The last few days I have been listening to environmental related podcasts and been culling and curating a playlist of the best – This would also help when I launch my own Green program discussing topics with experts in the field – then I thought…..what other firm, brand, program, enitity, university, scientist, or invidual might want to utilize Green.Podcast.com within our Social Media Communications Network?

Things have been moving fast and furious at Podcast.com – The scope, breadth, and focus of the project has evolved from a simple consumer web service to RSS/OPML based feed managment platform and developable data ecosystem….in fact we better rename the company.

Notice the cool set of colors over on the right hand side of this blog – it’s a ‘quilt’ of images. They are the images representing a Podcast rss feed which exists within a Listener Account at podcast.com. It’s random. Click the image and it will take you to the Podcast.com page for that podcast feed.

Kosso whipped up this very customizable widget. The docs and scripts are being written so anyone can do it. Really soon anyone can come to Podcast.com and sign up and create their own podcast directory of subscriptions. We have lots of things cooking here! Very cool ways to use that data to feed all sorts of widgets – embed in your blogs – Myspace page – ebay pages – etc, etc.
Things are really starting to hum……..can you hear it

There seems to be some hubbub around the concept of a ‘community podcast directory’ and in fact it is one of the core reasons we have built (and continue to build) Podcast.com in the way we have – forming a solid content data foundation, with easy tools – then slapping that data into a great UI, for the web, mobiles and desktop. And btw with a simple neutral URL to find the good stuff…;)
‘Community Directories’ are exactly what you will have available at Podcast.com, in open OPML and RSS for you to consume and manipulate, using easy tools we are building here for you.
Soon, you will be able to log in to Podcast.com, create an account – get a super hot URL for your podcast directory and fill her up! In fact the other day in a matter of minutes we pulled together Canada.Podcast.com in an OPML file for easy consumption and findability of all Canadian podcasts.

The call came from http://www.rogic.com/canadapodcasts/ who was maintaining the node for the old community directory that has been abandoned – we fixed up the OPML to comply with the spec via our toolset and voila Canadian podcasts are cranking again. We left the custom tags in there. You can find it here :

http://podcast.com/opml/canada_fixed.opml
We have also been testing out various nodes – BBC.Podcast.com – Worldcup.Podcast.com – CNN.Podcast.com – NPR.Podcast.com
The power of OPML inclusion will make it very easy to connect many different users’ podcast directories together to form an infinite growth of trees of directories, mashed up any way you like.

So the ‘root’ of this directory is in place….come on in and curate!

I have to say I am enjoying building and fostering new media ecosystems – I’ve spent the last several weeks with a friend from New York casting a message that the old line finance types in his world will understand – the most difficult part for these folks will be letting go of traditional notions and that the economics of MSM has changed forever – and my children will know nothing else. Eric Norlin makes a great comment on The Buzz Machine about this point and elucidates the mission of the platform we are building – filtering and aggregation – and the Value lies at the aggregation point!

We are trying out a few cool event Sub-Domains to Amplify. Here is the latest.

Worldcup.Podcast.com – enjoy!

Podcast.com is proud to curate this collection of podcasts about the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Enjoy all the thrilling moments from multiple perspectives on the world’s biggest sporting event.

Click on any of the podcast feeds and join podcasters from around the globe as they provide audio and video reports both on and behind the scenes.

I think we are on to something very innovative at Podcast.com – Sub-Domains.

One, we recently added, which ‘taps’ into our directory at a specified ‘node/branch’ is by popular demand ( which is how we like to do things – responding to the needs of Podcasters and Listeners ).

It has all the podcasts aggregated by NPR (National Public Radio) – browse and listen to them @ http://npr.podcast.com

A simple to remember URL.

One of the cool opportunities of building out Podcast.com is that we could effectively provide a subdomain (the bit before the domain name) for *any* BRAND. This provides a VERY easy to remember URL for people to promote and our *brand* (ie: podcast.com) does not dilute or interfere with the brand and values of the potential brand name used for the subdomain. It amplifies the media you make.

We think that’s very cool. Please do drop us a line using the feedback form at Podcast.com if you are interested in the possibilities here.

Vloggercon is this weekend in San Francisco and we have added a lot more Video Podcast (vlog) feeds to the video podcast directory at podcast.com

Check them out at http://video.podcast.com

There will be plenty more to come as we evolve in this alpha phase as well as a better way to view the videos in your browser.

Also in honor of Vloggercon here is a quick video podcast from the North Woods of Maine

Falcon Lodge Liberty Media.mov

( in the Eric Rice mode

Shhh we are quietly * LIVE * Great job team!

kudos to our friend Jake Shapiro for putting on a great event at The Berkman Center for Interenet and Society – Beyond Broadcast was an inspiring two day convergence of Public – Commerical – Old – New Media folks with passion for inventing the future. I’ll post more on this after I return from down south…..way south.

not a Pavarotti podcast mind you…..but a quick explanation of what we are trying to achieve @ Pcom

well…Flickr came through….sort of. Half the photos are there…the rest MIA.

I opened a flickr account and posted a few photos….with a generous supply of user created 2nd order metadata…..their system wasted no time in placing contexual ads against one photo description with ‘BVI’ in the text. The problem is that the photos are still not available to the public. It seems they are taking care of themselves via monetazation very quickly, but no such speedy service for the supplier of their CGM ( consumer generated media )….let’s monitor this and see how long ‘the value’ of the service takes to trickle to the public. Stay Tuned.