The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting

A comprehensive guide for podcasters to setup their own podcast, submit it to iTunes and other directories and integrate it into their blog. Additional resources to audio editing, content, related conferences, books and tools that make things easier or save cost are also included.

This guide is for people who have a podcast or think about starting one and NOT for listeners to podcasts. There are good guides for podcast audience available, for example: The podcast listeners guide by Mathew Honan. You can also check out Apple iTunes, PodcastAlley.com, Digg Podcasts or any of the other podcast directories available on the internet.

Podcasting – once reserved for technical types or those with the financial backing to hire a podcasting specialist – has become mainstream and is no longer limited to geeks and early adopters. With this popularity and concurrent availability of tools, it has become easier to publish podcasts (although it is still not as easy as configuring a VCR).

Thanks to over 100 million iPods sold and the improvements to software and tools to make access and consumption of podcasts easier for regular people contribute to a steady growth of people who tune in to podcasts on a regular basis, which is soon reaching double digit percentages of the US population.

The increasing popularity of podcasting has fueled the number of available podcasts and the competition for audience share. Just having a podcast is no longer enough to attract listeners or engage subscribers.

Learn more about setting up your own podcast and promoting it on the internet and integrate it with your existing blog (if you don’t have one yet, create one, even if it is just for the podcast itself).

Check out the “The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting“

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Update on DefCon 15 Videos

Update on the DefCon 15 videos. After the initial 47 of 125 videos were all other remaining videos uploaded to Google Video as well, in addition to some other goodies for all the DefCon fans out there. Read the full details here.

Enjoy the 125 videos and spread the word!

DefCon 15 Session and Panel Videos Available On-Line

47 of all 121 sessions and panels from the world’s largest hacker conference, DefCon, in video format available online. This are the sessions from the 2007 conference, which was held on August 3-5, 2007 at the Rivera in Las Vegas, Nevada.

See the list of available videos here.

All session videos make up a set of 10 DVD-Roms full with MPEG-4 videos (.MOV) in Quick time format. The sessions were professionally recorded and are also sold commercially for a several hundred dollars. You can now watch them on-line and for free.

The videos show security exploits and vulnerabilities of networks, operating systems, web servers, database servers and Web 2.0 technology and also includes some panels with discussions about general internet security issues and sessions that are related to hacking and computer security.

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Spoofed Google Sites with Official Google IP. Got Google Hacked?

This was discovered by Heather Paulson and then published by SearchEngineJournal.com earlier today. 

There are sites that looks like Google and even have an official Google IP from their headquarter in Mountain View, California showing up in their domain registration records (Who-Is) and “Ping” results, but the domain is something like xxxdisc.net or ckopo.org.

Ckopo.org is even referenced twice by the Russian Wikipedia in the article about Firebug (Firefox plug in) and “Dozory.Forbidden Games”. The references made in the Russian Wikipedia point to sub domains of Ckopo.org, which look like the Russian Firefox homepage and Firebug plug in help pages.

• What does this mean?
• Got Google Hacked?
• What is going on there and what is the purpose of this?

Every answer found so far only raised additional questions and made the whole thing even more fuzzy and suspicious.

digg story

Don’t Get Your Web Pages Filtered out by Search Engines

Search Engine RoundTable is reporting from the Search Engine Expo Advanced. Transscript from the SMX session about the duplicate content issue (Duplicate Content Summit) with representatives from Google, Yahoo!, MS Live Search and Ask.com.

• Information about what webmasters should and should not do.
• How each of the four search engines deal with duplicate content.
• Questions and answers.
• Suggestions and ideas to improve on the issue.

The workshop was moderated by Danny Sullivan
Speakers: Vanessa Fox, Google; Amit Kumar, Yahoo; Peter Linsley, Ask.com; and Eytan Seidman, Microsoft Live

Pictures are also available. If you are a web master, you should read this.

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Search Engine Optimization Article at Wikipedia Doesn’t Deserve Attention

Trying to make Wikipedia better, by working the system from the inside, as a trusted member and editor at Wikipedia, is itself not only honorable, but wise. It’s not a battle many would wish to fight. It’s an article about SEO worth it? Wikipedians are adversaries many prefer to simply ignore.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz is one of them. He also states what he things about how Wikipedia should work and does actually work.

Here’s how it should work:

• Read something about SEO on Wikipedia
• Think to yourself – huh, I wonder if that’s accurate
• Investigate the author a bit – are they reliable, generally honest, trustworthy, experienced?
• Investigate the subject matter – spend some time in the popular, well-regarded SEO blogs, forums and read some industry resources
• Come back and re-read
• If you still disagree, consider bringing it up in the discussion and be sure to mention that you’re not an industry expert, cite your sources and be respectful
• If you think you’ve got a real point, go ahead and make your edits

Here’s how it actually works:

• Read something about SEO on Wikipedia
• Note that it doesn’t match with your prejudiced, pre-conceived notions of SEO as spam
• Make a bunch of edits and deletions
• When pressed by industry experts, dismiss their sources as lacking credibility
• When pressed further, find Wikipedia rules that work in your favor – since you can’t argue from experience, use your powers of derision and dismissal combined with bureaucratic wordplay to frustrate and demoralize your opposition
• Find other inexperienced people with similar biases towards SEO and recruit them to your cause

Mhhh… True or Not True?

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How to Fix Google: Ranking, Algorithm & Webmaster Policies

An in depth four part series on Google’s historical ranking and linking policies, and how the company can change such policies for the better.

The debate about paid links and possible penalties for sellers AND buyers by Google to safe their precious PageRank algorithm raises questions whether or not Google lost touch with webmasters and the real world realities at the same time.

And in the middle of it are the affiliate marketers who might become the first potential victims and casualties of this shift in Google’s policy.

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