Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the rise of Facebook as a place to find news. Hitwise found that Facebook was the #4 referrer of traffic to news sites, after Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- and above Google News. Plus, the tech blog Engadget shut down comments after an influx of trolls, before relenting to open them again. And I ask Just One Question to Google News founder Krishna Bharat, who explains how 9/11 inspired him to create the service.

Check it out:

4mrbareaudio2510.mp3

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Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Facebook Largest News Reader? at Hitwise

Facebook Could Become World's Leading News Reader at ReadWriteWeb

Creating Your Personalized News Channel at Facebook blog

Is Facebook, Not Google, the Real Global Newspaper? at The Atlantic

Facebook helps the news industry, but it's no white knight at VentureBeat

We're turning comments off for a bit in Engadget

Comments getting out of hand, Engadget turns them off at AFP

Engadget editor - Why I turned off comments at VentureBeat

Are Blog Comments Worth It? at Web Worker Daily

How Much Blog Would a Blogger Blog If a Blog Chucked Its Comments? at MediaPost

Commenting on Engadget - a human's guide at Engadget

Google News to Publishers - Let's Make Love Not War at PBS MediaShift

Here's a graphical view of the most recent MediaShift survey results. The question was: "What do you think about Apple's iPad?"

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about where you find news online:

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

This episode of 4MR is brought to you by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more.

Social Media

We are organizing five workshops about social media:

1) The very basics.
The first workshop starts with what we consider to be the very basics: RSS Feeds. To familiarize journalists with this tool, we will hold hour-long sessions, of about 15 journalists each, where they can work with Google Reader.

We also say a few words about how RSS feeds apply to blogs. The principle is that of "My friends' friends are my friends." If a blog or a news site one trusts discusses other blogs on a regular basis or includes them in its blogroll, then there is a good chance those blogs are interesting as well. Of course, these recommended blogs will have additional recommended blogs of their own, which could very well be interesting as well. The number of worthwhile blogs grows exponentially, hence the need to organize all the feeds, for instance using Google Reader.

We explain that RSS feeds can also be used to keep track of searches in Google News or for monitoring the new bookmarks in your network at Delicious.

However, the very first thing we teach is how to use Mozilla Firefox in an efficient way -- showing shortcuts, extensions, etc. In that way, we want to be sure that everybody masters some of the basics.

2) Sharing articles and links.
This is where we go into more detail on the sharing possibilities of Google Reader and of Delicious, but also Twitter as a way to exchange links and ideas. For Twitter, we'll let our colleagues compare Twhirl, Tweetdeck and Twitterfall, with special attention to the search possibilities.

3) Photo and video sharing.
I think that we'll need to devote another session to "sharing," this time focusing on pictures and videos. Most of my colleagues don't use Flickr, for instance, and because we want to publish the pictures, we'll need to explain the principles of Creative Commons and when you can publish someone's photos. To integrate all these media streams, we'll present them with the life-stream aggregator FriendFeed as a possible solution.

4) The social dimension.
One of the most important aspects of all this is learning how to navigate the social dimension, to deal with other users on the networks. In the fourth session, we'll play around with Facebook, LinkedIn and social news websites such as Digg. Maybe we'll have a look at virtual worlds, to see what other media do there to engage their audiences in an immersive way. We'll see if we can start a debate about the best ways to practice crowdsourcing and meet interesting people using networks.

5) Striking out for yourself. The last session of the social media series is for those who want to launch their own blog, network or wiki. We'll discuss the projects collectively and take the first steps to launching some. We'll use an internal wiki to enable people to react, to suggest other tools and practices after the discussion. This wiki is organized to be ongoing as we anticipate that we'll have repeat courses and additions, taking into account that new tools come on to the market about every day.

Audio, video, stills, animations

Most of our journalists are "writers." They are text people. We would like to introduce them to other possibilities to bring their stories to life. To that end, we have also envisioned some voluntary courses on audio, video and animation. Not all of our reporters will choose to follow these sessions, but we think they will help those that do attend to understand some new tools.

Introduction to Flash.
We'd like to have a group of journalists who know the basics of Flash so that they can communicate with our Flash specialist on behalf of our writers. If reporters are more aware of the possibilities and challenges of Flash, it would help to bridge relations between the departments. Also, journalists could take over producing some not-too-complicated animations themselves.

Basic Video.
We hope to involve as many journalists as possible in a course teaching video production, basic editing skills and uploading/publishing skills. They would also learn some basic stuff about what to do and not to do when shooting video, and also how to handle themselves when speaking in front of a camera. The same applies for stills: Knowledge of some simple rules would not harm anybody!

We hope our colleagues will enjoy this training, because, after all, most of us use cameras in our spare time and it would be nice to have some basic skills to take better pictures. Those skills will also help us to select pictures made by others and to filter the best videos and pictures.

The Endgame: Cross-media Storytelling

Sometime in the fall, we hope to conclude our "new media" workshops. Around that time, we'd like to invite some expert in cross-media storytelling (preferably based in Europe) to give a seminar on how to use various media to create interactive, immersive stories.

Our goal is more than just a seminar: We hope we'll be able to produce some of those cross-media stories during the remainder of the year. I think that a lot of the previously discussed skills will be involved in such projects; working on such projects would make the exciting potential of new media tools obvious to the newsroom.

Help us train

The social media workshop runs for one month, before we move to the sessions about "sharing." My colleagues seem to be very interested and active during the workshops, but it remains to be seen whether they will actually use the new techniques in everyday work.

It is crucial for us to demonstrate to our colleagues that the new tools should not be thought of as creating an additional burden. Instead, they can make work easier and more interesting. It is obvious that the workshops are not the place to have philosophical discussions about old and new media. What people want right now are skills and tools which help them produce better stories.

We would appreciate any insights and recommendations you might have for our training program. Feel free to point out anything you think we forgot or any aspects that you think we've overplayed or shortchanged in our approach.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

Photo of man with videocamera by Amancay Maahs via Flickr.

When you open up your Internet browser, what's the first thing you see? Many people opt for personalized start pages, portal-like websites that let you pick and choose the content you want, such as news, weather or updates from social networking sites like Facebook. You can add widgets to your start page, and even create widgets for others to use on their pages.

These sites incorporate Ajax programming, which lets you easily customize the page, moving content from one area to another, while also speeding up the page's load time. These start pages are popular with a lot of folks, but they've never worked for me for a variety of reasons (I'll get to those in a moment).

First, the back story. Personalized start pages have been around for several years but really took off in 2006, when several players appeared on the scene, among them Netvibes (which Mark reviewed back in 2006) and Pageflakes. That same year Google launched their own personalized start page called iGoogle, with the first widgets added to the page around that year's World Cup. Since then, more and more services have appeared on the scene, with mixed results.

So why haven't I become a regular user of personalized start pages? And why haven't they become successful businesses? Let me count the ways:

1. Widget appeal is fleeting.

I must admit I'm not a fan of widgets, those mini-applications that run on social networking sites, blogs and start pages. The concept seems really cool for a couple of hours, but that's about how long they've lasted for me. On iGoogle, many of the widgets I originally installed don't work anymore, and others, such as games, take way too long to load in the first place. While I agree that they can be useful, they just aren’t useful enough to keep me coming back to a start page.

2. Too much me in one place.

The idea of updating or checking other people's updates from social networking sites or reading feeds from newspapers on a start page brings us back to the topic of aggregation. It's a subject I've covered before in a previous post about social aggregation services such as FriendFeed. Instead of visiting various sites, you can use social networks and read the news without leaving your start page.

The offer of centralizing information in one place is catching on as sites such as Twitter, Flickr, etc., have included this functionality seamlessly when you sign up. In theory, I see the appeal of having everything I follow online in one central place. But a start page can't accommodate all the things I read and do online without becoming overwhelming. I tried adding all the things I cared about to Netvibes and Pageflakes start pages and it ended up looking like something I'd rather run away from than embrace. Like my experience with FriendFeed, it's too much of me in one place for me to handle.

3. They seem like features, not stand-alone businesses.

Two years after the onset of the personalized start page bubble, most of these services are still around. But I wonder for how long. From a business standpoint, the beauty of these services is that they are content portals without having to provide any of the content, which is funneled in from other sources. But as stand-alone businesses -- as opposed to a feature, such is what iGoogle is to Google -- they don't seem to have much traction. Recently, one of the more popular services, Pageflakes, ran into financial trouble /and was acquired by Live Universe.

Start pages built from the ground up can't seem to compete with the big boys such as My Yahoo and iGoogle, so I wonder how long the variety in this space will last. For many people, it's just too easy to use a service already integrated into a suite of services they already use -- provided by Google or Yahoo. Plus, as TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld wrote: "What will the half-life of start pages be in a Friendfeed world?" Schonfeld noted that:

comScore measured only 50,000 unique U.S. visitors [for Pageflakes] in March 2008, compared to 1.4 million for competitor Netvibes. iGoogle had 7.4 million U.S. visitors in March, and My Yahoo had 19 million.

4. I can’t find a real use for them.

I'm always in such a hurry to find what I want when I go online, and I'm a creature of habit. So when I use one of these personalized start pages, I end up ignoring what's there and just cutting to chase with a Google search or a visit to my RSS news-feed reader. As for using it to get news, well, that's what the feed reader is for, and it does the job a lot more effectively.

On the Other Hand...

There are some reasons why these services might just stick around despite my resistance. Among them is the customized media diet we are getting more and more used to these days, and the fact that readers are less attracted to stories than they are to headlines. Here are a few reasons personalized start pages might just catch fire.

1. People gravitate to aggregation.

I assumed that people who work on the Internet, like me, would have less of an interest in these services than people who only occasionally consult the web for news and entertainment, so I asked a couple of other people what they thought.

I posted a question to my Twitter followers: "How many of you use these services and why?" I found quite a few people who use and enjoy personalized start pages for a variety of reasons. Among them were the ability to update their statuses on services like Twitter directly from the start pages, or put only the most important news to them in one place, while using RSS feed readers to get less important news.

Some people said that start pages influenced and streamlined the way they interact with other sites. For instance, updating on Netvibes means you don't have to visit the Twitter website, but seeing a headline often compels you to click through to read the whole news story on the source site.

2. The trend toward me-focused media.

Some people want less editorial intervention and more of themselves in the media they consume. In contemplating the appeal of personalized start pages, I couldn't help but compare it to the draw of a D.I.Y. magazine or newspaper. Early versions of personalized online papers have been around since the '90s, with notable projects such as CRAYON leading the way.

The concept of The Daily Me -- personalized news publications built around one's own interest -- dovetails nicely with personalized start pages. Services like customizable news site DailyMe.com or The New York Times' MyTimes are more news-oriented than the start pages I've mentioned, but also attempt to deliver highly customized content.

3. Our love for snacking on headlines, not stories.

Recently there's been a lot of talk about how our inability to wait and our short attention spans -- possibly made shorter by high-speed Internet, tabbed browsing and a seemingly endless stream of Web 2.0 sites. Instead of longer, more in-depth stories, studies show that what most readers want these days are news bites and headlines.

This trend toward brevity might be a good thing for the personalized start page, which serves up just that: a headline and a two- to four-line intro. Sites such as Pageflakes make it extra easy to get the point of a news piece without actually having to read it. If the headline reads "John Mayer's Ex 'Happy' About His New Romance," a mere mouse-over of the text gives a subhead telling you who the ex is and who the new romance is. I guess with stories like this, you don't need anything more than that -- and really, who has time for more? (Uh, except for our long-attention-span readers at MediaShift, of course.)

What do you think? Do you use personalized start pages? Why or why not? What do they provide that you don't get from just visiting a news site or a social networking site -- or using a RSS reader? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a writer, blogger and marketer, who also covers Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

Pageflakes image by Paul Jacobson and Christ and Deep Thoughts widgets image by Manuel W., both on Flickr.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In my account of Supernova 2007 yesterday, I didn't mention one of the things that really irked me about the conference: the silence. When panelists were on the huge stage at the main ballroom in the Westin St. Francis Hotel, the large audience sat silent typing away at their laptops.

While some sessions ended with a formal Q&A in which attendees got up and made the long trek to the microphone, most stayed put, making the sessions more like speeches than participatory discussions. With a room full of such smart people, you'd think they'd have a lot more to contribute, but the talking didn't really begin until the breaks, when entrepreneurs were pitching their products left and right, and full-on business schmoozing was overflowing into the hallways.

On the second day of the conference, I attended a panel called "The Social Web." What I found immediately interesting about this panel is that the products and companies represented were extremely diverse, ranging from a social WiFi telephony site to traditional portals. Moderator and Supernova co-founder Kevin Werbach introduced what he described as an increasing trend: As the web becomes more social, it also becomes more personalized. As we are out there networking with the world on MySpace and LinkedIn, we also are closing ourselves to information that we feel isn't relevant to us, by picking and choosing our media and how we consume it.

"So what's next for the social web?" Werbach asked the panel.

Up first was Mike Speiser, whose team works on Yahoo Groups, Yahoo 360 and other community products. Speiser said Yahoo is moving more toward "discovery" (a buzzword that came up a lot in yesterday's pitching sessions) and personalization. He said that each person that uses the product improves the experience for the next user. An example would be if a lot of people are clicking on a link to a certain story, Yahoo might promote that link with more prominence. The company is also trying to take user data to suggest stories, in an Amazon-like recommendation: "people who like this also like this." Speiser says the web is going from "publish and subscribe" to users actually improving the products they use.

Greg Reinacker of NewsGator said something similar. On NewsGator, a company that develops RSS feed readers, what's "bubbled up to the top" is content that users are interacting with most, driving more interest from other people. Reinacker also wondered how media brands will deal with the fact that people are moving away from having CNN.com as a homepage to a more personalized experience. That shift means more business and traffic for NewsGator and other aggregators, who can syndicate content onto different sites to meet the growing demand.

Also on the panel was Martin Varsavsky, the CEO of FON, a company that lets people connect to each other by sharing wireless routers, creating an interesting community of folks who share ad hoc Internet access. Varsavsky is a Spanish-Argentine entrepreneur who is quite a celebrity in the Spanish-speaking Internet world, so I was anxious to hear his take on all of this. I wasn't disappointed, as he actually went beyond the tech side to talk about users as people.

Varsavsky pointed out the differences between American Internet users and those from Latin America or Spain. "In the Spanish world, they like physical contact," he said. "They like to look at people, they like to touch people." He said that as the popularity of the Internet began to grow in Spain, users immediately used it to meet up offline for parties. FON lets users do that with the people around them, as neighbors share WiFi routers then use the service to network with people physically close to them.

He also made a good point about these cultural differences, using the conference and its silence as an example.

"This looks like a press conference, with everyone looking at their computers," he said, referring to the sea of laptops in perfect lines that filled the ballroom. "If this were a conference in a Spanish-speaking country, we probably wouldn't be looking at the people on the stage or at the screens; we'd all be talking to each other."

I think this sums up not only why his product is right for his markets, but why Americans are so obsessed with our online lives. Even in a room full of people with similar interests, we're incapable of talking to each other if it isn't via IM or email. The point was driven home even more as I received an email from a person who was sitting about 20 feet away from me.

The Politics of Governing the Internet

Seeing the conference in bits and pieces and taking the panel sessions at face value, it might be hard to see how all of this ties into the event's theme of decentralization. After the "Social Web" session I had a chance to talk with renowned Internet thinker David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. His latest book is Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, and he explained to me why the conversations taking place at Supernova were important.

"The old means of communication required a certain degree of centralization: broadcast," he said. "It's very expensive to get on, it has a very strict audience vs. speaker dynamic, but all of that goes away as the person-to-person network becomes more important. This makes the question of 'who owns the Internet?' that much more important, and ultimately impacts media, both online and traditional."

Weinberger said that attendees -- whom he described as a mix of hardcore telecom people and those building online communities -- are dependent on each other even though they are often treated separately. He said that Supernova was a good place to see how the web's infrastructure is having a direct effect on what we can and cannot do online.

Weinberger also said that the infrastructure issue has both political and cultural weight, as many people believe that multimedia such as online video will eventually strain the Internet's backbone to a breaking point. I told him I thought the issue of scalability, whether the Internet could scale to deal with all that traffic, seemed to come up a lot in the panel discussions, and wondered what effect that would have on how we use the Internet.

"Scalability came up from the very beginning, and it's where these two levels actually touch," he said. "The web came about only because it's scalable and it's scalable only because it's unowned and there's no permission required to be on it. There are no managers, and if there were, it wouldn't scale. Now we need to decide whether -- now that the Internet is 'all grown up' -- it needs more management. That's an active political issue and how that plays out actually determines what kind of applications you can have. For example, the providers of the current infrastructure have made the decision that we need more bandwidth coming down, to download stuff. And that's based on the assumption -- which has never been true, by the way -- that people who use the web are like people who watch TV."

This conversation with Weinberger happened, of course, off-stage in a corridor, and was for me a better representation of what this conference was about than what I actually saw on the panels. The idea behind the conference is extremely compelling when you think of the urgency of the issues he talks about here -- the cultural and political ramifications of business intersecting with the Internet.

Unfortunately, to an observer like me, that issue wasn't immediately evident in the panels. That might be due to the fact that most of the attendees are of the opinion that the Internet does not need management, making it a moot point. As Weinberger puts it: "It's a battle -- the struggle for the Internet. Who owns it and whether it's going to be owned or not. That issue is coming to a head. The discussion around it is ever more passionate and the lines are drawn more firmly. Supernova tends to be on one side of that issue, and that's fine by me."

Here's what other folks thought about Supernova 2007:

Dylan Tweney on Wired's Epicenter blog wrote that it was "an impressive muster of brainpower and business clout. On the other hand, the presentations onstage were mind-numbingly boring."

JD Lasica of SocialMedia.biz discusses the first day of the conference.

David Weinberger discusses some of the more interesting sessions on his blog, among them Denise Caruso's take on anti-social software.

Supernova's Conversation Hub blog has blog posts summarizing each of the panels for the entire conference, as well as some video interviews with panelists.

What do you think about Supernova 2007? Did you attend the conference and what did you think were its stronger and weaker points? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a San Francisco-based writer, blogger and marketer, who covers Latino marketing at Latin-Know and Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

Photo of Nick Douglas by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo. Photos of Martin Varsavsky and David Weinberger by Dan Farber.
You can see more of Jennifer's photos from Supernova 2007 on Flickr, and you can see more photos from the conference taken by other attendees here.

What Are Podcasts?

Podcasts are audio or video shows that you can subscribe to via the Internet and listen to or watch on your own time on your computer, portable MP3 player or other web-connected device. The power of podcasts is that you can subscribe to the shows you want, and then they automatically appear in your podcast aggregator software such as Juice or Apple's iTunes. When you plug in your portable MP3 player -- which can be an iPod or any other player -- your podcasts can then be uploaded and experienced on the go.

Why has podcasting become such an appealing pastime? People who listen to podcasts love the way they can access an amazing array of content -- from language lessons to comedy shows to NPR news -- on their own time and on their own devices. Almost all podcasts are free of charge, and very few include commercial or sponsor messages. You can often fast-forward, rewind or pause the podcast, making it a similar experience to watching a DVD or playing back a TV show on a digital video recorder (DVR).

Plus, the barrier to entry as a podcast producer is very low. All you need is a microphone connected to your computer, and some audio software, and you can start creating your own podcasts. Of course, if you want to garner an audience for your podcast, you'll likely need a website or a blog to help promote your show, and you'll need to submit your podcast to various podcast directories.

Richard Giles, who co-wrote the "Podcasting Pocket Guide," explains the explosion of podcasts on his blog:

There are podcasts about music, technology, movies, business, words, camels, coffee, politics, and parenthood. The range of podcasters is just as diverse: professional DJs, truckers, lawyers, counselors, journalists, camel herders, actors and the girl next door. Anyone and everyone can create their own radio show about whatever the heck they please. It might mean that only their wife and mom listen, or perhaps 50,000 people tune in, but the beauty of the show is that it can be whatever they want.

One downside to podcasting is that not everyone is comfortable using computer software to subscribe to shows and manage subscriptions. Listening to podcasts is not as easy as simply turning on your radio, or even just listening to Internet radio stations. However, once people get the hang of it, they often become big fans of the variety and convenience of podcasts.

A Brief History of Podcasting

Podcasting became part of the general lexicon almost overnight. The technology behind podcasting comes from RSS news feeds, which were developed by programmer and blogging pioneer Dave Winer. Former MTV VJ Adam Curry had been pushing for a new way to do RSS with multimedia, and helped encourage Winer to develop RSS with enclosures.

That technology allowed people to publish RSS feeds with audio or video, but it took a few years before regular podcasts were launched. In the summer of 2004, Winer started a proto-podcast called Morning Coffee Notes and Curry started his Daily Source Code show. Curry decided to start coding his own podcast software called iPodder, and was hoping to get other programmers to join in on the open source software project. Eventually, iPodder became the basis for other "podcatching" software programs, which help you manage and subscribe to podcasts. In 2005, when Apple's iTunes included podcatching software as well as a podcast directory, the medium exploded.

What started out as a geeky side project became a medium that every major broadcaster participates in. When you look at the iTunes Podcast Directory, for instance, "featured providers" include NPR, ABC News, CNN, Comedy Central, MTV, The New York Times, and yes, PBS. Along with the interest by media companies who want to reach this tech-savvy podcast audience, various startup companies have sprung up to help commercialize independent podcasts (e.g. Curry's PodShow), insert ads into podcasts (e.g. Kiptronic) or measure podcast audiences (Audible's WordCast).

Where to Find Podcasts

Unlike regular radio shows or TV shows, podcasts live all over the web, so there is no limit to where you might find them. However, to ease the burden of searching high and low for podcasts that might interest you, many sites offer podcast directories with listings of podcasts and easy ways to subscribe to them. (I wrote a guide to podcast directories about a year ago.)

The iTunes directory has the slickest interface, with an emphasis on professional content from media companies. You can search through podcasts according to topic or by popularity or check out "staff picks." Once you find a podcast you like, you can subscribe to it via iTunes or just download an episode to check out. The great thing about iTunes is that it is well integrated with iPod devices, but the drawback is that you have to open up the iTunes application to check out the directory.

Once you have subscribed to the podcasts you like, you can return to your podcasting software to find new shows. Then you can download those shows to your MP3 player or listen to them on your computer at your leisure. As you listen to shows, you can then discard the ones you don't need or have your podcast software remove older shows automatically.

How to Become a Podcaster

One great thing about podcasting is that anyone can jump in and start podcasting with very little investment in equipment. For a basic audio podcast, you'll need a computer connected to the Internet, a good microphone, and sound recording software. Of course, having an original concept will help as well. You should probably sift through existing podcasts in various directories to make sure you're doing something relatively unique.

Yahoo provides a great step-by-step guide for making your own podcast, and includes the following advice:

Want to really maximize your audience? We've found that many successful podcasts start with a good plan...Next, think about the content of your podcast. What will you talk about? How long will your podcast be? Jot down a rough outline for your podcast so you can keep on track when recording. Finally, how often will you create new episodes? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?

Once you have the plan and the gear, make sure you're in a quiet space and record your show. Be sure to get clearance for any copyrighted music that you use on your podcast. You can find music that's free for use on podcasts at PodSafe Music. Once you're done recording, you'll need to take the audio file and encode it into the MP3 format, and then upload it to your website or the podcast hosting service you might use (such as Libsyn).

Then comes the tricky part: getting noticed. With the thousands of podcasts in existence, you'll need to consider who your audience is and how to reach them. First you'll want to submit your podcast to the various directories. Next, you'll want to give notice to the various bloggers and online pundits who cover your field of interest. Once you have built up a loyal audience, you might consider making money as a podcaster.

Making Money with Podcasts

There has been a lot of hype around podcasting, and much of it has faded since the initial ruckus in 2005. While many podcasters have taken their hobby and made it into a profession -- notably video podcasters such as Rocketboom and Ze Frank -- the vast majority of podcasts remain labors of love with little commercial appeal. Bullish market researcher eMarketer predicted that advertisers will spend $400 million on podcasts by 2011, up from $80 million last year. But that number is miniscule compared to the nearly $20 billion eMarketer predicts will be spend in all online advertising in 2007.

There are a few problems for people looking to "monetize" podcasts. First, it's impossible to tell how many people actually listen to your podcast. While you might be able to gauge the number of subscribers, you never know who actually listened to it or how long they listened. This information is crucial to advertisers who want to know specific audience numbers and usage statistics. While some services have cropped up to help podcasters tally their audience numbers, nothing has become widespread enough to make serious inroads. The podcasting audience remains a muddled guess.

Rob Walch of Podcast411 recently compared various research firms' estimates on the size of the total podcasting audience. His conclusion was that the number is probably "somewhere between 6 and 60 million, with the likely conservative number around 15 to 20 million consumers." That's not bad, but still a long way from mainstream appeal.

Perhaps that's beside the point. The early nature of podcasting was that it was home-brewed radio, created by amateurs and boosted by enthusiasts. Placing advertisements all over a podcast would almost defeat the purpose, and people would simply fast-forward past them or stop listening if it became too commercialized. The trick for podcast publishers is to create an experience that is engaging and includes the sponsors in new, more interactive ways. For instance, GoDaddy at one point allowed PodShow podcasters to create their own ads touting its service.

Resources

To learn more about podcasting -- from how-to's to business articles -- check out the list of resources below.

Guides and Histories

Directory of Podcast Directories from Podcast411

History of Podcasting from PodcastBlaster

iTunes Podcast Spotlight from Apple

Introduction to Podcasts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) from Richard Giles

Make Your First Podcast from Podcasting News

Podcast defined by Wikipedia

Podcasting and iTunes: Technical Specifications from Apple

Podcasting and iTunes: FAQ from Apple

Podcasting Glossary from Podcasting News

Podcast Hosts from Podcasting News

Podcasting Software [for Listeners] from Podcasting News

Podcasting Software [for Publishers] from Podcasting News

The Technology Underlying Podcasts; from Computer.org

Top 25 Podcasts by Hits from Podcasting News

What Is a Podcast? from Podcast411

Yahoo Podcasts -- Guide to Publishing a Podcast

News Stories

Audible's Podcast Tool Tallies Listeners from the Wall Street Journal

Classes To Go Digital with New Podcast Service from the Daily Orange at Syracuse

Music Industry Changes Its Tune on Podcasting from the Wall Street Journal

Podcast Riches? from Blogspotting

Podtrac Unveils Web-Based Media Planner from MediaWeek

Searching for the Pod of Gold from BusinessWeek

The Next Big Ad Medium: Podcasts from BusinessWeek

Services

Audible WordCast

Castfire

Kiptronic

Liberated Syndication

Odeo

Podbridge

The Podcast Network

Podcast411

Podcast Expo

PodShow

PodshowCreator

Podtrac

If you know of other good online resources for podcasting, please add them to the comments below and I'll update the blog post with any glaring omissions.

Photo of Winer and Curry by JD Lasica.

Though newspaper websites have been around for a decade, they've often been slow to innovate, and have been mainly used for "shovelware" -- repurposing the same print stories online. But now, times are changing, and newspapers are perking up and realizing they're going to have to do more online if they want to compete with the TV network and cable news sites, international newspaper sites, and aggregators such as Yahoo and Google.

So can these ink-stained dinosaurs do the Web 2.0 boogie? The Bivings Group, a Washington PR agency, recently studied the Top 100 American newspaper sites (ranked by print circulation, strangely enough) to find out which newspapers offered blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, comments on stories, reader forums and even bookmarking features.

The following are some key findings from the report, which you can read in full here (PDF file).

Blogging is all the rage.
Out of the Top 100 newspaper sites, 80 of them have blogs. Of those 80 sites with blogs, 67 sites (or 83%) let readers comment on the blogs. The report singles out the Boston Globe's massive blogging effort for encouraging "reader participation and interaction between reporters, journalists, and everyday citizens." Blogging is so prevalent, that 9 of the Top 10 and 9 of the Bottom 10 newspapers offer blogs.

Podcasting is still a province of larger papers.
Unlike blogs, podcasts are employed by a minority of Top 100 newspaper sites -- 31 of them. And the trend is much stronger on bigger sites vs. smaller ones. For instance, 6 of the Top 10 newspaper sites have podcasts, while only 2 of the bottom 25 have podcasts. The reason for that disparity might be because of the extra production required for podcasts vs. for blogs -- plus the newness of podcasting.

Video offerings are widespread.
61 newspaper sites of the Top 100 offer video on their sites, which is a pretty strong number. However, The Bivings Group didn't break out whether that video was AP video or original video shot by the newspaper staff, or even video submitted by readers.

Newspaper sites offer RSS -- but not with full text or ads.
Out of the Top 100, 76 sites have RSS feeds and almost all of them offer feeds for particular sections of the site. But none of these feeds are full-text feeds and none of them have advertisements within the feeds. What's up with that? The Bivings Group explains:

They are essentially using RSS like an email alert system: letting people know something new has been posted but still trying to push users to their own websites. Thus, while newspapers are using RSS, they are not yet allowing readers to read full text in their own RSS readers without visiting the newspaper's site online. Perhaps newspapers fear that by using full RSS feeds and allowing people to read entire newspaper articles via this technology, fewer people will visit their websites.

Over time, it's possible that newspaper sites might see the importance of offering full feeds with ads, as more people start using RSS feeds and prefer to read articles inside their news reader.

Forced registration is losing steam.
Only 23 of the Top 100 newspaper sites require people to register in order to read articles. That seems awfully low, and perhaps a sign that the sites don't trust the veracity of people giving their personal information. Instead, the sites might rely on behavioral ads that are served according to the websites the person has visited recently.

Editors are not hip to reader comments on stories or bookmarking.
Only 19 sites allow readers to comment below each article, and only 7 sites offer either internal or external bookmarking features. The low number on reader comments is a strong contrast to the 63 sites that let people comment on blogs. This could be an issue of resources and the amount of time it takes to moderate comments on stories -- or it could be the thin skin of reporters and editors who don't want reader comments on their stories.

As for social bookmarking, that seems like a no-brainer for newspaper sites, as people bookmarking their stories would lead to more readers. Why not turn your readers into advocates and promoters for your best content? For instance, the Washington Post site allows people to save stories to del.icio.us, where others can see the stories you've bookmarked.

"Based on these findings and others, it seems that today's newspapers are making a significant effort to reach web-focused audiences with mediums that are relevant to today's virtual society," concludes Erin Teeling of The Bivings Group on the firm's blog.

True enough, but what could newspaper sites do better to help reel you in as a regular reader? What tools and technology do you think they should offer? Are newspaper blogs or podcasts important to you? Do you want original online content? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The idea of RSS news readers is to make it easy to see the latest content on various sites, blogs and podcasts without having to visit each site individually. So if it's all about saving time and energy, you want a simple news reader that doesn't make your life more unmanageable than it already is.

(For more on the basics of RSS, check out Your Guide to RSS; for my own take on the perfect RSS news reader, check out How to Make RSS = Really Satisfying Syndication)

I was impressed with the wide range of responses to this week's question -- though it's not surprising when you consider the amazing array of RSS news reader software and web-based services.

I've tallied up all your favorites, and allowed people to vote for multiple news readers if they used them that way. The top vote-getter was Google Reader, followed by Sage for the Firefox browser. Why did Google Reader win out? Many folks mentioned the ease of use, the simple interface, and the fact that it's web-based so it's accessible from any Internet-connected computer.

Photographer Chris Pultz says that he recommends that new RSS users try Google Reader.

"I actually teach a class that includes RSS, and I push new RSS users (including my own family) towards Google Reader," Pultz wrote. "Free, straightforward, great for a few feeds. Convenient for those who already have a Gmail or a Google News account."

Though Google Reader is officially still a Google Labs product in testing, it has a nice feature set including letting you watch Flash video directly in the reader. For more on the features of Google Reader, check out the dedicated Google blog by the developers. Plus, there's a great screencast tutorial by Jason Toal showing you the features of Google Reader if you're interested in learning more about it.

Before we get to some of your interesting thoughts on various RSS readers, here's the final tally for your favorite RSS readers (obviously this is a very unscientific poll):

Google Reader: 6
Sage (for Firefox browser): 4
NetNewsWire (for Mac): 3
Bloglines: 3
My Yahoo: 3
NewsGator: 2
FeedDemon (for Windows): 2
Gmail Snippets: 2 (plus 1 very reluctant voter who calls it "kind of useless")
FeedBurner (via email): 2 (including 1 vote from a VP at FeedBurner)
Netvibes: 2
Internet Explorer 7 (beta): 1
Attensa (Outlook plug-in): 1
Vienna (for Mac): 1
Klipfolio: 1
Flock browser: 1
FeedPopper (for Mac): 1
Feedblitz (via email): 1
Zookoda: 1
Pluck: 1
Central Desktop (via Outlook): 1 (from the CEO of Central Desktop)

Blogger Jose Moreno likes FeedDemon for its ease of use and personalization features. He also noted how RSS use changed his reading -- and writing -- habits.

"Significantly, ever since I started using an RSS reader, I post a lot more on my blog, but each post is a lot shorter," Moreno wrote. "Plus, now posts tend to be more directive torwards sources and less opinative. Conclusion: When you use an RSS reader, your information gathering tends to be less intensive and more extensive (and so are your posts). That should mean something about the way we connect to the world. Meaning: An RSS reader is not just a tool; it is a tool that changes the world, in a way."

Perhaps RSS readers help us gather and swallow up more information, but it gives us less depth both for reading and writing.

Other folks like to use various RSS readers depending on the purpose of the information they're gathering. Isaac Garcia, who is co-founder and CEO of Central Desktop, noted that he reads different information via different tools (of course including his own company's service). Here's his rundown:

Bloglines -- Primary blog/news reader

Outlook -- "work" related project and workspace feeds from Central Desktop.

I separate my "work" RSS feeds into Outlook because I "live" in Outlook where my email resides. To read RSS feeds in Outlook, I use the Attensa Outlook plug-in.

My Yahoo -- For financial news, company information and RSS feeds that I can 'scan' but that don't need to be refreshed as quickly and often as Bloglines or Outlook feeds.

Gmail Snippets -- This is kind of useless in my opinion. But I subscribe to a few Snippets via RSS in the odd event that my eyes veer to the top of my screen and read more trivial RSS feeds.

Philippe Borremans, a PR manager in Belgium, also is a bit of a power user when it comes to RSS feeds. While he first says he uses two readers, he actually lists five of them.

"[I use] Klipfolio, which I use to create a full screen online monitoring dashboard," Borremans wrote. "This little program is made of different Klips which can contain one or several feeds. It also has auto-discovery of feeds and one-click subscribe plus it allows you to put alerts based on keywords in any feed. This is one of the main reasons why I use it for monitoring purposes."

He also uses the Flock browser, email feeds via FeedBurner and Feedblitz, and Zookoda, which is an email newsletter marketing system based on RSS feeds. Whew.

Sometimes, your RSS reader of choice depends on the operating system you use. Many people mentioned NetNewsWire for the Mac, while FeedDemon received kudos on the Windows platform. Online newspaper editor Howard Owens noted that his recent switch from Windows to Mac made him switch RSS readers as well.

"On Windows, I preferred FeedDemon," Owens wrote. "I liked the way it allowed me to organize my feeds and the way it let me scan feeds for each individual blogs (good reading pane). I recently bought a MacBook and decided the Mac side would be for RSS, multimedia, web stuff, blogging and such (while the Windows side is for writing code/development). I'm using Vienna. It's free. I can't scan the complete feed of a blog, just headlines, but I'm adjusting."

Don Loeb, VP of business development at FeedBurner, prefers to use web-based readers. Here's his rundown:

- my yahoo (but it's slow with a lot of feeds. i'm sure they will fix that)

- yahoo mail (since i use yahoo mail, this is going to be great when they add folders)

- google reader on the google personalized home page (the module)

- google reader on my mobile device (this rocks as it's fast and personalized)

- netvibes

- i also get a few rss feeds delivered by email (using feedburner's rss to email solution (my employer))...

Thanks to everyone who responded to this week's question, one of the most popular ones at MediaShift. It's great for the power users and RSS experts to weigh in with their favorites to help guide folks new to the technology.

I hope you've enjoyed our little RSS Week here. Feel free to share any other thoughts you may have about RSS technology, news readers, features you'd like to see, etc. in the comments below.

What Is RSS?

You've probably seen the letters "RSS" or the orange icon at the left on your favorite blogs or news sites and wondered what it was for. RSS is a format and a process for syndicating web content. RSS variously stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS technology lets bloggers, podcasters or other web publishers syndicate their content as a web feed.

If a content site offers RSS that means that you can use a news reader or aggregator to view the web feeds of many sites without having to visit them. Most RSS readers allow you to see headlines, blurbs, photos or even full articles or blog posts.

FeedBurner, which helps publishers manage and sell advertising into web feeds, has this explanation on its Feed 101 page about why RSS is a good thing:

Technology...has made it really easy to not only publish regular updates to web-based content, but also keep track of a large number of your favorite websites or blogs, without having to remember to check each site manually or clutter your email in-box. You can now streamline your online experience by subscribing to specific content feeds and aggregating this information in one place to be read when you're ready.

Putting it simply, using an RSS news reader will save you the time and hassle of surfing all over the web -- letting you see the freshest content on your favorite sites and blogs in one convenient place.

And you can subscribe to RSS feeds from more than just news sites such as Wired News or blogs such as Powerline. For instance, RSSAuction lets you create RSS feeds for eBay auction searches or for Buy.com product searches. And RSS technology powers podcasts, so you can subscribe to podcasts and have them uploaded to your portable MP3 player. (You can learn more about podcasting technology here)

How Do I Get Started?

The first thing you'll need is an RSS news reader, also known as a news aggregator. You can use Mac software such as NetNewsWire (with a free Lite version) or Windows software such as FeedDemon. You can also use web-based readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader or My Yahoo (which is actually more of a personalized home page with RSS feeds built in). There are also feed readers that run in your email program, and others that run within your browser software, such as Sage within the Firefox browser. Most popular web browsers have RSS readers built in.

(For more on choosing a reader, see the section below, "Finding the Right RSS Reader.")

Next you'll want to subscribe to RSS feeds. How you do this depends on the reader that you choose. Some readers allow you to input the web address for the sites you want to subscribe to, and will find the RSS feeds for you. Others require you to input the actual RSS feed address. For example, the RSS feed address for MediaShift is:
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/rss2/index.xml

Some news readers such as FeedDemon suggest a variety of feeds to start out with. You could also find web feeds by using RSS feed search engines such as Feedster or Bloglines. But probably the most tried-and-true way of adding RSS feeds is to browse the web to the sites you know and love and find their RSS feeds to add to your news reader of choice. To find out if a site has an RSS feed, you can look for the orange feed icon or a small XML button.

Now you're ready to roll. Just open your news reader software or log on to the web-based reader site, and you'll likely see a list of your feed sources. By clicking on them, you'll see the headlines from each one, and by clicking on these you'll get summaries of the articles or full text, sometimes with advertisements.

Because MediaShift offers RSS 2.0 feeds, you can read the entire posts that I write within most RSS news readers. PBS server logs have shown what appear to be RSS pings of my site between 5,000 and 8,000 times per day. My conclusion is that I have a good number of people reading MediaShift without ever visiting the site.

Common RSS Jargon

Atom: A competing technical format for web feeds, but many news readers will read both RSS and Atom feeds.

news reader or news aggregator: The software or website that collects the latest news or blog posts from sites you subcribe to. There are hundreds of readers, from web-based ones to readers that run on personal digital assistants (PDAs).

OPML: Stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It's a format that lets you list all your RSS feeds simply, so you can import or export them from one news reader to another.

RSS: Format for syndicating web content. Stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, among other things.

webfeed: To de-geek the RSS moniker, blogger Amy Gahran had a contest to come up with an alternate name for RSS. The winner was webfeed, a term which was also picked up by the Guardian newspaper.

XML: Stands for eXtensible Markup Language, the computer language on which RSS is based.

Finding the Right RSS Reader

Choosing an RSS reader is a matter of your needs and tastes. For practical purposes, you might want a web-based reader so you can pull up RSS feeds on various computers or handheld devices. If you mainly use one computer, then you might consider software that's compatible with your operating system.

For those starting out with RSS feeds for the first time, a personalized site such as My Yahoo can't be beat as a simple way to get the hang of it. Yahoo explains clearly how to add RSS feeds to My Yahoo.

The great thing about RSS news readers is that almost all of them are free or offer free 30-day trials. That way you can test out a few different readers and see which ones work for you. Plus, many readers support OPML, a format that lets you transfer your RSS subscriptions to another reader if you decide to swich at a later date.

You also have some great advice on news readers from fellow MediaShift readers, who have responded to this week's Your Take question, describing the RSS reader they use and why they use it.

Here are a few directories and comparisons of RSS news readers:

About's Top 10 Windows RSS Feed Readers

AddtoAny's List of Online News Readers

Google Directory of RSS readers

Hebig's News Aggregator Directory

The State of Online Feed Readers by TechCrunch

RSS Compendium's RSS Reader Directory

Upsides and Downsides of RSS

Because RSS readers have only been in widespread use for the past few years, it's hard to gauge how they have changed our reading habits. The basic assumption is that RSS readers help people scan and process more information quickly, thereby saving time and energy. Perhaps that's true, but it's also possible that people are spending more time managing their RSS feeds and playing with the RSS feed reader software. Over time, you might end up subscribing to more feeds than you ever have time to read, meaning you have to also spend time pruning your list of subscriptions.

RSS does provide one way to deal with information overload online, and to quickly see the news at various sites quickly. It cuts down on tangential web surfing somewhat, and unfocused time spent going from site to site. The software is usually free or costs very little, and it's getting easier and easier to use -- and with more personalized features.

The variety of RSS news readers is a blessing and a curse. Sure, you have an amazing variety of programs and websites to choose from, but that also means you have an overwhelming amount of options. So you might be cutting down on your web surfing but you'll be boosting the time you spend testing out new software.

Resources

If you want to learn more about RSS, the following articles and online resources should help.

A Guide to Using RSS, Which Helps You Scan Vast Array of Web Sites [Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal]

All About RSS [Radio UserLand]

News That Comes to You [OJR]

RSS Feed Help [BBC]

RSS History [Joseph Reagle]

RSS Search Engines [Search Engine Watch]

RSS Quickstart Guide [Lockergnome]

What is RSS, and Why Should You Care? [Search Engine Watch]

What is RSS? [XML.com]

*****

What am I missing? What did I get wrong? Share your additions to this Guide in the comments, and I'll correct and update this entry over time.

That's where the promise of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) comes in, a geeky technology that lets you subscribe to your favorite news sites, blogs, and podcasts. You then use a news reader -- either software or web-based -- to look at all your sites at a glance. Rather than having to go visit 85 different sites, you can use your feed reader to go through all the recent headlines from those sites, and you can even read the content from within the reader.

There's a lot to like about RSS technology and the idea that it will save you time in web browsing. But there's also a lot to learn about it, and a lot that could be improved. So, starting with the Your Take question asking you to tout the reader of your choice, I'm going to make U.S. Independence Day week into RSS Week here at MediaShift. We have a Top 5 dedicated to RSS, and tomorrow I'll have a special Guide to RSS.

Today is the day to dream a little dream, hope a little hope, and imagine a future time when RSS technology turns a little less geeky and becomes more practical for the common news junkie. I have tried various news readers and personalized news sites but very few have become constant companions. I don't want the feed reader to add more time to my reading day -- I want to subtract the searching, the yearning, the culling, the off-topic tangents that take me away from what I want.

10 Steps to Making Really Satisfying Syndication

1. Better suggested feeds. Some feed readers helpfully suggest other feeds that might interest me. That's nice, but very few have comprehensive lists of what I might want.

2. Recommend stories or posts depending on my preferences. Give more personalization features that let me filter the barrage of reading material in a meaningful way based on what types of information I want and my mood. For instance, today I might want an emphasis on sports and business and tomorrow I might want updates on the War on Terror and political policy.

3. Automatically rank all posts or stories depending on how other people rate them, or by how many other people read them. Some sites such as Digg or Daily RSS offer community-rated news, but not within a news reader's interface.

4. Show me related posts. As I'm reading, if I find a story that I particularly like, I'd like to see blogs that refer to that story or other stories that are similar to that one.

5. When pulling up one particular source, such as New York Times Technology or BuzzMachine, let me order the posts by Most Relevant to my preferences, or Most Popular by other readers, or Most Commented On (if they are blog posts with comments). That gives me a better idea of what I should read.

6. Learn my preferences dynamically. Based on what I read and click on over time, the RSS reader could start to order my sources and the articles by my past behavior. This is a similar functionality to the personalized news site, Findory.

7. Tangent warnings. If I start to read articles or blog posts that are not in my preferred subject areas, the RSS reader should warn me in a polite but firm way that I am going off on a tangent and need to focus.

8. Make adding feeds a snap. If I am visiting a site or blog, I don't want to have to hunt around to find its RSS feed link. I want some type of shortcut that will add the page's feed to my reader in as few steps as possible.

9. Highlight hot topics. A computer algorithm could search through all the stories I subscribe to (and perhaps related ones online) and find the hot topics that people are writing about and create a running list of these.

10. Block news I don't want. Maybe I'm tired of news from Iraq or the World Cup, or I've taped the Oscars on my DVR and don't want to know who won them yet. Create a "block news" feature that lets me block news stories or blog posts on these topics that I don't want to see.

Some of these features exist in part in current news readers, and some are on the drawing board. The personalized RSS news reader, Feeds 2.0, shows some promise and I've just started playing around with that in the beta test. And blogger Chrono Cracker has a nice list of 25 features he'd like to see in The Perfect RSS Web-Based Reader.

Now it's your turn. What features would make RSS feed readers better, more potent, and help you save time? How would you describe the perfect RSS news reader? Share your thoughts below in comments.