Podcamp Pittsburgh. we've been travelin' about to all these fun places like Ontario....Seattle.... ... then Ontario again.  This time its your turn folks, come join us in the city we call home.  Blitzburgh PA!

Roll Call

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about the next big things in media, and over 66% of the podcasts mentioned are libsyn users!

While we are thrilled that WSJ have noticed a few of our standout customers, they missed about 4,500 others.  We'll let them know about it and hopefully they'll extend their list next time!
  http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115412710465720901.html?mod=technorati

Sitting in a Starbucks in SanFran as I "cut" this puppy, I am realizing how much fun I had at the Corporate Podcasting Summit.  Must admit, I didn't know what to expect - actually shaved every day for this event.  Anita over there ran everything tight as a drum, and the speakers, panelists and attendees were a very inspired crew.  We had fun and the excitement for the medium was still very sincere.  Glad about that.

Characters in tow:

Elisabeth of Podcasting News (pictured) - Never Miss a day on that site!
Mark Blevis (pictured) - Canada Rocks!
Rob Walch of Podcast411 - Like a Rock
Chris Macdonald - Indiefeed pioneer shows libsyn how to stroll
Jon Cobb - His brains worth a Million, Smiles... priceless
Michael Geoghegan - The White Night of Podcasting
Paul Colligan - PLAy on!!
James Harris of ListenShare - Smart and Smooth
Yong Fu - Stealthin' - Awesome Guy - no link

Not in the Vid but Check his stuff!
Craig Syverson - Podcasting's Buckeroo Bonzai

I'll probably touch up this list as I find everyone on the web.
Coming soon memories of Bloggercon IV

We have a new selection of libsyn bumpers for those of you who may be interested.  They are voiced by Lord Grunge a fellow podcaster, and rapper of the band Grand Buffet.

The soundstamp digital effect is provided by Phil Boyd of the band Modey Lemon.  You may come across him in emails.  Phil has a podcast and he can do headstands. 

The Grunge Bumpers are available in Wav and Aiff.

"libsyn" aiff wav
"Powered by libsyn" aiff wav
"Liberated Syndication" aiff wav
"Lib-SiiiiiiiiNuh" aiff wav

If you would like to create your own bumpers you can grab the soundstamp below.  Please let us know if you create a bumper that we could use. 

libsyn soundstamp aiff wav

So we've just christened our brand new office in the booming Larryville part of Pittsburgh.  Here are some clips from today's fungramming.  A few casualties of programming... hooopes down.

We're unleashing Dave Mansueto onto the Podcast Hotel this weekend, Feb 23 - Feb 25 out there in beautiful Seattle, Washington. Noone has any excuse not to go- certainly none of your west coast -erners. No telling what's going to happen this trip out west for the young pioneer, Mansueto. Please, everyone come buy a drink for our tireless traveler. The event sounds totally awesome, and we're bummed we all can't go. Live it up for us, Dave!

We'd like to take a moment and recognize another milestone and truly thank everyone for their participation in helping to build the premiere podcast delivery network. This is a network built by you guys and girls, the podcasters, from the ground up to be exactly what you need.

Alright kids, geek alert. Here's our latest stats libsyn is now 3,000 users (and growing rapidly) with over 55,000 episodes online serving almost 1 million media files every day. What does that look like on the nerd side?- about a terabyte of data served every hour!
.... ya our reaction too when we calculated that number.

Ok, nerd break over, back to work. Thanks everyone, seriously, we still are amazed when people find out about us and come join our network. We love you.

Two years ago I asked this question: Why can't we have global, ubiquitous non biased coverage of the olympics available to anyone and everyone, for free, via a p2p delivery network? The olypics are an international competition of goodwill, yet here in America exclusive rights and coverage is bid on and owned by one of the major media networks. Then, the events of most interest to the least common denominator of US viewers are recorded, edited and replayed in prime time.

I would like to seriously put forth the challenge, to all independent media outlets, that we band together and plan for the 2008 summer games complete, on-demand, streamable, coverage- free for anyone in the world to watch.

Here are some things we need to figure out how to pull off:

coverage

This may be one of the hardest pieces. We need unadulterated footage of every trial of every event. This could mean a sizable investment to cover actually having a film crew on site, and also having a mechanism to allow uploads of event coverage for citizens of this participating community worldwide. We then need to develop a way to allow multiple commentary tracks to be recorded/uploaded/synched to allow for multi-national point of view commentary. Graphics overlays should also be able to be created,uploaded, and drawn in dynamically by the international consortium of olympic coverers. All the typical resources a commentary team has on hand, like historical statistics, relevant back story, insider information, etc needs to be linked in via a comprehensive wikipedia like knowledge base.

delivery

To power the delivery of this massive archive of video footage, a more robust and flexible peer-to-peer technology needs to be developed so that a billion people worldwide can tune in via web, tv, and mobil video appliance. The UI should be a timeline map, of every event, including every trial run, as well as medal round. The viewer should be able to pick and begin viewing on-demand. The user should able to pick from angles, pov, language, and also vote on quality and completeness of any given event coverage. After several years of different experiments in the wisdom of crowds filtering, we as an online community should be able to develop something to handle this task.

archival

Once complete, this people's history of the olympic games should be kept online and available for all posterity.

Sponsors currently pay how many millions and millions of dollars- for what? At least sponsors of the people's coverage of the olympics will be contributing to something great. We would form an international organization and every dollar raised would go to the production, development, delivery, and archiving of the event and future olympics.

If nothing else, over this past year we have learned the cost of technology is not a limiting factor. The shear processing, storage, and delivery power to make this a reality is here today and not difficult or expensive to obtain. I don't think this is a pipe dream at all, and with the help of some smart people and some money we can make this a reality.

Do I have any takers?

We heard about this a while back and thought it would be rad to go, then the holidays came and we kinda forgot, but then was reminded by our friend Chris at Indie Feed, so we said hell ya, let's make a road trip to NC! So tomorrow night, we're going to pack the car and head out. Everyone on the east coast should be there, no excuses! http://www.podcastercon.org/ Let's hope the old car will make it.