The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world.  The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.  Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes!  It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).

The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English. 

Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters.  Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world.  The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch.  Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.

Found via David Weinberger.

Heather Green has a short post about Castrol Motor Oil's podcast on car racing and motor oil and the way they promoted it by buying ads in Feedburner's RSS feeds.  Someday this kind of thing is going to be old news - but these days it's still exciting.  I love it when non-tech organizations make use of new communication technologies.  So much for this stuff being meaningful only to coffee-house lurkers with wispy beards and sweaters, huh?  I know that's the type I relate to best, and Green must too since she spelled the popular oil company's name 3 different ways in a one paragraph story! :)

Rick Klau, VP of Business Development at the feed managing service Feedburner has posted a long analysis of their numbers around podcasting, and if you ask me it's more interesting than the most recent Technorati State of the Blogosphere.  It's very good to stack up against the Forrester study emphasizing that only 1% of US households on the internet regularly listen to podcasts. 

Highlights include:

• 168,000 bloggers, commercial publishers and podcasters use FeedBurner
• These users publish more than a quarter million feeds, recieving over 60 million feed requests per day
• The aggregate subscriber base is more than 11 million
• Podcast feeds (those that contain a media enclosure) represent just under 20% of all FeedBurner feeds and this percentage is consistent with the more than 1,000 new feeds created every day at feedburner.com.
• FeedBurner recently surpassed a major milestone of 44,000 podcast feeds under management which, according to the CIA World Factbook, exceeds the total number of radio stations worldwide. 
• Podcast circulation is consistently growing nearly 20% per month.

Listened to two great podcasts today while walking the dog (one even from Podshow, if you get my drift) and thought I'd let readers know how good they are.

Nicole Simon is one of the best interviewers online, in my opinion.  Her Bloxpert interviews are far too infrequent for me, only when she's headed to a tech conference.  But her interview with Doc Searls last month is very worth listening to.  Doc talks about everything from Attention vs. Intention and the changing patterns of innovation  to the relationship between 60's culture and today's web tech.  Very interesting, and I swear I'm not usually a huge Doc Searls fan.

Speaking of Doc Searls, he was absent from the most recent Gilmor Gang podcast.  So were my favorite contributors, Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch and Jon Udell of Infoworld.  Perhaps they aren't as essential as I'd grown to think, though, because the newest episode is particularly good.  The discussion of the Forrester report that 1% of connected households in the US report regularly listening to podcasts is the best part.  It starts at about 6:00 in and ends around the fifteen minute mark or so.  The whole thing is worth listening to, though, despite what the host may say.

Ireland's Robin Blanford has developed a tool called CommentCasting that lets podcast listeners leave voice mail comments about a podcast.  The podcast admin gets an email notification, decides if the comment is acceptable, and if it is then it is automatically added to the RSS feed along with the podcast episodes.  Looks pretty cool.  The service uses a Grazr box to display the comment as well.

Charlene Li over at Forrester Research has blogged about the firm's newest report on podcasting.  She says that only 1% of households listen to podcasts and a substantial percentage of those only listen to mainstream media content republished as podcasts for time-shifting purposes.   Lee and others say this is a real downer for podcasting, but I've got to say - if one our of every hundred households are listening to podcasts that seems like a pretty good start to me! 

I live in a town of 200,000 people , so  presuming there are an average of 3 people per household that's 63,000 households.  630 households in my town listen to podcasts? Probably 800 people?  It's hard to get 800 people to do anything.  I'm not sure what to think of those numbers.  Does that mean a Dawn and Drew party in our little town would draw 100 people?  That there are 20 other people here who listen to the Gilmor Gang?  I don't know.  Obviously I'm not a scientist, but I don't know that podcasting is ready to be declared dead yet.  It's obviously not a mass market media format yet either, but is how many of its practitioners are aiming for that? 

The above is a cell phone call I made to the new podcasting system Evoca.  Reviewed today by both TechCrunch and Mashable, I found this service via eHub.  There's browser based recording, phone-in recording, descriptions, tags, RSS feeds, groups, albums and oh so much more.  You can also charge a fee for listeners to be able to listen - but the first one here is on me, ok?

Update:  I've tried two more times to make recording through Firefox on a Mac.  Both times I got choppy recordings that were lost when I tried to save them.  I saw an error screen about browser difficulties and am now frustrated enough that I will be darned if I try the browser record again.

The service is free for pretty basic use but for $5 per month you can do lots more, including recording Skype phone calls!  Very nice for those of us on a Mac.

Problems:

It's been available for a month now, but I just discovered this interesting service over at PRWeb.  If you're in their $200 level service track, they'll do a 5 to 7 minute interview with you concerning the press releases you put out through their company and they'll promote the interview around the web.

I'll be interested to see how many of these we start seeing around the podosphere and whether it ends up worth it for the company's clients.  This is the kind of thing that underlines the much discussed need for metrics in podcast listeners.  Sounds like a good idea to me, though.  Found via Next Level Partner.

After a few days off I'm in the swing of things at SXSW, where the first thing I got to do was  interview Eric Rice (off-site) of Audioblog.com yesterday.  Audioblog started as a service that allowed people to record podcasts by calling a phone number; today the company offers many more related services - including video hosting and delivery.  Found out a number of interesting things.  First, the company is in the process of rebranding and will soon be referred to as Hipcast - to better reflect their offerings beyond audio and blogs.  Second, they are expanding operations into Japan with Castella.jp.  Eric Rice is a busy man in the podcasting scene and his company looks to be on the ascent.