The winners of the first European Podcast Awards have been announced.

Choosing from ten participating countries across Europe and over 750 nominations, a panel of judges awarded the inaugural European Podcast Award to five winners from Germany, England and Spain.

The European podcasts of the year 2008/2009 are:

• Schlaflos in München [Sleepless in Munich] / Germany
• The Naked Scientists / United Kingdom
• Comunicando Podcast [Communicating Podcast] / Spain
• CoffeBreak Spanish / United Kingdom
• ComputerClub 2 / Germany

David Prest, BBC producer and the English member of the panel of judges, says: “The award does a much needed job all over Europe in recognising excellence in podcasting. These podcasts are clever, creative, imaginative and extremely valuable programmes with high production values.”

About the European Podcast Award:

More than 750 nominated podcasts from 10 countries were judged by a combination of online voting and an international jury in four categories. Entries were evaluated on the basis of consistently defined criteria and awarded up to 625 points. Point totals were then used to determine national winners and the leading European entries. Jury members hail from all represented countries and include radio producers, journalists and podcasters.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (New Mexico) is reaching out to his constituents by several different media. Bingaman has launched two video podcasts, a YouTube channel, and keeps in touch with voters via his Facebook page.

Why two different video podcast series? One podcast is a short (less than 2 minutes) weekly overview of Congressional and New Mexico news. The second podcast, the “Bingaman Policycast,” averages five minutes in length and examines individual issues in greater depth.

In a very superficial review of the two podcasts, they are nicely-produced, the Senator is well-spoken and engaging, but the presentation itself is not so tightly-scripted that it seems false or forced. And the viewer’s time investment is minimal – the overview and in-depth podcasts are both brief.

Bingaman announced the podcast series via his Facebook presence, where he also asked his constituents to e-mail him with questions to be featured on future episodes.

Both the “Jeff Bingaman Weekly Podcast” and the more detailed “Jeff Bingaman Policycast) are available via iTunes.

via New Mexico Independent

Cool find of the day: Open Sound New Orleans.

Calling itself “a collaborative soundmap of the city,” the site invites New Orleanians to share the recorded sounds of their lives.

Recording equipment is loaned to community organizations, neighborhood groups, and individuals to facilitate a wide range of “dispatches” from around the city. Sounds are archived and organized geographically on a soundmap of the city (pictured, right).

Pins on the Google map of New Orleans are color-coded to designate whether they are music, conversation/interviews (or prayers), ambient noise (footsteps on a street, frogs and crickets in the trees), recently added recordings, or currently featured sounds.

Clicking on a map pin will open a window to the recording, with options to stream or download the sound. Users can also search the library of recordings from a list, sorted by categories. You can also get directions to each of the sounds’ locations through the mapping program.

I didn’t mean to, but got completely sucked into trying out one curiously-named sound bite after another. The sound library is fascinating and the entries are diverse.

The group describes their motivation behind the sound-collecting project: “Archiving the sounds of our city as everyday people hear them, move through them, and create them, is an act of preservation.”

Not a podcast per se (there is no RSS feed to automatically receive new additions to the collection), this is a thought-provoking use of digital media (like audio recordings) mixed with free technology (like Google Maps), to make creative and useful new mashups.

If you happen to be involved in any creative endeavors that mix up different media and technologies to yield a whole new product, let us know.

The (US) Library of Congress today announced the launch of its own YouTube channel.

The Library of Congress is the country’s oldest federal cultural institution, and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. In terms of “modern” (20th-century) media, they curate over 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings).

One of the Library’s stated missions is to “preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations,” and today’s additions to YouTube are another way to do that.

Because the knowledge of boxing cats is something the world should preserve and pass along to future generations.

No, really, this is a really cool thing. There are recordings of lectures and author presentations from the National Book Festival, industrial films from the early 1900’s,  a twenty-minute documentary on poet Langston Hughes. More content is promised in the days to come, along with a promise to “make our content more useful and delivered across platforms with built-in audiences of millions.”

You should definitely check it out.

Outdoor cinema equipment maker Open Air Cinema today announced that its Open Air Home Screens are now available at Target.com. As the name would indicate, the screens are giant inflatable movie screens designed for what the company calls “the ultimate backyard cinema experience.”

The movie screens come in three sizes: 10ft, 14ft, and 18ft, which are the largest inflatable movie screens for home (or guerilla drive-in theatre) use. Open Air Cinema describes the screens as “top-quality screens with theatrical grade projection surface(s).” See http://tinyurl.com/ak8kmz.

Product features include:

• Matte white, wrinkle-resistant ripstop nylon projection surface
• Black-backed projection surface blocks lights from behind, improves contrast ratio
• Ultra lightweight—weighs from 12-17 pounds when deflated and fits inside a duffle bag
• Quiet, professional quality air blower provides constant inflation
• Air blower, ropes, stakes, etc.
• 20 MPH wind rating

Last summer, we shared news of a growing DIY guerilla drive-in theater movement, in which video content producers take their creations to the audience, setting up mobmov’s, or mobile movies. The mobmov.org site gathers information about guerilla drive-in theaters, and filmmakers can even work through the organization to arrange screenings of their work. These portable, inflatable screens sound like a slicker presentation material then the old standby white bedsheet, or pale-colored side of a building as projection screen.

The portable, inflatable Open Air movie screens retail for between $499 – $1149. A little pricey for watching Wall-E at a backyard barbecque, but perhaps a useful tool for more serious movie-makers.

A week or so ago, we wrote about reports that changes to curriculum in grade schools in the UK would forsake “studying things like the Second World War and the Victorians in favor of Twitter, Wikipedia and podcasts.”

A review of, and updates to, the country’s centrally-proscribed curriculum would have meant requiring student fluency in social and new media by the time students left primary school, at the expense of learning abut “the Victorian period or the Second World War.”

As we expected, the response to this prospect was swift, furious, and overwhelmingly negative.

So, it comes as little surprise to read today that UK Children’s Secretary Ed Balls maintains that history will stay intact as part of England’s primary school curriculum.

In remarks to a meeting of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, Balls said that the curriculum redesign was not a matter of choosing only history or only information technology in the classroom. However, he said, “it’s also absurd that children are stuck in a dark age of technology when they learn history.”

The BBC article reports that “Children will be taught the broad chronology of major events in Britain and the wider world – from ancient civilisations through the Romans, the War of the Roses, the industrial revolution and the world wars to the modern day.”

It may come as a surprise, or seem inconsistent coming from a website that focuses on technology and new media, but the idea of focusing young children’s education on new media at the expense of history is about the most asinine thing we’ve read in ages (and we read about plenty of asinine initiatives and practices).

The Internet, blogging, podcasts, and new media are just tools that make for easier discovery of content, and for easier dissemenation of content. That content itself, whether history or the arts, mathematics or sciences, should remain a central focus of the primary school curriculum.

Those technology tools make the student and teachers’ jobs easier in many ways, but it is important to keep in mind how quickly and dramatically the tools change.

How many of our techie readers grew up learning programming on punch cards? In FORTRAN? Board-wiring? How many of us had clerical job skills that included WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3 and booting up dual-floppy-drive PC-XT’s or early Macs?

Those are all nice skills to have, but do little for us in our work today other than provide good fodder for nostalgic stories. Learning technology skills is helpful in that it gives us practice in thinking technologically. But to place much import on studying the particular applications of this brief moment in time is wasting time, and depriving young people of a broader educational foundation that would help them much more later in life.

This documentary, Virtual Journalism: Inside the Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo, explores the use of virtual worlds for journalism.

The documentary is part of a project between Dancing Ink Productions and the American University in Cairo exploring how virtual worlds can be used to augment journalistic goals globally, cut costs and enhance the interview process by providing access to often hard-to-reach subjects.

The project is directed by veteran American journalist and long-time Middle East correspondent Lawrence Pintak, head of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Research and Training at the American University in Cairo.

Details here.

What do you think: Is “virtual journalism” the future of news – or just a gimmick?

The latest episode of the “Get the Download” podcast features a discussion with attorney Colette Vogele, one of the authors of the Creative Commons Podcasting Legal Guide.

Interviewed by Volo Media‘s Jeff Karnes, Vogele discusses intellectual property law, including copyright, trademark, and privacy, and how it relates to new media and podcasting. Colette also addresses digital media topics such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Creative Commons, downloads vs. streaming, and legal considerations for podcasters.

Vogele is the principal of San Francisco-based Vogele Law, where she practices intellectual property law, specializing in technology and new media. The practice addresses copyright, trademark, privacy, reputation, and security issues. She speaks and writes regularly on issues related to intellectual property, on-line reputation, and the Internet. [She is also an extraordinarily smart and nice person, and has been an excellent information resource when Podcasting News has written about any of the above issues.]

Podcasters, along with every other variety of new media creator, need to take into account some legal considerations when they launch a new project: Do I need signed releases from people I interview or photograph or videotape? What can I use for theme music?  What if someone uses my blog content without my permission?

“Get the Download,” the podcast from the Association for Downloadable Media, covers a variety of topics related to providing advertising and audience measurement standards, and the monetization of downloadable content. The podcast feed is at this link. To stream the current episode, click here.

MechaWorks has announced MobileEdition – a new service that promises to put your WordPress-based blog into the iTunes App store, for free.

Here are the details:

MobileEdition is designed to let you to offer an iPhone-formatted version of your blog, while keeping the full desktop experience available on Safari. You get presence on the App Store, your readers get a simple choice in how to read your blog on-the-go.

Mobile Ads, Simplified

With MobileEdition, you’re in the driver’s seat on how your App Store app is distributed. You can charge for it, or you can offer a free, ad-sponsored version.

MechaWorks keeps a 40% revenue share for managing and improving your App Store app. However, with our competitive management, we work with multiple mobile ad networks to ensure you have the best ad rates possible. Best of all, this is all handled automatically by the MobileEdition system… so you don’t have to worry about it.

We’re right next to Infinite Loop…

MechaWorks is just a couple of blocks away from Apple, Inc. We realize that the App Store may not be ready for six million more App Store apps. But, we do look forward to working with Apple to handle this major paradigm shift.

To infinity… and beyond!

MobileEdition isn’t just going to rest with the App Store. From Android to webOS, and everything in-between, we’re already scoping out expanding MobileEdition to support a plethora of devices… on the fly.

Our goal is to make expanding device support completely pain-free to bloggers. Just like how we’re enabling you to create your own App Store app, pain-free.

The service is not available yet – MechaWorks is looking for interested blog publishers.

This is likely to be the first of many similar services that will let you transform your blog into a standalone app for the iPhone/iPod touch, and eventually for other platforms. We’ve signed up for the service, and we’ll let you know what we find out.

Are you going to try out MobileEdition? Or do you have other plans for moving your content to mobile devices?

Slate V takes a look at the latest in microblogging, Flutter.