An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly closed with a mention of a favorite cardio workout podcast – the long-running (pun intended) Podrunner.

The Podrunner series features free exercise music mixes for runners, joggers, power walkers, cyclists, elliptical trainers, aerobics, or “anyone who can use nonstop, fixed-tempo music when they train.” Each podcast episode has a fixed number of beats per minute (BPM), and the listener can browse through many years’ worth of shows to find a tempo that matches the level of activity.

I first met Podrunner’s creator, Steve Boyett, (or DJ Steveboy to his devotees), at the first Blog World Expo. He was part of a great panel discussion on “making money with podcasting.” Boyett told the story of how a gear manufacturer’s gift of high-end DJ headphones. Although the gift cost the manufacturer little, Boyett recounted, in many ways it was more influential than a straight-out financial sponsorship of his podcast. The story has stuck with me since first hearing it – the “rewards” of podcasting aren’t always strictly financial ones.

I asked Boyett about his reaction to the WSJ article, and about what else he has going on at the moment:

I just love that article about Commissioner Kelly – I’m sending him a Podrunner T shirt tomorrow. 🙂 I told him he knows how to “keep a department running.” Nyack nyack nyack.

As for me, if I get any busier I’ll need to be twins (yet another thing the world doesn’t need, two of me).

Podrunner continues its remorseless global domination. It’s stayed on top of iTunes music charts for 3.5 years now! The current economic climate has made it difficult to get sponsorship, though, and we have had to scale back to every other week, to reduce our music licensing overhead.  But prospects are good, and we’re pretty optimistic that we’ll be back to weekly before long. We’ve introduced new products (water bottles, wicking shirts) and more frequent contests for our newsletter subscribers. The reaction has been great.

I can’t say enough how much I appreciate Podrunner’s listenership.

Making everything even crazier, I have two novels (ARIEL and ELEGY BEACH) coming out this year in print and audiobook. The first is out in August, and the second in November. My experience as a podcaster has had a profound effect on the presentation of the novels. I have come to hugely enjoy (and perhaps accept as given) the immediate reaction of and interplay with my audience.

In an effort to augment the personal and somewhat linear process of the novel, both forthcoming books will have dedicated websites featuring interactive & customizable Google Earth maps (which I’m guessing has to be a first for fantasy novels!) as well as collaborative Wikimapia maps, forums, PDF & audio samples, etc.

Book publishing is one of the last media industries to become “Web 2.0,” and it’s been fun and challenging to find interesting ways to let readers go beyond the border of the printed page. I don’t think there’s any way all this would have occurred to me, had I not been podcasting for the last few years. The first, Ariel, will launch July 1, and the second, Elegy Beach, will launch early in October.

Realizing that there is a lot of crossover in people who listen to music when they workout and people who listen to audiobooks, I’ve just put together audio spots for the books that will air on Podrunner starting next month. One of the things I love about living in Los Angeles is that a friend of mine is a professional voiceover artist, and my wife is a composer (the Podrunner theme music is hers, and the audiobook producers love her stuff, so she’s doing the music for those as well), and I got to use their talents for the book spots.

I’ve had very separate identities thus far as a writer and as a DJ/podcaster. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as they overlap a bit. It’s become clear to me that podcasting has taught me a lot about branding, marketing, and presenting my work. My podcasting work has also shown me different ways to connect with an audience. It tends to be a bit removed for writers.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience.

Podcast production company StoryQuest is seeking multilingual freelance audio producers for “flexible part-time work.”

StoryQuest is a Chicago-based company that produces corporate podcasts with a twist – the podcasts feature the clients’ stories – those of the people and the customers. Company founder, Tim Keelan, describes the podcasts as being “driven by a deep commitment to story-arc, authenticity, and integrity.”

To help develop projects with international clients, Keelan is looking for experienced freelance media producers fluent in both English and one or more of the following languages:  French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Independent producers would be expected to:

• Review background information provided and follow established processes.
• Conduct phone interviews in designated language with corporate executives.
• Edit content into final product with compelling storyline.
• Provide transcripts and other review support materials in English and other language.

Scope of work requires individuals who are good at following directions, but excited to apply their creativity and storytelling skills to the business world. Producer base location unimportant, as work may be carried out remotely.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Minimum of 4 years experience in radio journalism, audio documentary work.
• Fluent in English and one or more of following languages: French, German, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
• High level of professionalism.
• Passion for storytelling.
• Proficient in ProTools is a must.
• Willing and excited to apply skill set to corporate communications

Compensation: Paid on per-project basis. Competitive rate determined by work involved and candidate’s level of experience.

Keelan asks interested freelancers to submit their personal introduction and resume to jobs at sign storyquest dot us .  He stresses that qualified candidates can live and work remotely.

We first met Keelan at the Corporate Podcasting Summit in 2006, where he presented a case study with client and IT services provider Keene. It was a fascinating look at the using podcasts of people’s unscripted stories (in this instance, experienced sales staff talking about their successes and misadventures) forcorporate training. He’s a good storyteller himself, and is gifted at asking the questions that draw out interesting tales from the people he records. Learn more and see examples here.

A media conglomerate is experimenting with delivering newspapers that are customized, not just with neighborhood news for a single part of town, but with custom newsgathering for each individual newspaper customer.

MediaNews Group, parent company of The Denver Post, is using a downtown hotel and a neighborhood in Denver as a guinea pig for its trademarked “I-News” (short for “individuated news) news-delivery method.

Like a newspaper version of a personalized RSS newsfeed reader, I-News is news, gathered for individual readers’ interests. Guests in the Denver hotel trial will have a printed newspaper featuring news from their hometown, along with feature articles on topics the readers previously indicated were of interest to them. Advertising from businesses near the hotel will be included in the custom publication. I-News can be printed, as well as sent to a cellphone or computer.

Media News Group, based in Denver, is the newspaper company that owns the San Jose Mercury News and the Denver Post as well as the Los Angeles Daily News, where a similar trial is planned for later this summer.

In the Denver residential trial, the custom-news experiment involves “state-of-the-art printers equipped with fax, copier and scanner,” according to an article in the Denver Post. Residents will get to keep the special printer at the end of the three-month trial.

Via the Denver Post

UK’s dance music “evangelists” Ministry of Sound have launched a new iPhone application, “Dance Radio.”

The $6.99 app offers a variety of global dance music stations, and includes these features:

• Listen to a live stream of Ministry of Sound’s exclusive dance radio station
• Choose from Ministry of Sound’s handpicked list of the top 100 dance music stations
• Listen to exclusive ‘on demand’ mixes by some of the finest DJs on the planet including
• Mark Knight, Above & Beyond and Rusko – updated every week
• Access over 20,000 music radio stations from all over the globe
• Search for stations by location or genre
• Use GPS to generate a list of local stations
• Stream your own URLS in many formats such as M3U, ASX, PLS, RLTSP.

Patrick Hagenaar (Head of Mobile) says “We are very excited about launching a radio application, which lets users listen to all the best music stations wherever they are and have on demand radio shows by some of the biggest DJ’s out there! “

Ministry of Sound offers music enthusiasts a variety of ways to access its music, and dance music in general, via its nightclubs, albums, artists, website, radio station and now iPhone applications. The company’s previous iPhone application the iDrum, a music production tool, has already sold over 40k copies.

Apple today announced that it sold over one million iPhone 3GS models through Sunday, June 21, the third day after its launch.

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.”

The new iPhone 3GS features improved speed and performance, longer battery life, a 3 megapixel autofocus camera, hands-free voice control and easy to use video recording.

That last feature promises to be huge.

The inexpensive Flip video camera came from nowhere to become a hit, because it made it easy to shoot video, import it to your computer and post it to the Web.

The iPhone 3GS eliminates the step of importing video to your computer, letting you shoot video and directly post it to YouTube. Other phones have done this before – but the iPhone 3GS is going to do it on a massive scale.

The iPhone 3GS is a revolution in Web video.

It may take a year for it to really hit us, but it’s a revolution.

There are a million people out there already that are ready to shoot a video and publish it to the world almost instantly. This makes video blogging as trivial as Twitter made microblogging.

How will this change user generated media? How will this change journalism?

Are Twitter users anti-social?

Last week, Internet marketing blog HubSpot released their second State of the Twittersphere report (pdf).

According to HubSpot’s report:

• 79.79% Twitter users fail to provide a homepage URL
• 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
• 68.68% have not specified a location
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted
• 52.71% have no followers

So – more than half of all Twitter users have done nothing more than lurk at the site, and three-fourths of all Twitter users aren’t even trying to be social.

A lot of people are going to take a look at these numbers and conclude that Twitter users are anti-social. That’s a mistake, though, because it confuses Twitter accounts with actual users of the site.

It’s clear that Twitter hype has led a lot of people to sign up for the site to check it out. Many people also have multiple identities on Twitter in order to “stake claim” on those identities. This no different than the way people buy many more domain names than they actually use.

Trying to understand Twitter based on unused accounts makes as much sense as trying to understand the Web based on all the millions of unused domain names.

HubSpot’s statistics are interesting – but their stats would be a lot more useful if they focused on people that actually actively use the site.

via TwistImage

The Amazon Kindle may be a failure as a new media platform, but it’s great for reading books, right?

Maybe not.

According to Gear Diary’s Dan Cohen, DRM is the Kindle’s Achilles heal.

Cohen upgraded his iPod touch and bought a new iPhone 3GS recently, and found that he couldn’t download much of his substantial Kindle library to the supported devices:

When I got the Amazon Kindle app I knew there was one particular book I needed to download to both devices immediately. It’s a reference book that I wanted to make sure that I had on my device as the weekend began. But when I opened the app it only showed me a small subset of my books.

So he called customer service and got a shock:

“Oh that’s the problem,” he said. “If some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren’t currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice.

And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.

Worse yet – when you buy a book for the Kindle, there’s no way of knowing how many times you can download it:

“How do I find out how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”

I pressed — “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

In other words, buying a book on the Kindle platform is digital Russian roulette. You never know when the DRM is going to go off and the book that you paid for will be “dead”.

ReadWriteWeb blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick, right, and proto-podcaster Dave Winer kicked off a new podcast today, the Bad Hair Day Podcast.

The podcast is old-school, basically an unedited conversation between the two, tech snafus and all.

In the first episode, Kirkpatrick and Winer touch on the new iPhone OS, Twitter and even Kirkpatrick’s bizarre unicorn fetish. Fetish may be to strong a word, but we’ll let you make the call.

Bad Hair Day is broadcast live via BlogTalkRadio, but is also available as podcast subscription.

You can preview the Bad Hair Day podcast below and you can subscribe to it by adding this URL to your podcast software:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Bad-Hair-Day.rss

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg put together this light-hearted look at his search for the first blogger as a promo for his new book, Say Everything, a look at the 15 year history of blogging.

Anyone else amazed that blogging is 15 years old?

PAB2009, Podcasters Across Borders 2009, kicks off today in Kingston, Ontario.

The three day event, running from June 19th to June 21st at The Holiday Inn Waterfront, offers sessions focused on audio and video podcasting, but also on using social media and building new media-based communities.

Most of all, the event is about meeting other people excited about the possibilities of new media. There should be plenty of opportunities for this, and this year’s event is sponsored in part by Molson Rickard’s White – which means some free adult beverages on the annual PAB boat cruise.

Events kick off today at 2pm. Cost for the event is cdn $150/person.

Schedule below. See the Podcasters Across Borders site for more information.