iPod accessory vendor ThoughOut has introduced an iPhone tripod adapter designed to help you make the most of the iPhone 3GS’s new video capabilities:

Our new PED3-TriPhone and PED3-TriPhone-FORM is a rotating iPhone tripod mount and holder that makes great use of the new video features as well as the still camera and the slew of other great applications. Simply add this to any standard tripod of yours (with 1/4″-20 thread) and you will be shooting like a pro.

The FORM version, like our other products works with any cased or skinned iPhone and the standard version works without.

Works with all 3GS, 3G and original iPhones

Made from 100% USA materails and labor.

The TriPhone mount by itself will also be available (here) for current customers that already have any of our PED3 series holders.

ThoughOut expects the iPhone tripod adapters to be available before the end of this month (July 2009) for $28 PED3-TriPhone / $32 PED3-TriPhone-FORM / $12 TriPhone (mount only).

Mobilecasting startup Audioboo and SpinVox, a leader in voice to content messaging, have announced that the SpinVox API (Application Programming Interface) will be used to automatically convert speech to text across Audioboo’s applications – including iPhone podcasting and Twitter posting.

This is a cool new feature that will have all types of uses.

For example, Audioboo CEO Mark Rock suggest that the new speech-to-text feature can give “journalists a simple way to record draft articles and have them automatically converted to text and sent to their news desks.”

Beyond creating a mobile podcasting solution, Audioboo hopes to establish itself as a major platform for audioblogging.

“The deal with SpinVox is of immense importance to Audioboo as we roll out both our API and business model,” explains Rock.  “With the Audioboo API, any developer will be able to build their own mobile and web applications to record to Audioboo and SpinVox integration will be an important addition to that which we can deliver simply and quickly through the SpinVox API.”

Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor posted an interesting article yesterday looking at ways artists could use the Internet to promote themselves, even if they are new or unknown.

In the article, Reznor shared these tips for how to use the Internet, new media and social media sites:

1. Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic.
2. Remove all Flash from your website.
3. Remove all stupid intros and load-times.
4. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay).
5. Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever.
6. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time.
7. Put up a bulletin board and start a community.
8. Engage your fans (with caution!)
9. Make cheap videos.
10. Film yourself talking.
11. Play shows.
12. Make interesting things.
13. Get a Twitter account.
14. Be interesting.
15. Be real.
16. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested.
17. NEVER CHASE TRENDS.
18. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

Reznor adds, “If you don’t know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don’t get it – find someone who does to do this for you.”

These are great suggestions – and it’s information that doesn’t just apply to established artists like Reznor, but could apply to anyone.

If you want to dig Even Deeper, see the NIN site for Reznor’s full thoughts on ways musicians and artists can use the Internet.

And if you’ve got more thoughts or suggestions on this, leave a comment below!

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and singer Dave Carrol saw his Taylor guitar being thrown around by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago:

I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss.

So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

United Breaks Guitars has been viewed nearly a quarter million times in just 2 days, and that’s goint to be just the beginning.

United Breaks Guitars is going viral because:

• Everybody hates the hassle of flying these days. Flying was once glamorous; now, dinner is a bag of peanuts and you’ve got to pay $15 dollars if you decide that you actually want to check in some luggage.
• Everybody has been given the run around by airlines.
• Dave Carroll’s story is a story that you can relate to, even if you don’t have $3,500 guitars.
• There’s a lot of humor in the video, ranging from the baggage handlers playing toss with Carroll’s guitar to the chalk outline of the victim.
• The song is catchy and well crafted. If you’re like me, you probably found yourself singing along with the chorus by the end of the song.

What a fiasco for United Airlines. And Carroll has promised two more songs!

Do you think Ms. Irlweg has some explaining to do?

Print Media Deathwatch Update: Joshua Karp, founder and publisher of The Printed Blog, a Chicago newspaper startup that aggregated news blogs in print form, has announced that the newspaper is a money-loser and is shutting down:

It is with great sadness that I must report that, due to a lack of outside investment capital, The Printed Blog is ceasing publication.

Last year, I had an idea. I wondered what would happen if some of the business model principles that work online were applied to the troubled newspaper industry. The more I thought about it, the more the curiosity got to me. So I registered a domain name, developed an action plan, and started the process of building a new kind of newsprint publication.

Everyone said I was nuts, but I did it anyway.

16 issues, 80,000 print copies distributed, another 100,000 or so copies downloaded, and countless new friends, fans, and collaborators all around the world later, I may still be nuts, but I have zero regrets.

It’s getting harder and harder to see what value print can bring to new readers. People tend to worry the most about the conquering the costs of printing and distributing papers – but the cost in timeliness and interactivity may be the bigger challenges.

Do you think there’s still hope for newspapers?

via Bits

Pioneering videopodcaster Hayden Black (Goodnight Burbank) has snagged Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) to star in a web only science fiction comedy musical, TheCabonauts:

The news is out and the buzz is pretty damn loud! The wonderful, beautiful, exceptionally talented Nicky Nichols – Star Trek’s Uhura – has come on board the Cabonauts as CJ, the CEO of the cab company.

We couldn’t have done it without our unbelievable casting director, Erin Gray. Erin allowed us to connect and, after I delivered a script and character breakdown, Nichelle said yes. It happened so fast too; within 3 weeks of having the initial idea to approach Nichelle, she’d said yes.

Black describes The Cabonauts as “Hitchhikers Guide meets Flight of the Conchords”. The show will feature guest stars each episode from iconic sci-fi movies and TV shows.

The show is expected to debut in the next few months.

Podcasting network Wizzard Media today announced that podcast downloads from their network were up by 45% in Q2, compared to 2008.

For the second quarter of 2009, Wizzard Media saw total network podcast download requests of 350,053,574 vs. 241,600,000 download requests in the second quarter of 2008

The company also reported:

• The audience consuming podcasts from shows on the Wizzard Media Network grew 41% (5.3 million).
• Wizzard Media Network advertising impressions served through its proprietary Alchemy advertising engine grew from 3.9 million in the second quarter of 2008 to 13.7 million in the second quarter of 2009, an increase of 251%.

The music video was shot for Sour‘s Hibi no Neiro (Tone of everyday) is a very clever example of groupsourced music videos.

Fans from around the world worked together to create synchronized patterns and lo fi effects for the video. The cast were selected from the Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

In june, we predicted a revolution in Web video, driven by the iPhone 3GS.

The new iPhones have already caused a 400% increase in mobile video uploads at YouTube. But rumors suggest that Apple has even bigger things in mind.

MacRumors is reporting that, based on images of cases for the upcoming iPod touch and iPod Nano, the next generation touch and Nano iPods may be getting video cameras, also.

A separate rumor, via TechCrunch, is that Apple has placed massive orders for the camera modules found in the iPhone. The size of the order suggests that video cameras will be showing up soon in iPods.

It’s a safe bet that video is coming to the iPod touch. The video camera is a fairly inexpensive part, but adds compelling new functionality that will help differentiate iPods from other media players. It’s less likely that the cameras will show up on the Nano.

The impact of putting millions of wireless video editing platforms into people’s hands is just beginning to be felt – but it can’t be long until this changes the way we watch and create news.

Developer Edgar de León has introduced a new video blogging plugin for WordPress, WebTV.

WebTV is designed to let you attach a video to a post and upload it to most popular video distribution sites, including YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv. After your video is uploaded and processed, WebTV get and inserts the embed code from the sites into custom fields on the post.

How It Works

Every time you create a new post, a new Metabox appears letting you attach a video to the post. After the video is uploaded, it uses the post title, description and tags to publish the video to the most popular video distribution sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo.

You can check the option to let the plugin automatically publish the post on WordPress after a successful upload to any of the video distribution sites configured. The plugin uses the WordPress internal cron system to upload the video to all the sites configured. After a succesfull upload the plugin checks the video distribution site every 5 minutes if the video was processed and if the embed code is available, once the video is ready it gets the embed code and insert the data into a custom field on the post.