The Boss has released a new video and a free download to celebrate Halloween.

“If you grew up in central or south Jersey, you grew up with the “‘Jersey Devil’,” says Springsteen. “Here’s a little musical Halloween treat. Have fun!”

Yamaha is now shipping the Pocketrak CX, a portable audio recorder with an upgraded stereo microphone system designed for recording live music.

Like its predecessor, the Pocketrak 2G Pocket Recorder, the Pocketrak CX supports a variety of different recording formats from 16-bit 44.1 CD quality .wav files to MP3. It comes with an onboard speaker, stand adapter, and Cubase AI DAW software.

While the Pocketrak 2G is good for recording discussions and lectures, the Pocketrak CX is designed with music recording in mind.

Other features:

• The CX has a larger battery, good for up to 40 hours of continuous recording and play-back
• a high sensitivity 90° X-Y microphone for high-quality stereo recording
• support for microSD cards (2GB card included).

The Pocketrak CX is now available for $499 MSRP at authorized Yamaha dealers.

New media isn’t just for the cutting edge hipsters anymore; the suits are officially moving in.

Marketers are jumping into new media and moving their advertising budgets from traditional media to social networking sites, blogs, podcasts and mobile marketing. 

According to a new survey by Epsilon,  nearly two-thirds (63%) of the marketing executives they surveyed see an increase in their spending on interactive/digital marketing, while 59% report a decrease in traditional marketing spend. 

Where Corporate Marketers Are Focusing Their Attention

• Social computing (including word of mouth, social networking sites, viral advertising, etc.) was the most popular emerging channel with 42% of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix.
• Blogs were the second most popular emerging channel: 35% of marketing executives want to pursue blogs and 19% already use blogs
• Almost one-third of CMOs mentioned podcasting as an area of interest: 31% are interested in adding podcasting to their marketing mix and 18% already have.
• Mobile devices also elicited interest: 29% are interested in Mobile Devices (Phones/PDAs) and 22% have added them to their marketing mix.

Read more »

From Rob Walch, creator and host of Podcast 411, and VP of Podcaster Development at Wizzard Media:

“Usher has made a music Video. He is allowing podcasters to include it as an item in their feed.  This is a get out the vote message, and the version below has an intro from Senator Obama.   You can also put the video player on your site. Usher has been very active in the get out the vote message.”

The link to the video is here, the enclosure tag (for your RSS feed) is here, and the video embed code for the single player version is here.

No word yet as to whether McCain supporter and reggaeton superstar Daddy Yankee is making a podcast-friendly video to help get out the vote.

comScore today released a study of blog traffic in the U.K. that found that 41 percent of the total U.K. Internet audience visited a blog in August.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” said Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director, comScore Europe. “They’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie.”

Other highlights:

• Blog Platforms - In August, the most popular blog platform in the U.K. was Google-owned Blogger.com, which attracted more than 9 million visitors, followed by WordPress (4.8 million visitors) and Six Apart sites (2.7 million visitors).
• Top Individual Blogs - Two of the most popular blogs in the U.K. are gadget blogs Engadget.com, which ranked as the top individual blog in August with 243,000 visitors, and Gizmodo.com, which ranked third with 223,000 visitors. Reality TV blog UnrealityTV.co.uk (225,000 visitors), gamer blog Kotaku.com (210,000 visitors), and community blog Metafilter.com (207,000 visitors) rounded out the top five.
• U.K. Bloggers are Younger and Tech Savvy, with a Sense of Humor - Heavy blog users were found to be 142 percent more likely than the average Internet user to visit a site in the humor category, a testament perhaps to the sharp wit often associated with blogging. They are also likely to be tech savvy, as evidenced by their skew in visitation to the Web hosting and technology news categories, and younger with a focus on education, as evidenced by their heavier than average visitation of the community – teens and education-information site categories.

RADUS today unveiled a new media hub platform that lets you simultaneously discover, search, share, and view rich media across leading computer, mobile, and social networking services, including Facebook and MySpace.

RADUS (ray-dee-us) was designed to address one of the major issues confronting online content delivery—the lack of a consistent user experience. RADUS lets you view videos, photos, blogs and other content within a consistent interface.

The consistent interface is very sexy - but it’s not as fast or as efficient to use as sites’ native interfaces. It does let you search across media types, though, which can be very efficient.

The site lets you customize the content that is shown on the home page, so you can have a media hub customized to your interests. You can also embed RADUS, as shown below:

Read more »

Netflix today said that it has reached a deal with TiVo to provide digital movie streaming to many of the 800,000 broadband-connected Tivo subscribers.

The companies are testing the new service in several thousand U.S. households and expect it to be broadly available in early December.

Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” Web streaming service, with a library of more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes, is offered free to its more than 8 million subscribers.

“The YouTube service on Tivo is extremely popular,” said Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager of content services at TiVO, who said over 65 percent of its broadband-connected subscribers were taking advantage of the broadband features.

“I think everyone’s trying to figure out the right business model, and they want to get their content on as many platforms as available,” she said.

The Blogger & Podcaster Media Network is a new media network startup that promises a “six-figure income for all.”

It’s not clear from the site if they are promising a six figure salary for everybody that signs up, or if everybody that signs up will just be asked to split it up equally.

Here are the membership benefits touted by BPMN:

• Revenue. The mission is to provide members with a six figure income from multiple revenue streams, including an affiliate program.
• Stock Ownership. All members who sign-on prior to December 31, 2008 will be gifted equity in the company. This way when the BPMN is successful, all members who helped get the network launched will benefit too, not just the guys at the top.
• Promotion. Through the SocialRank search engine and our network of Blogger & Podcaster Guides (distributed through mainstream media), BPMN members will have their content promoted to millions each month.
• Healthcare. BPMN is working on creating a healthcare program that will enable members to have access to quality healthcare if they desire to make blogging/podcasting a full time job.
• Discounts and Freebies. Members will include access to exclusive deals and promotions provided by BPMN partners. At launch this will include $2,000 in services from PR Newswire, a powerful promotional service.

The Network, formed from a merger of four companies: Fuel My Blog (a UK blog social network), Podcast Pickle (a podcast social network), SocialRank (blog search engine) and Blogger & Podcaster Magazine plans to launch in the first quarter of 2009.

Call us skeptical, but we’ll keep our eyes open for more BPMN news.

via TechCrunch

I recently discovered that the University of Oxford offers quite a few interesting podcast series. I was looking for some resources on Beowulf for one of our children, but was pleasantly surprised to find an incredible variety of topics presented in podcast format.

Some of the 99 podcast feeds offered:

refugees and forced migration around the world
philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics)
Practical ethics in modern life
World War 1 Poetry Digital Archive Project
seventeenth century writer John Milton
Monty Python trouper Michael Palin narrating podcasts about “Oxford Today” (The episode about student life is worth a watch, even if you’re not college-bound).
German politics
Fruit flies (drosophilae) and neuroscience
Schrodinger’s cat - quantum nanotechnology
Climate change

There is even a series about Oxford itself, and about preparing for and applying to university, PodOxford.

“Members” of the university community (I am guessing this means students and faculty or staff?) are invited to create their own podcast series and use the institution’s “OXITEMS” publishing service. The university says, “Podcasts give educators an opportunity to deliver course materials and lectures outside a conventional classroom environment.  Academics at Oxford have already embraced this new technology to great affect.”

Put this in the unsubstantiated rumor category - but AppleInsider is reporting that iPhone firmware 2.2 will add support for wireless downloads:

A tipster shared with us some screenshots of the new firmware, including what appears to be the ability to download podcasts directly to your iPhone (and presumably your iPod touch). This could tidily explain why Apple rejected the Podcaster app last month. The option to “get more episodes” doesn’t appear to work in this firmware build, however.

This is different than wireless syncing; it looks you’ll be able to browse and download specific episodes. 

It’s also not clear if this will be supported just on WiFi or if it will be available on AT&T’s wireless network. If it’s supported on AT&T’s wireless network, it could ratchet up the traffic significantly.