stream.

This is a pretty significant milestone for citizen media – it’s the first live video broadcasting app OK’d for the iPhone, and it puts live streaming within reach of tens of millions of people.

Major League Baseball is going to love this app. ; )

In addition to live streaming, the app has social networking features for Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.

If you’ve tried out Ustream Live Broadcaster for the iPhone, leave a comment and let me know what you think of it!

Samson Technologies has introduced the Q2U Microphone Recording Pack, an $89 starter set that includes a XLR + USB microphone, HP20 headphones, software and more.

A dynamic handheld microphone, the Q2U features both an XLR output and a USB I/O allowing it to be plugged directly into a live sound console or any computer with a USB input.

Features:

• High-quality dynamic handheld microphone with XLR and USB I/O
• XLR output plugs directly into any console
• Plugs directly into any computer with a USB input
• 3.5mm stereo headphone jack output with volume control for no-latency monitoring
• On/Off switch controls audio to XLR output
• High-quality A/D converter with 16-bit, 48kHz sampling rate
• Cardioid pickup pattern
• Compatible with any computer based digital audio workstation
• Includes HP20 studio headphones

Time put together this concept video as a concept of what Sports Illustrated could be like on a future tablet computer.

This is just a concept, but it’s clearly influenced by the iPhone’s industrial design and user interface design, and offers a vivid picture of why people are excited about the idea of an Apple Tablet.

In this concept, the ereader tablet is not backwards-looking, like the Kindle and the current generation of ereaders.

Instead, it blows apart the page, letting you use the magazine page as an interface to access more information, more media and even interactive gaming.

Excited by the concept?

via mediamemo

YouTube has announced that it’s counting down the most memorable videos of the year, advent calendar style:

Without giving too much away, you can expect to see some well-known YouTube videographers on the countdown, along with breakout viral videos and a selection of the year’s biggest pop-culture phenoms and memes.

During December, we’ll be adding playlists to the channel to dig a little deeper into YouTube’s content categories — because we know that a video doesn’t have to have millions of views to make an impact.So check out the countdown as it unfolds, and see if your favorite clips or personalities are featured. Definitely let us know in the comments what your video of the year would be, whether it’s a blockbuster clip or one that simply made an impression on you.

With a limit of 31 videos in the countdown, we know it only just scratches the surface of this incredible time on YouTube.

Guitar: Impossible, above, is the first video. You can see the rest throughout the month at YouTube’s NewYears channel.

Make Magazine is calling on TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington to open source the failed CrunchPad project.

When the CrunchPad concept was announced last year, Arrington made open source design a central feature:

“Let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them. If everything works well, we’d then open source the design and software and let anyone build one that wants to.”

Now Make Magazine’s Phil Torrone is asking Arrington to follow through on the open source promise. Since TechCrunch is killing the project, why not open source it?

mike – phil from MAKE magazine here. you said many times that the project was an open source project (the hardware and the software) – where are the files, the schematics, the source code, the PCB files, etc? is it correct to assume that “fusion garage” is not going to release any source or continue this project as an open source (software/hardware project)? if that’s the case it seems like “open source” was used again just to get good will and marketing and not really put any value in.

Is there anything there to open source?

It’s not clear – but maybe Make readers and the open source community could make something of the project.

If you’ve been hoping for a touchscreen Internet tablet, it looks like you’re going to have to keep waiting.

TechCrunch today announced that they were sending their much-hyped CrunchPad design to the deadpool.

According to TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington:

The CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.”

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project.

Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Except that Apple wouldn’t wait to the day a product was to be launched to hammer out their legal agreements. And if Apple had problems with a supplier, it would find a new one.

Royal Pingdom has taken a look at social network site use by gender, and found that social network site use is dominated by women:

Highlights of their research:

• 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users.
• The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users. 🙂
• If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males.
• Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
• The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
• The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

All the sites are predominantly female, except for Slashdot, Reddit & Digg.

Why are these predominantly male? Is it because men find them especially appealing? Is it because women find them uninviting? Is it because the sites are dominated by technology news?

Or is social news just a “guy thing”?

There’s been a lot of discussion, growing out of the tremendous popularity of Twitter, that blogging is going to be replaced by microblogging, or some other “next best thing”.

Last year, for example, Wired magazine’s Paul Boutin weighed in on the subject, arguing that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg weighted in on this today, stating something that should be obvious – that “new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging”:

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

The entire Twitter vs WordPress meme is a flawed view of new media technologies.

A more significant thing to consider is this: What are the best tools to use to publish new media?