Technology and new media conference South By Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) is just wrapping up in Austin, Texas.  The five day event featured panel discussions, “celebrity geek” interviews, vendor exhibits — and lots and lots of parties.

We have asked some of our friends and colleagues who attended this year’s SxSWi to share their highlights and takeaways from the conference, and will be sharing them with you over the next few days.

Len Edgerly (center, in red shirt at right) is the creator and host of the Kindle Chronicles podcast, a weekly series devoted to Amazon’s e-reader. Edgerly also promotes the use of podcasting and new media in the fine arts community, calling himself a “technology ambassador to the arts.”

Here’s his take on SxSWi:

This was my first time at SxSW.  I feel grateful for the experience on many levels. I heard terrific presentations and panels. Bruce Sterling, Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson, and Henry Jenkins’s panel on “What We Can Learn from Games were especially great.  I met other podcasters and had a chance to be a guest on one of my favorite shows, Push My Follow.

My best memory will be the first-ever meetup of listeners of my Kindle Chronicles podcast yesterday at Java Jive.  I had thought there might be listeners attending the conference, but it turned out that all of the meetup participants were NOT at SxSW but did live in the Austin area.  There were five of us who showed up, and we had a lively discussion, part of which I recorded for this week’s episode.  It was a real thrill for me to meet listeners in person and hear about their Kindle experiences.

[picture, right, of what Edgerly calls “the first Kindle Wheel seen in the wild.”]

The turnout in Austin made me realize I will be able to hold similar podcast meetups in my two home towns, Denver and Cambridge, Mass. So I’ll be setting those up in the coming months.

My mind is full of new ideas, and even though I’m exhausted I know I have a renewed supply of energy to keep improving my podcast and learning what I can contribute to this wild new world of social media and human connections via the Internet.

You can find out more about the Kindle Chronicles here.

Mobilecasting update: Audioboo is a free iPhone application (App Store link) for recording and sharing audio with the world.

A built-in recorder lets you create audio blogs of up to 3 minutes in length and post them to your own account on the web. You can add titles, text, geolocation info and a photo to the recording before you upload it. Your audio is saved as an mp3.

In addition to publishing audio blog posts from the iPhone Audioboo app, you can browse and listen to other people’s posts from your phone or via the web.

The site’s still in beta. According to the developers “We debated long and hard about releasing this version, since there’s a much better one in the works and the website needs a fair amount of work. But we decided to get it out there and see what happens.”

The site does not appear to provide RSS feeds for the audio posts, at this time. Javascript embed codes and a WordPress plugin are available, though.

Here’s an example of an embed, via Neville Hobson:

If you’ve used Audioboo, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Podcast production and hosting site Blubrry.com today announced the addition of Open ID sign-in capabilities. Open ID is an open, decentralized standard for “user authentication and access control.” In other words, it allows users to log onto many sites and services with a single digital identity.

Blurbrry founder Todd Cochrane explains:

“You can now login to Blubrry.com with an OpenID account. Users that already have accounts will be able to associate there [sic] OpenID logins with their existing accounts. We wanted to make Blubrry even more accessible to listeners that are looking to find new content….

“So far as we know Blubrry.com is the first podcasting site to implement the OpenID standard and quite frankly we are pretty proud of this accomplishment.”

OpenID authentication is used and provided by several large websites. Organizations like AOL, BBC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, Ustream and Yahoo! act as providers.

Popular GLBT website and podcast Feast of Fools: Gay Fun Show has changed its name, and will now be known as Feast of Fun: Gay Talk Show, or, as creator and host Fausto Fernos says,”just “Feast of Fun” or just plain FOF.”

Fernos, who hosts the weekly show with his partner Marc Felion, explains the broader effects of the change (bold italics added by me):

“[It] reflects our plans for expanding the programming, design and functionality of the site…. For over 11 years I’ve been thrilled to host Feast of Fools, from its first night as a drag queen variety show and a rock and roll cabaret, to its transformation into the world’s most downloaded talk show for a GLBT audience….

I’ve spent years thinking about how a name change would impact us and it just felt right to do it at this time. Since the last election was about change, Marc and I figured why not keep it going? Think of Feast of Fun as the Obamafication of our podcast. Change is good.”

I first met Fausto and Marc at the Podcast and New Media Expo in 2006, where they were awarded a People’s Choice Podcast Award (pictured, Fausto in the blue tux, Marc in the brown, at right). We had a great talk the next day, at the Podango “unconference” booth, where I was doing a session about (among other things) podcasting’s ability to broach difficult subjects, and build communities of like minded people across great physical distances. FOF has won the People’s Choice “Best GLBT Podcast” Award in 2006, ’07, and ’08.

Feast of Fools (or Fun) is informative and campy. This most recent episode, published today, gives an upbeat look at some indie newspaper publishing success stories. These are a nice counterpoint to the stories we are reading (and writing) about the demise of newspapers.

The RSS feed for the podcast is here.

You probably already know that people are moving their attention from traditional media to new media.

Now, research shows that marketers are following, moving their advertising dollars from traditional media to social media. Spending on social media is on the rise, according to Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang:

• According to Forrester, more than half of the marketers interviewed are planning to increase their social media budget during the recession.
• Another 42% of marketers said they would, at least, maintain the same level of spending on social media marketing;
• All in all, 95% of marketers are “bullish on social media marketing.”

Using social media for marketing makes sense, Owyang says, since it’s an inexpensive way to reach your intended audience.

Forrester argues that marketers should take social media seriously, and not treat it as an experiment. “[P]ut the right roles, process, and measurement capabilities in place to be effective…. The most expensive part is the soft costs: strategy, education, process, roles, measurement.”

Is the money finally going to flow into new media and social media?

Leave a comment with your thoughts!

Image: Steve Wampler

Print Media Deathwatch: Looks like Hearst is coming to grips with the idea that the traditional local newspaper is dead.

They’ve laid off hundreds and shut down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, pinning their hopes for the news organization on a “new type of digital business,” creating a business focusing on community news and local business advertising.

“The P-I has a rich 146-year history of service to the people of the Northwest, which makes the decision to stop publishing the newspaper an extraordinarily difficult one,” Frank Bennack, chief executive of the Hearst Corp, said.

“Our goal now is to turn seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region.”

The paper’s final print edition runs Tuesday.

Most traditional newspapers face extinction unless they can radically reinvent themselves, very quickly.

In addition to the horrible economy, papers face unavoidable technology trends:

• People are getting their news via computers and mobile devices;
• People are just not that into newspapers anymore; and
• The barriers to competition for news have been largely eliminated, which means that our traditional idea of local news is dead.

Hearst is cutting and running, killing off the Seattle P-I to focus their efforts on the Internet. This may not be a great strategy, but it’s a pragmatic one.

The Canadian arm of professional services firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers today announced a series of business podcasts which explores “key issues” affecting businesses during an economic downturn.

The podcast series, “Strategy Talks,” shares strategies companies can use to address the problems facing companies today. The episodes will feature interviews with PwC “thought leaders” about the recession, and offer insight and practical advice on how companies can weather the troubled economic climate.

The premiere podcast episode, titled “Surviving the Economic Crisis: PwC’s Perspective,” features a discussion with an executive in PwC’s Restructuring and Distress Strategy Group and the Credit Crisis Task Force at PwC, offering what the company calls “real-world coping strategies for businesses in this economic downturn.”

A second episode (already available online) covers the topic of “Restructuring in a Down Economy”, with an official from the PwC Corporate Advisory & Restructuring group, with a discussion of some of the key differences between restructuring a company in good times, and in bad.

The Strategy Talks podcasts can all be found here: pwc.com/ca/strategytalks. The RSS feed is here.

Photo: “Victim of an Economic Downturn?” by Barney.Craggs

Information released this morning by digital measurement company ComScore says that people’s use of mobile devices for accessing news and information on the Internet “more than doubled” from January 2008 – January 2009.

Over a third (35 percent, or 22.4 million) of the 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009 did so daily. That figure is more than twice the size of the audience last year, when an estimated 10.8 million people used their mobile devices daily to get news and information from the Internet.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

News and information are still, by far, the most-viewed categories for daily mobile web access, with 22.4 million daily unique users in January 2009 (up from 10.7 million in Jan ’08), a 107% change.

Social networking and blogging sites experienced the same explosive growth among mobile Internet users as among the general computer-using population. These sites ran a distant second to news and info sites among “most-viewed” categories, with 9.3 million daily unique users in Jan. ’09. However, this category marked the most dramatic increase — a 427% change over the 1.8 million unique daily mobile users in this category in January 2008.

The four other top categories that grew the fastest for daily mobile web access were:

• Stocks and financial info (up 188% from last year, 3.3 mil daily unique users 01/09),
• Movie information (up 185% from last year, 3.1 mil daily unique users 01/09),
• Business directories (up 161% over last year, 2.4 mil daily unique users 01/09),
• Entertainment (up 160% over last year, 5.5 mil daily unique users 01/09).

What are the implications of this for media organizations?

Mobile device owners are keenly interested in getting news and information (the province of “old” media like newspapers, radio, and tv) via their phones and portable media doo-hickeys. Old media, newspapers and magazines in particular, are in a state of declining revenues and rising expenses, some might even say a state of crisis. Perhaps focusing on making these sites easier for mobile users to, well, use can be a bigger part of the “old media” retooling.

For new media: accessing social networking and blogging sites, as a category, has mushroomed among daily mobile web users. That category is growing far more quickly than any other on the comScore report. How is your organization taking advantage of this boom time? And what will you do to maintain users’ interest, once the boom time is past?

Finally, for old and new media alike: Some of the fastest growing categories among daily mobile web users are staid and rather boring sites like movie listings and entertainment info, financial sites and business directories. How can news, information, social networking, and blogging sites capitalize on this less-glamorous but growing part of the mobile web?

If you have brilliant ideas, please weigh in in the comments.

Photo: 1000 Mobiles by Gaetan Lee

The Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress version 0.7.1 is now available.

The latest version includes a large number of new features as well as bug fixes.

New Features:

• Simple/Advanced Modes
  • Simple Mode is perfect for podcasters just starting out
  • Advanced Mode includes additional settings, tools and features.
  • Enhanced iTunes Summary option (learn more)
• Create Unlimited Custom Podcast Feeds
  • Each Feed includes the same extensive feed settings as the default podcast feed.
  • Customize feed title, description and landing page
  • Specify number of episodes per feed
• Hosted Feed Service Support (e.g. FeedBurner.com)
• WordPress Nonces support
• Added WordPress Roles and Capabilities support for User Role Management
• Additional player settings, specify audio player width and video player width & height
• PodPress Episode Import Tool
• Simple Mode for Podcast Entry Box (just enter the media URL and you’re done)

In addition to the new features, the update offers bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed duration detection bug
• Improved player in-page loading time
• Duration formatting improved for episodes that go over 1 hour.

The updated PowerPress can be downloaded here. More info below.

If you’ve used the PowerPress WordPress plugin, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Clay Shirky has published an interesting essay looking at the “unthinkable future” of news, where the Internet removes barriers to publishing and increases competition, making the traditional model of newspaper publishing beyond saving:

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?”

To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

Shirky’s right. Many of the problem that the traditional newspapers model solved are gone.

The photo above is of a printing press for a small paper – the West Coast Messenger. The presses that print major papers are complete beasts compared to this press.

What’s going to keep those behemoths running, when you can publish the same information – to the world – for nearly nothing?

Nothing’s going to keep those presses going, and nobody knows what’s going to replace traditional news organizations yet.

Shirky adds:

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

It’s a fascinating time – one full of chaos, destruction and invention.

Are you taking part in one of those experiments that will create the future of news?

Image: electro8