The BBC is running a background/forecast piece about podcasting replacing radio. It's a popular angle; I've made noises like that myself. But the comparison of podcasting to radio is too simplistic, and the forecast is probably too focused on content over distribution. Quality issues aside, podcasting cannot replace radio in its current distribution method; radio is just too easy to turn on and its installed base is too ubiquitous. Of course, the music-licensing issue is important, too—if podcasting is to supplant radio it will supplant talk radio.

I'm thinking that podcasting and radio are each too distinct for the former to destroy the latter. But it's not hard to suppose that podcasting has already fragmented the listening market, and will drive an even bigger wedge as time goes on. Radio will have to press its advantages and synergize (as many producers, stations, and personalities are already doing) with podcast technology. As disruptive technologies go, podcasting seems relatively benign, unlike MP3 and other compressed file formats which could feasibly eradicate CDs.

The RSS notification service Blogarithm, first covered here about a month ago, has added a search engine to help users find feeds. It seems to be a fairly simple tool, in which search operators and even moderately complex keyword strings bring the results down to zero. A search for riaa brought in one result, in which the string of characters was in the site title; in other words, Blogarithm did not recognize the acronym and apparently did not search entry bodies. Such a basic engine might be productively replaced by a hand-built blog directory. But no matter; I am continuing to enjoy and find useful the daily delivery of RSS updates via email that Blogarithm offers.

It seems like just 18 months ago that I started blogging here at Weblogs Inc. Actually, its was 18 months ago. And here is my promise threat to you on the occasion of my 3,000th entry: I will continue my self-indulgent harangues with extreme prejudice. I'm not sure what "extreme prejudice" means in this context, but I heard the expression on Law and Order and wanted to use it.

Speaking of self-indulgence, now is a good time to announce that my latest book, Blogging For Dummies, is finished and will be out on January 16. Good for newbies and containing something useful, I hope, for everyone.

Thanks for reading, and for making this blog the center of your universe. Don't disillusion me.

That's an exaggeration; the blogosphere will never become textless. Maybe. At least, not  for a while. A few months, anyway. All I know is that after opening my Audioblog account, through which I can post podcasts, audio files, mobile audio messages, and videos to any one of my multiple blogs, pounding away on the keyboard has seemed like hard work … and not quite as fun. Maybe it's just the novelty of effortlessly putting multimedia in a blog entry. But I can easily see the entry-level consumer blogosphere rotating out of text and into media-rich moblogging. If this indeed be a trend, a partnership of VideoEgg and TypePad is nudging it along. VideoEgg's ultra-simple video-file editing and uploading interface is now at the disposal (free of charge for now) of TypePad users—one of the world's largest clogging markets. Moblogging from videophone could hardly be easier. Look out. The evolution of home movies is here.

B2B e-mail provider Silverpop is advertising an RSS product called RSSDirect that adds a personalization element. RSSDirect feeds are individualized to the recipient, so that each delivered feed can be a little different. Measurement tools are built into the program to assess each feed's effectiveness and track how the user interacts with it. Silverpop is pushing RSS hard as a more secure and consumer-friendly marketing tool than e-mail.

Andy Volk posted a great interactive RSS feed maker embedded right in a Yahoo! Search blog entry, that creates a feed URL for any Yahoo! Video search query. Then he provides instructions for plugging that feed URL into iTunes and seeing the results display within iTunes. From there, individual videos can be easily transferred to the new iPod. These are not necessarily vlogs or video podcasts; in fact, most Yahoo! video results are neither. So, the questionable legality of all this copying makes my head spin, but never mind that now. (Yahoo! has always demonstrated guts in the operation of Yahoo! Video.) This RSS feed gambit is exceptionally cool … but why is Yahoo!'s podcast strategy so focused on iTunes? Why doesn't this instant-RSS feed work similarly in the Yahoo! Music Engine? (I poked around and couldn't see any way to make it happen.) Y!ME is just as good a program as iTunes, and the Music Unlimited service for which it serves as a front end is certainly better (in my book) than iTMS. Same deal with Yahoo! Podcasts, which is oddly skewed toward iTunes functionality.

So, guys and gals at Yahoo!— stop bending over. Making everything compatible with iTunes? Yes. Promoting iTunes excessively and dissing your own fine products? No.

Built on Mozilla, the newly released (pre-beta developer's edition) Flock browser threatens (promises?) to yank the browser back as the central window to the Internet experience. In the emerging era of Web-service sites displacing the browser's built-in tools (I'm thinking about newsreaders primarily, but also social search and tagging sites like del.icio.us, My Web 2.0, and Digg), Flock seeks to bundle everything you need into the browser toolbar. That it comes remotely close to succeeding at this early stage in its development is astounding. Put in a few needed tweaks, build out some essential extensions, and Firefox would be bumped off my desktop.

Unsurprisingly, RSS is deeply and integrally woven into Flock. So is tagging. So is social bookmarking. And so is blogging—this last might be the blockbuster feature, at least for very active bloggers using multiple platforms…

An audio recording of a recent Yahoo!-sponsored panel discussion about audio search and podcasting has been posted on IT Conversations. The panel features executives from Loomia, Odeo, and Audioblog. [via Yahoo! search blog]

FeedTree (download page) is a P2P java app that uses distributed bandwidth to push RSS feed content to users faster than traditional newsreaders that poll their feeds on a schedule. A poster describes graphically how it works … which is not to say I fully understand it. But I do understand that speed and timeliness are the payoffs here. Currently the installations process and user interface are rough going; the developers promise improvements. My eyes glazed over reading the command-line and port-massaging requirements to get this thing running, but if such technicalities are up your alley, this looks like an interesting new spin on both P2P and RSS. [via Pho]

The e-mail powered RSS service Blogarithm has released version 2.0. The free service issues daily e-mails to members notifying them of activity in their subscribed blogs. Thankfully, Blogarithm works on submitted Web addresses; you don't need to plug in the feed address. (Feed addresses work too.) Bloggers can put self-actuating buttons on their pages for users who wish to receive e-mail updates; Blogarithm sends actual entries where available in the feed. The Blogarithm user account page allows adding and deleting subscriptions, tailoring the e-mail on a daily basis. Much as I appreciate the respectful frequency of once-a-day notifications, I wish the user could determine frequency, from weekly updates to real-time notifications. That wish-list item notwithstanding, Blogarithm works smoothly and is a pleasure to use.

I'm a little late in commenting on this, but last week Bloglines implemented hotkeys that facilitate working through a folder of feed entries. You can also use the keyboard to skip to the next feed in your queue, or skip to the next folder. Beware of that last command—"f," which skips to the next folder. Hit it by mistake and Bloglines hangs for a while (in the case of a big folder with many feeds and unread entries), then splats a tremendous amount of material onto your screen. The worst part is that every feed in that folder is instantly marked as read, and reset to the present moment. Very much a nuisance if done accidentally. I'd prefer Control+f in that case, and wouldn't mind using the Control key in all the commands.

AOL has reportedly reached an agreement to license measurement content from Intelliseek's BlogPulse search engine. BlogPulse tracks and parses blog-related data, outputting trends and charts about blog linkge and readership. "AOL Community Vice President Bill Schreiner said the company's aim was to keep visitors to the AOL network connected and informed about what bloggers are talking about." AOL recently purchased Weblogs Inc.

Chris Pirillo has posted a despairing rant about Google-owned Blogspot, the hosting arm of Blogger.com, in which he he uses a screencast to demonstrate how splog-infected his PubSub search results have become—all infections deriving from Blogspot. Apparently a few (or just one?) spammer has let a splog-creating script loose in Blogger, generating thousands of blogs, hundreds of thousands of posts. This doesn't appear to be splog with a purpose—just simple pollution for its own sake. This problem has been festering for some time, and Google has soaked up a lot of criticism for failing to take decisive action. Recently, Blogger placed a splog-reporting flag on the default search bar atop Blogspot sites.

Pirillo suggests simply pulling the plug on Blogspot, but that dire action, of course, would be painful for the many people who happily use Blogger, and who remain relatively unaffected by rampant spam. If a Blogger user does not run blog searches or PubSub subscriptions, and does not market his or her blog in any way, then splog is like air pollution to someone living on a remote Pacific island: the problem is remote and the global consequences hypothetical. Google/Blogger probably needs to make it harder to get a post accepted in the system, which certainly they don't want to do.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted a review of the soon-to-be-beta blog search engine Sphere. Arrington doesn't disclose many details, but provides a screen shot, and is generally wowed by the thing's relevance and design. From the screenshot, it appears that Sphere has some kind of smarts for distinguishing the topicality of a blog entry from the topicality of a blog. So it seems from the Related Blogs box on the search results page. The engine also evidently returns MSM news articles—again, in a set-off box—sort of the reverse of Yahoo!'s approach of bundling a few blogs into its news results. Sphere is accepting sign-ups for beta. [Thanks to Todd Carter]

Business Week has posted a little profile of eDonky CEO Sam Yagan, who recently testified to a Congressional committe that he was shutting down his business model in the wake of the Grokster case. The article describes the moment of truth when the Grokster ruling came out and Yagan reeled with astonishment. Past the shock, he is now attempting to reinvent eDonkey as an RIAA-compliant licensed distributor, and one model mentioned in the BW piece involves watching ads to earn download credits. Boy, I don't know. I wish him and eDonkey the best, but one of the appeals of file-sharing is the lack of speed bumps.