CollegeCrunch has put together a great list of 15 Podcasts That Will Make You Smarter:

One of the more underrated benefits of the internet era has been access to quality radio style programming at any time of the day or night. Just like DVRs have freed us from having to adhere to rigid television program schedules, podcasting has enabled us to carry excellent radio with us for listening at any time. I struggle with not having enough hours in the day to listen to it all, because there is truly so much quality out there.

Highlights of the list include The Naked Scientist, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Ted Talks & This American Life.

It’s a great reminder that podcasts offer a great alternative to the often mind-numbing programming of corporate radio.

Dave Winer, the author of the RSS 2.0 specification on which podcast feeds are based, is working on a new project, to bootstrap real-time podcast feeds:

We’re trying to bootstrap a network of realtime feeds, and it’s going pretty well so far. Podcasts are implemented with RSS too, and while we have excellent examples of realtime photo feeds, we don’t yet have a realtime feed with audio.

So a week or so ago I started exploring options, and thought I’d use the Grateful Dead again, until JY suggested using a fast-updating audio feed from the Internet Archive. I took one look and realized this was it. It took a bit of a coding to check it periodically to see if it has updated, add a cloud element and notify one of my cloud servers. Now it’s done.

http://static.newsriver.org/archiveOrg/podcastRss.xml

So if you’re working on podcatching software give it a try.

Winer summarizes how how RSS Clouds work like this:

1. The authoring tool. I edit and update a feed. It contains a <cloud> element that says how a subscriber should request to notification of updates.
2. The cloud. It is notified of an update, and then in turn notifies all subscribers.
3. The subscriber. A feed reader, aggregator, whatever — that subscribes to feeds that may or may not be part of a cloud.

Podcasts may not make you rich, but they may make you skinny.

In a recent study, researchers found that people that listened to a diet podcast based on social cognitive science lost 9 times as much weight as people listened to a regular diet podcast.

The study, Pounds Off Digitally (POD) Study: A Randomized Podcasting Weight Loss Intervention, was published online on Sept. 15 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study involved a 12-week randomized controlled trial of 78 overweight men and women (body mass index, or BMI, of 25 points to 40 points) in the Raleigh-Durham area. Participants in a control group listened to 24 episodes of a currently available weight-loss podcast, while another group listened to an enhanced podcast, designed using behavior change theories. The enhanced podcast used tenets of social cognitive theory – including that behavior change is based upon an individual’s expectancy (how much they would value an end result) and expectation (whether they believe they will succeed or fail).

Study participants who used the enhanced podcast experienced a significantly greater decrease in both weight and BMI than the control group. The enhanced group lost 6.4 pounds in 12 weeks, compared to 0.7 pounds in the control group, and dropped one point in BMI, compared to a 0.1 point drop in the control group.

Researchers hope to do additional studies to determine if podcasts can be used long-term to help people keep off weight, and whether podcasts targeted directly to people’s habits and needs are more effective.

This is fascinating research: it shows how useful podcasts can be as dieting tool, but also suggests that current weight-loss podcasts may not be nearly as effective as they could be.

via physorg.com

This is an edited version of Social Media Revolution, a video that brings to life some amazing facts and statistics about new media and social media.

Music by Fat Boy Slim, Right Here, Right Now (1999).

Betanews has published an interesting review of the new Zune HD, and it makes a great case for both the pros and cons of Microsoft’s latest attempt to match Apple’s iPod:

The Zune HD is perhaps the best portable media player released by any vendor — even better than iPod touch. Microsoft finally gamed Apple, with better design, better hardware components, more appropriate size and outstanding digital content consumption experience.

But Zune HD also is a platform without a purpose. It’s a single device in a multipurpose world. There isn’t much you can do with Zune HD other than watch movies or listen to music, and there is currently no ecosystem for extending Zune HD’s utility — nor is one visible in the distance.

Zune HD is a real heart breaker, because Microsoft otherwise has delivered something exceptional.

The review mirrors our thoughts from when Microsoft announced the Zune HD – that Microsoft was stuck in a rut trying to compete with Apple on Apple’s terms, instead of coming up with something really new.

It may be an incredible portable audio player – but dedicated portable audio players are a dying breed, aren’t they?

Think YouTube and the iPhone are pretty cool?

In 5 years, there will be more than 12 billion devices capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of on-demand video content.

According to Intel’s projections, on-demand TV will be ubiquitous in five years.

“We are talking about more than one TV-capable device for every man and woman on the planet,” said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel. “TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.”

Apple has released an update to iTunes that fixes a sync problem with podcast playlists.

Here’s a summary of the changes:

iTunes 9.0.1 provides a number of important bug fixes, including:

• Resolves issues browsing the iTunes Store.
• Addresses a performance issue where iTunes may become unresponsive.
• Fixes a problem where iTunes may unexpectedly quit.
• Fixes a problem syncing Podcasts in playlists to iPod or iPhone.
• Fixes a problem sorting albums with multiple discs.
• Addresses an issue with the Zoom button not switching to Mini Player.
• Improves application syncing for iPod touch and iPhone.
• Genius is now automatically updated to show Genius Mixes.

Fast Company has an interesting article that looks at Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter.

It features the work of Dan Zarella, who analyzed 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets to find out what factors influence your “retweetability”.

There are some surprises.

For example, newer URL shortners, such as bit.ly, ow.ly, and is.gd, were much likelier to get retweeted than older, longer services, such as TinyURL.

This could be because popular Twitter users tend to jump on the latest thing – or because shaving a couple of characters off the URLs makes your messages more retweetable. Who knows? But setting your default URL shortener in apps like Tweetdeck takes about 5 seconds – so why not try it?

Zarella also identified the most commonly retweeted words and phrases:

This doesn’t mean you can randomly combine these words and phrases (see the post title) and expect to suddenly be more retweetable – but it does strongly suggest that people that get retweeted the most are the ones that are tweeting to you about social media topics.

Zarella also found that “boring” phrases make you “unretweetable”:

“There are a number of ‘-ing’ verbs, including ‘going,’ ‘watching’ and ‘listen-ing,'” that were not retweeted very often, he writes. Translation: Unless you’ve got a really interesting life–Shaquille O’Neal, anyone?–do not legitimately answer Twitter’s “What are you doing?” prompt.

Want to know what the real surprise of Zarella’s research is, though?

UK startup Mixcloud has gone live with their site that combines podcasting, social media and Digg-like discovery to create what they are calling “cloud radio”.

Here’s Mixcloud’s video introduction to the site:

http://vimeo.com/6665954

The company explicitly says that that its goal is to be the “Youtube of radio”

So if Mixcloud is the “Youtube of radio”, is this the future of podcasting?

The Emmy Awards were more horrible than ever – with a visit from Neal Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion as Dr Horrible and Captain Hammer.

The highlight is Dr. Horrible’s skewering of both the future of television and the current state of Internet video.