Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The Irish Internet Association Conference Reaches a Global Audience

[rss] [iTunes] [web]

[Dublin, 30th May 2006] The IIA Congress, which took place in Dublin on the 25th May, is now available to global audiences through the medium of Podcasting. The conference podcasts, which were produced by doop.ie - a leading Irish podcast service company, where sponsored by Microsoft.


Podcasting is a method of publishing audio files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription. Users can listen to podcasts from their PCs or using Ipods, Mp3 players and mobile phones with built in Mp3 functionality. In 2006 the Irish business community have begun to engage in the medium of podcasting as a communication tool. Events and conferences are the perfect vehicle for podcasting as it delivers highly compelling content to an audience who are not in a position to attend the event due to time or distance constraints.



Brian Greene podcaster with doop.ie said "While podcasting events allows many who could not attend hear or see the event at a future time of their choosing it also allows attendees and speakers replay the event for themselves or for colleagues. It also acts as a perfect archive of the event. Podcasting extends the sponsorship opportunities and allows for interviews and vox pops, further engaging speakers, experts in attendance and conferences sponsors."


Commenting, Fergal O'Bryne, IIA CEO said "The IIA recently undertook to podcast as many events as possible. They engaged the services of doop.ie to provide a full suite of services to enable the recording, editing, production and distribution of these podcasts. As a showcase event the recent Annual Congress was the first full day event to be podcast by the IIA. Held in the Killiney Castle Hotel the event featured speakers from Google, MSN, Yahoo, eBay, Kennys.ie and Bebo. The congress was sold out. doop.ie provided full podcasts of all the events and also a vox pop from a selection of delegates. The IIA intends podcasting as many events as possible and will continue to develop this area. The podcast for the IIA Congress was kindly sponsored by Microsoft."


The conference podcasts can be accessed at the IIA website,
http://www.iia.ie/articles.asp?id=851, or though iTunes.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Podcasting - Just the Ticket

[www] snippets from a recent Irish Times piece on Podcasting.

8<
Many would-be music podcasters are in a bind because of licensing problems which prevent the use of copyrighted material. There are moves afoot by various industry bodies to bring in a special podcast licence. In the meantime, most podcasters can get around this by using either copyright-free material or featuring a very large amount of unsigned bands.
......
There are also a few Irish music podcasts worth checking out. We like the Phantom FM podcast, and the recently launched New Music Ireland podcast is doing very well with its focus on rising Irish acts, although we could do without less of the overbearing presenter.
8<

Give up yer auld ipod (and get a video ipod instead)

[rss] [iTunes]
From "Academy Award Nominated" (have to put that in) Brown Bag Films comes an RTE for download 6 episode film called Crap Rap, packaged now as a podcast that is also keen on the mobile market as it ships off the RTE WWW (wonderful wanderly wagon) web server as a 3gp file also.

Crap Rap: summary, It’s hard enough making it in the tough gangsta world of Rap without having to worry about the stresses of school, spots, annoying little sisters and just being a teenager!

Fancying the new girl in school who’s way out of your league, using your little sisters Karaoke machine without asking or being caught with your mothers lady shave are just some of the trials Burno must face through his hormone ravaged days.

Follow the trials and tribulations of a group of teenagers from the country town of Staneen as they dream of world fame, finding love and fitting in.

Did Eminem have this much hassle growing up? Word!

This is the latest series by Academy Award Nominated Brown Bag Films.
Directed and created by Nickey Phelan.

Produced by Brown Bag Films for RTÉ.
http://www.rte.ie/craprap/

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Total Munster - Podcast for Munster Rugby Fans

[RSS] [MP3] [iTunes] Bringing you the latest news and views from the province with the most passionate team and fans in the world.

Get up close and personal with the boys in red and our need to know guide for that big match with thanks to Toyota.

Presented by Today FM's Paul Collins and Mick Galwey.

Episode one features interviews with Frankie Sheahan, Anthony Foley and Marcus Horan along with John Rochford, Chairperson of the Munster Rugby Supporters Club.

Also available for download in itunes - search for Total Munster (or click link provided by PNI - BTW where is the RSS? read on)

If you ever need to learn the RSS link behind an iTunes URL here is how

iTunes URL
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=152825745&s=143444

GET ID from iTunes URL 152825745

append it to
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=
to get https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=152825745

visit https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=152825745
in a browser to expose the real RSS URI
(so what did we just do; we ping'ed apple to say hello and it replied with the goods)

http://www.ballywiremedia.com/audio/TotalMunster.xml

Saturday, May 13, 2006

5MPs 1 MP3 no RSS

Sinn Fein have started to podcast. see here. But perhaps the RSS feed was decommissioned, I can't find it anywhere. Any how fair play to them getting into this new medium.

Where is political Ireland and rss podcasts. here are a few feeds we found.

Near FM politics [RSS]
5-7 live political column [RSS]
Senator Joe O'Toole podcast [RSS] [itunes]
Leviathan - Political Cabaret at CrawDaddy [RSS] [iTunes]
indymedia podcast [RSS]
Cllr. Diarmuid Scully Podcast [iTunes]

Actually I just noticed that our very own Leviathan Podcast is #3 on iTunes!!!!!

if you know of other political podcasts shout them in to brian_AT_doop.ie

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Podcasting Trends

Google Labs has released Google Trends which allows web users to see how many people have searched for a particular term over the previous couple of years. Although the results are based on a subset of Google searches the results for podcasting from Irish searches is quite telling. And what does it tell us? It tells me that the Irish are a nation of listeners and not doers.

Do a comparative search for the phrases Podcasting and Podcast http://www.google.com/trends?q=podcast%2C+podcasting and check the results by region. Ireland is the second highest ranked country for searches for these phrases even though our output of podcasts is about 0.1% globally. Globally there are about 80,000 podcasts and Ireland outputs about 100 of these so we are not exactly doers in this arena yet. But I say yet. There is obviously a bigger interest in this area here than anticipated if we are doing more searches on the topic than the US. I suppose that it goes back to the crux of the matter - we are a nation of listeners. In 2005 the JNLR showed that 85% of Irish Adults listened to the radio the previous day.

So we like to listen - which bodes well for the Irish podcasting industry. We might not be producing podcasts yet at a rate to match our European or US cousins but we are probably listening to a lot of podcasts. The audience is there - its time to start "talking" and delivering compelling Irish content to that audience.

Saturday, May 06, 2006

enjoy 8,000 new podcasts a week

podcast growth worldwide is growing at 8,000 a week. Since April 12 2006 25,000 new podcasts have been listed on PODNOVA.COM. this will be an annual rise of 100,000+ podcasts from its humble 3500 podcasts around the time when apple itunes 4.9 was released 10 months ago.

month year size of market
June 2005 3500
Nov 2005 18000
Mar 2006 37000
Apr 2006 55000
May 2006 80000

Feedburner alone has more podcast feeds than there are radio stations worldwide. The number of podcasts outstripped radio stations before March 17th 2006 (as reported here). Fueling this growth and the inevitable hype is not technology or a MP3 player boom but compelling radio content not heard in decades since the over formatting of radio began. - Brian Greene (podcast consultant at doop.ie)

see also april 12-19 measurements here