As we tick down the hours until Halloween, we thought we would profile a few seasonally-themed shows that have caught our eye and ear this week.

Mocking reality “ghost hunter” series, scary teen movies (“Let’s split up and look for clues in the creepy castle/abandoned summer camp/swamp/scary dark cave”), and our current bizarre fascination with “paranormal activity” and attractive vampires, “The Occulterers” is a campy new miniseries from Hayden Black and his Evil Global Corp.

The show is about a team of TV ghost hunters who are investigating local claims that Count Vampire’s Transylvanian castle is “haunted – not just by ghosts, but surprisingly, by vampires.”

We caught up with Hayden yesterday for his perspective on the new series:

While we’re gearing up for next year’s launch of [musical-space-taxicab web video series] The Cabonauts, I decided to take 3 weeks to create, sell, cast, write, shoot & edit The Occulterers for Babelgum. Absolute whirlwind but tons of fun and we got an amazing cast. James C. Leary (Buffy), Ellen Sandweiss (The Evil Dead), Camden Toy (Buffy, Angel), Amy Kline (I <3 Vampires) and myself all playing dysfunctional ghost hunters (actually, Camden plays Count Vampire) spending the night in a haunted Transylvanian castle.

The show premiered Monday [26 Oct], and a new episode plays out every night through Halloween. They’re also accompanied by 1 hour mock live feeds from within the castle itself, so people can see for themselves what’s going and then Twitter us at @TheOcculterers so we can go investigate.  There are also 2 different Halloween flashmob/parties we’re going to be teasing in the live feeds for fans in Los Angeles!

The fan reaction has been unbelievable; people twittering how much they love the show, the live feeds, that they want to buy DVDs, that they want new seasons and now [on 28 Oct] the Wall St. Journal has joined in the chorus of love we’ve been getting – and we’re just 3 days in! Another surreal experience thanks to the interwebs.

Black is also the creator of local TV news spoof Goodnight Burbank, which will see 10 new Goodnight Burbank: Hollywood Reports published online in the coming weeks.

Twaud.io is a free service that’s like Twitpic for audio – it makes it trivially easy to share audio and tweet about it.

To use Twaud.io, you:

• Log in with your existing Twitter account
• Upload an audio file or record it online
• Add your tweet text
• Click Twaudio it! to publish your audio to the web and send a tweeted link to Twitter.

Your tweet will point to a page that looks something like this:

Twaud.io’s got a few tricks up its sleeve, though, like support for RSS, which means that the service not only makes sharing audio trivial, but it makes a podcast while you’re at it.

Your Twaud.io profile will have icons for streaming, podcast rss feed and to subscribe on iTunes, like this:

Twaud.io is one of the easiest ways to get podcasting that we’ve seen.

When Nine Inch Nails looked into filming their first-ever live peformance of The Downward Spiral, they ran into legal and financial barriers. But crowdsourcing saved the project:

On the recent Wave Goodbye tour, we were unable to professionally film the band’s performance of The Downward Spiral at Webster Hall, due to exorbitant fees requested by the LiveNation venue. Our open camera policy, however, remained in tact, and as soon as the show ended fans took matters into their own hands, organizing online to track down everyone who had filmed HD footage of the show. Now, only two months later, the group has released a polished, edited, downloadable DVD of the full Downward Spiral performance from Webster Hall. The entire thing has been recorded, edited, and distributed entirely by fans, and it’s the latest example of the amazing things fans will do when their creativity isn’t limited by outdated, misguided restrictions.

Nine Inch Nails, more than any mainstream band, has navigated the challenges of new media intelligently, using their fans self-interest to help the band promote and distribute their work.

You can watch “The Downward Spiral: Live” in HD on this YouTube playlist. You can also download it via torrent as a burnable DVD or an iPod/iPhone-friendly video from this page.

Wizzard Media today announced that it has eight new podcast companion applications, available in the Apple App Store.

The new Apps are iPhone companion Apps for popular podcasts, offering convenient access to the podcast, show extras, bonus content and new social communication features. This brings the total number of Wizzard Apps to 58 (with 34 awaiting approval).

Wizzard is offering a customized podcast companion App to its podcast network members and select off-network podcasts, as a means for podcasters “to monetize their show and further penetrate and engage their audience.”

Wizzard is actively looking for synergy between podcasters and iPhone apps. It previously introduced a campaign to license iPhone apps and promote them within Wizzard network podcasts.

Details on the apps and podcasts below.

19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of microblogging:

• social network website users,
• those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and
• younger internet users – those under age 44.

Pew also found that, the more Internet devices you own, the more likely you are to be microblogging. 39% of internet users with four or more internet-connected devices (such as a laptop, cell phone, game console, or Kindle) use Twitter, compared to 28% of internet users with three devices, 19% of internet users with two devices, and 10% of internet users with one device.

Google and Twitter today announced an agreement that will let Google include the latest relevant tweets in search results.

Here’s Twitter’s announcement:

Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.

We’ve always taken an open approach to how people experience Twitter, particularly in how and where tweets are read. Users have benefited greatly from the abundance of choice provided by our ecosystem partners. We’re honored to take this next step with Google and tap into their expertise to support the rapid, open exchange of information.

This is good news for Twitter, microblogging and the real-time web.

It’s also good news, though, for people looking for another way to get links into Google’s search results for valuable keywords.

Get ready for a rush of Mesothelioma tweets!

Check out this video demo for ReelDirector (App Store link) – a $7.99 video editing application for the iPhone 3GS.

ReelDirector features a drag-and-drop timeline, 27 video transitions and 4 text styles at 9 positions.

This takes mobile video to another level. Just amazing.

Details below.

Craigslist’s Craig Newmark has penned an interesting article at the Huffington Post, suggesting that the source of mainstream news media’s troubles isn’t Craigslist, but the fact that mainstream news media has betrayed the public’s trust:

Trust is the new black, as I like to say. The great opportunity for news organizations is to constructively demonstrate trustworthy reporting, and to visibly do so.News curation, that is, selecting what’s news and should be visible, that’s an equally big deal.

Here’s the deal…

An increasingly media savvy online public sees that recent major problems involved some really good journalism, particularly the current financial crisis, and also that “weapons of mass destruction” thing. Good reporters told us that something was amiss in both situations, and we did see some really good journalism in both cases.

However, the really good journalism was buried, not curated into the front pages, and then, infrequently if at all repeated. As news consumers, if big news is not prominently displayed, and then repeated, it’s a tree falling in the forest.

So, these major news organizations reported on matters of great importance to the world, but the curation model failed to really warn the public about those issues, in any way that genuinely delivered the message.

Corporate media has dropped the ball on some of the biggest stories of the last few years, and that’s one reason people are turning to alternatives.

While corporate media is focusing on the lowest-common denominator, people turning to podcasts, video podcasts, microblogging and other new media – where, like Newmark notes, trust is the new black.

It looks like the Twitpocolypse is upon us – Twitter is down, as of 6:30 Sunday Central time.

Here’s something to do while you wait for your microblogging fix: check the status.twitter.com site for an update and watch this free documentary that looks at the current state of the music industry:

If you’ve ever wondered why iPods and portable media players have been such a huge hit, or why podcasting and Internet radio are as popular as they are, this video has the answers.

Narrated by Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker, Before The Music Dies is an unsettling look at today’s popular music industry.

It features interviews and performances by Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Branford Marsalis – and even more importantly, musicians and other people in the music industry that you probably have never heard of.

Before The Music Dies filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen walked away from traditional Hollywood distribution to instead pursue a large-scale grassroots release with B-Side Entertainment. Since its release in November 2006, the film has screened over 200 times in over 130 North American markets with hundreds of additional events anticipated worldwide during 2007.

The entire film is embedded above – and what’s amazing about this film is that you can jump to anywhere in the movie and you’re going to find something compelling.

You can find out more about Before The Music Dies at the film’s site.