Congratulations to MuggleNet, and their podcast, which was recently mentioned on the Entertainment Weekly website for the best sites on the net for the Harry Potter Movies….

“FOR INTERMEDIATE AND ADVANCED POTTERPHILES: MuggleNet
If you know as much about the wizarding world as a Hogwarts upperclassman, this is the site for you. Here, fans nitpick mistakes, write fan fiction, and hold literary discussions about the characters on a weekly podcast.”

Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com | Feature

I had the pleasure of meeting a representitive from Melodeo at the Portable Media Expo last weekend and was given a demo of the Melodeo podcast browser in action (on his cell phone). I have to admit, I was quite impressed. Through their mobile phone interface you could browse through their directory of podcasts in a variety of ways and when you found a podcast, you could choose to download it or if you like, stream it.

“Melodeo, Inc., the first company to deliver over the air podcast downloads on mobile phones, today released a new version of Mobilcast(TM). Mobilcast lets consumers download podcasts over the air and listen to them on their mobile phones. The new version of Mobilcast improves this experience by introducing on-demand streaming, and Share. ”

See Melodeo Press Release

I would like to welcome Andrew to the PodShow Family, nice to have you here!

“PodShow Inc. co-founder and MTV VJ Adam Curry has recruited Andrew Grumet for the PodShow podcast network and services business he’s building. Grumet is a software developer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-creator of iPodder, an open-source application that aggregates media content on Web.”

TechWeb: PodShow Catches iPodder Creator Grumet

Found this interesting when I saw it a few minutes ago…nice to know people are actually keeping an eye on the site :) Feedster claims that the Podcast Alley RSS feed for the forum has over 4000 subscribers through their system (which actually makes it number 62 at feedster right now). Nice.

Feedster :: Top 500 Blogs

While browsing the homepage of Wired today, I saw a few podcasting articles and they were both about women! Well, one was about Di from Nate and Di and the other was about Madge Weinsteinn from Yeast Radio, but you get the idea…

Women Warm the Podcast Bench
Thumbnail photo Nov. 16, 2005 The podcast industry skews heavily toward male performers and listeners, data shows. Pundits blame insularity, the geek factor and internet creeps. By Steve Friess.

A Podcast Star is Born
Richard Bluestein is the voice behind Yeast Radio, one of the most popular podcasts on the web. But for the crowd of thirty-something geeks gathered here last week for a pre-convention bash, the voice was a vision. A 6-foot-tall vision, to be exact, dressed to thrill in makeup, a blond beehive wig and ill-fitting flower-printed muumuu.

Growing signs that podcasting, and podcasts themselves, are becoming increasingly more popular. Hosting sites, such as PureCast Media, are being shut down becauase of the growing cost of file distribution. The worst part is, Im not sure if any of their clients saw this one coming. Here it is, straight from the horses mouth.

“Our Apologies… PureCastMedia.com has been shut down due to incredible bandwidth overages that skyrocketed into thousands of dollars. All subscriptions have been cancelled and will not again re-occur. All of our business databases and email contact capabilities were also disconnected from us (because it was all on that server) when this happened, so we have no way of telling anyone about this except with this page. Again, our apologies… we never intended this to happen. “

PureCast Home Page

Congratulations to the MommyCast! I’m sure they will make the Dixie brand proud over the 12 month sponsorship period and Im exicted to see what they will do together. Read what Im talking about below:

“Dixie, Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s brand of disposable tableware, signed a letter of intent to be the premier sponsor of Mommycast, a PodShow Podcast Network podcast. The initial sponsorship will run for a 12-month period beginning March 2006. This marks the first podcast for, Dixie, an elite consumer products brand with a charter sponsorship for this popular program in the emerging podcasting medium.”

Read Full story about Dixie and MommyCast at Yahoo!

Jason Calacanis was 1 of 2 opening keynote speakers from the first day of the expo (the other being Leo Laporte). These keynotes, one following the other, were very different…almost on complete oposite ends of the spectrum, in my opinion. Here is a snippet from Calacanis and you can see links at bottom of this post for both Jason and Leo at the iPodObserver site.

“Jason also speculated on the number of ways that one could try to make money via advertising in the podcast world. How about being the Yahoo (directory) of podcasting? Nope, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, Oedo, Podshow, Podcast Alley are already in this space. How about being the Google (indexer) of podcasting? Nope, Technorati, Feedster, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are in this space. Unless you get really lucky, going against these folks means you will get crushed.”

Jason Calacanis Here || iPodObserver

Leo Laporte Here || iPodObserver

This is pretty cool to me. I had been debating between the PSP and the Video iPod and think this may have pushed me over the edge for the PSP (especially since it has games and the iPod doesnt).

“Sony has introduced software to enhance the reputation of its PlayStation Portable (PSP) gaming device as a multifunctional product. The new application lets users easily transfer a variety of content from a computer to the PSP.

With PSP Media Manager, users can move videos, music, and photos to the PSP by way of a USB connection. The software also gives users the ability to access a directory of RSS feeds, such as podcasts, video blogs, and PSP-formatted magazines.”

Come one, come all…let the PME photo taking and tagging begin! I will be keeping my eye out for all the photos that pop up from the Expo, so make sure you tag them with podcast expo so we can find them!

Flickr: Photos tagged with podcastexpo