In this installment, Allen and Mike discuss commerce and community, two essential forces driving the evolution of podcasting. 

We address these issues through the lens of Podshow, the well-funded venture headed by Adam Curry and Ron Bloom. 

Mike is somewhat circumspect during this discussion as some parts of the Podshow story are still under wraps. 

In this edition of the MADCAST, Allen and Mike discuss tagging and consumer-to-consumer taste sharing and their importance to the next stage of growth in media industries.

Today's contestant is Vsocial; the company appears to be in my nexk of the woods. Great transcoding!

Interesting story. China is selecting MPEG-4 as its offocial IPTV coding standard. No doubt this will persaude software firms to provide better editing tools as well as a reasonable DRM standard.

Being an early adopter sort, I felt compelled to try CNN Pipeline this morning. CNN Pipeline is CNN’s new pay news service delivered via the Web. Being a thrifty sort, I am on the 99 cent “for the day” trial.

Some early thoughts:

1. If you want the desktop player, it’s a funky download requiring some sort of Microsoft runtime to be installed. I am not a big fan of such things, but I figured the collateral damage would be slight.
2. The picture is the size of an index card which is pretty decent. I don’t see a full screen mode anywhere.
3. There are many viewing options including a mini mode that is relatively unobtrusive. I cannot figure how to get the player to persistently stay on the screen no matter what else I am doing (checking email, using Word,, etc..)
4. There is a cool feedback feature that populates an email to allow you to share your thoughts. Gotta figure there will be an AIM client soon (AOL and CNN are both in the TWX family)
5. There are four pipes (channels) running at the same time on varying themes. Right now, there is an international story, something on the White House, weather forecasts and a general news feed. The anchor appears to be dedicated to the Pipeline as opposed to a rebroadcast of an existing feed.
6. There are no commercials
7. There are lots of on-demand feeds and segments on such topics as sports, entertainment, business, etc..

On a 0-10, it gets a solid 7.5 so far. There’s nothing better than watching a live feed of  heavy snow falling in Virginia when it’s sunny and 65 at your home.

Maybe I am prejudiced as a former newspaper reporter, columnist and digital media exec, but I say you can never count the print guys out. Yeah, yeah.. I know I am cheerleading, but take a look at the new TV-video effort from The Virginian-Pilot (a Landmark Communications company). It’s cool and light years ahead of others in their sector. Keep in mind, though, Landmark was way ahead of the pack back in the early ‘90s in the world of newspaper voice and then Internet services. From an innovation standpoint, this effort then is no big surprise.