Portland Social Media

SplashCast My Podcast Network

Local internet startup SplashCast has announced a major new feature today called My Podcast Network. If you’re unfamiliar with SplashCast let me if you a quick overview: SplashCast is a website that allows you to create streaming media channels that you can embed almost everywhere. If you have a video of your son crawling around the living room and you want to show that to your friends on MySpace, just upload the video, add it to a channel (say, my son) and create a player in SplashCast. Then, just embed that in MySpace. Easy.

Now, with My Podcast Network you can collect and showcase your favorite podcasts right in the SplashCast player. The player will always be up to date and streaming fresh content from podcasts around the net. It’s a rather simple and easy way to aggregate the content you like and want others to see or hear. Include it on your blog or web page, remember these players can go almost anywhere.

Here’s an example: below is a small subset of podcasts I like to watch. To create this player, I simply logged into my SplashCast account, chose “Start Now” and immediately saw the new Podcasts & RSS option for creating a New Show. After clicking that, there’s an option to add the podcast via it’s RSS or, you can browse SplashCast’s Feed Directory - I found the directory was missing two of the podcasts I like to watch; Business Week Market Update and VH1’s Best Week Ever. Once you subscribe to the podcast just publish the show to a Channel; this is where a series of shows live. Then pick a player and copy the embed code to you website. Done! Here’s my Podcast Channel.

YouTube Goes with Pre/Post Roll Adverts

The Ads are coming, the Ads are coming!  YouTube fans should beware that ads are coming to your favorite video sharing website.  YouTube’s head of advertising dropped the A word at ad:tech in San Francisco Wednesday.  “We’re looking at executions like a very quick little intro preceding a video, then the video, then a commercial execution on the backside of the content,” Ms. Reider said.

Most of us are annoyed with TV-duration pre-roll commercials on the videos we watch, even a mere 15 seconds of pre-roll can be very frustrating for someone watching on YouTube.  With that said, I’m actually very impressed with the advertising included in Business Week’s video podcast - prior to a few days ago they had very short and informative Blackberry ads running just after the intro for the podcast.  Now, they’ve secured Windows Mobile as a new advertiser and all you see is the Windows Mobile logo on the screen for a few seconds.  In my opinion, these advertisements are intrusive and fit the podcasts audience.

The Most Successful Viral Tactics

We had a brief discussion Monday night at the Portland Social Media workgroup about viral marketing.  I just came across a survey published in eMarketer Daily, conducted by MarketingSherpa - 2,914 responses were collected.

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I Want My Money!

Will and Pearl’s video, The Landlord, has burned up the website Funny or Die, with over 16+ million views. Of course since the video is so popular this might not work because their servers are probably on fire.

Kitty Cat Dance

Hey, blame this video posting on Renny!