There is a rumor on TechCrunch that Robert Scoble will be leaving the troubled PodTech to join Fast Company (where he currently writes a column) to form a TV channel. Scoble’s current PodTech show features interviews with entrepreneurs, CEOs and other people with new stuff to show off.

Scoble has not commented on his blog as yet. Like a bunch of other blogging and Web 2.0 (sorry, I hate it, too) heavyweights, Scoble is currently in Paris at the Le Web3 conference, so, what with the time zone difference and the conference and all, it’s unclear whether he’s being deliberately silent because the rumor is false, deliberately silent because it’s true and shouldn’t have leaked, or hasn’t had time to blog up a response.

This isn’t the first time rumors have swirled regarding Scoble and PodTech parting ways since his well-publicized move from Microsoft. In the past, he’s vehemently denied them, and stated that he would be sticking with the videocast startup until a planned career re-evaluation in the spring of next year.

Just noticed that the iTunes Store has posted a Best of 2007 podcast list. Actually, there are four lists: new audio, new video, classic audio, and classic video.

The winners are drawn heavily from “big media” outlets including NPR and various TV networks, but a few notable indies made it in, too. Oddly, the “new” and “classic” designations seem to be a bit backwards, but it’s great to see the list, and great to see some excellent shows on it.

Congratulations to past B&P featured podcasts including: Ask A Ninja, PotterCast, MuggleCast, TWIT, The MacCast, Grammar Girl, Mighty Mommy, and MommyCast. Big props to B&P columnist Rob Walch whose Podcast411 made the list. along with Coverville, PodRunner, The Mac Observer’s Mac Geek Gab, IndieFeed Alternative, and Tiki Bar TV, too.

To see the list, open the iTunes Podcast page and click Best of 2007 Podcasts.

As you can see if you reached this blog from the magazine home page, we’ve posted the digital and podcast editions of the December issue. You can read the issue by clicking on the cover, or hear individual articles in the podcast player. You can also subscribe to the podcast feed.

Here are some December highlights:

• On the cover, we have an interview with Kent and Douglas of Ask A Ninja, whose various promotional efforts for their super-popular video podcast have been all over the place, from blogs, to mainstream media, to my personal Twitter and Facebook streams. You can read how they got started, how they’re keeping their show independent, and how they’re promoting the Ninja to new audiences.
• Lots of coverage of the first BlogWorld Expo, with product announcements, analysis,s and cool photos. I didn’t take most of the cool ones. Those come to us from Brian Solis.
• An interview-in-a-book-excerpt, featuring Engadget’s Peter Rojas. The interview is included in the new book, Blog Heroes, from Wiley.
• Advice from WordPress superstar Lorelle VanFessen, who shows bloggers how to be better writers.

Of course, you’ll find columns from Rob Walsh, Paul Colligan, Shel Israel and Tee Morris, along with other groovy features.

Let us know what you think.

The Blog Council is a new alliance of corporate bloggers, designed to address issues that are specific to creating, operating, and using blogs in a corporate environment. The council, which was announced today, was founded by AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, and Wells Fargo.

Organizer Andy Sernovitz (founder and former head of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association) wrote in an email, “This is the first voice saying that companies have a right to participate in the blogosphere, and do it under their own terms. Companies will blog well and ethically…but they will do it differently than personal or small business blogs.”

Sernovitz emphasized the corporate focus of the Blog Council, pointing out that the group would not include vendors, indie bloggers, or small business bloggers. The focus is clearly on large companies with global brands and far-flung communications, and blog-management issues. He says large corporations blog differently than smaller organizations.

Topics of interest for Blog Council members include: managing blogs in multiple languages, dealing with large numbers of employee bloggers, understanding the impact of consumer-generated media on brands, engaging with bloggers who write about companies and brands, and crisis communication in a corporate blog environment.

Sernovitz’ company, GasPedal, will run the Blog Council on behalf of its members. The council isn’t a non-profit trade group, but a business council, similar to those run by the Gartner Group, Forrester Research, and The Conference Board, according the the council’s FAQ.

The Blog Council Web site says the group will hold an unconference in Orlando, FL, January 22, 2008, and that it will be open to corporate bloggers.

Seems that Technorati has relaunched, with a new front page, and a tightened focus on a blogger audience. As is predictable, the reviews focus on what the site has not done, and to what extent Technorati lags Google Blog Search.

Yesterday, TechCrunch provided a good overview of the new front page, which has separate sections for blog-generated stories and mainstream news pieces. Blog chatter on all topics (attention) is scored below each story. As I look at the Technorati front page this morning, it’s just weird to see a People Magazine story in the top spot. But that’s just me.

Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee, where video is what it’s all about, says that Technorati’s failure to take the viral nature of video into account in its listings of hot stories and sources limits the site’s ability to track cultural touchstones. Writes Gannes:

Technorati knows who’s talking about what online because that’s it’s job. How hard would it be to create a frequently updated index of the most popular and fastest-rising videos on the web? It would be a lot easier than figuring out what’s most popular in the “blogosphere,” which is no longer an identifiable insular community.

Interesting point. And one that might be applied to audio podcasts as well, if that medium can ever acquire the rank and search infrastructure that YouTube provides in the video world.

The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) has elected a slate of officers, committee chairs and advisory board members. The election, which had originally been planned for October, was completed late last month. Libsyn’s Chris MacDonald chairs the ADM board, while Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media, was named vice chair. Matthew Snodgrass of the Porter Novelli PR firm is the ADM’s new secretary, and Podcast.com’s Duncan Perry was elected treasurer. .

A look down the list of other committee chairs and office-holders reveals an interesting mix of podcast production entrepreneurs, service and advertising company representatives, and folks from Microsoft, Nokia, and NPR.

Here is the complete list of officers and board members:

• Chair: Chris MacDonald, Chris MacDonald, Libsyn PRO Enterprise Platform and Indiefeed
• Vice Chair: Susan Bratton, Personal Life Media
• Secretary: Matthew Snodgrass, Porter Novelli
• Treasurer: Duncan Perry, Podcast.com, Treedia.com
• Committee Chair: Advertising Standards: Brian McMahon, National Podcasting System
• Committee Chair: Education & Outreach: Rob Walch, Wizzard Media
• Committee Chair: Measurement: Angelo Mandato, Raw Voice
• Committee Chair: Membership Committee: Bryan Moffett, NPR Digital Media
• Committee Chair: Terminology Standardization: David Rowley, Kiptronic, Inc.

Advisory Board

• CC Chapman, The Advance Guard
• Jonathan Cobb, Kiptronic Inc.
• John Furrier, Podtech
• Rob Greenlee, Microsoft Zune
• John Havens, BlogTalkRadio
• Risto Koski, Nokia
• Jim Louderback, Revision3
• Mark McCrery, Podtrac
• Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, PodcastingNews.com
• Kent Nichols, AskANinja.com
• Tim Street, French Maid TV

As Bratton told me some time ago, the ADM’s focus is exclusively on the money-making aspects of podcasting, and specifically on developing standards and metrics for podcast advertising. We’ll be watching to see how ADM makes that happen.

I’ll be chatting with ADM bigwigs this week, and we’ll be following the group here, and in the pages of B&P. You can keep up directly by reading the ADM blog.

Note: Blogger & Podcaster was asked by BlogWorld Expo organizers tto pass along what follows. This magazine is a BlogWorld Expo sponsor.

Mark Cuban (who is a blogger, but is usually identified as a “billionaire entrepreneur”) will give a closing keynote presentation at BlogWorld Expo, November 9. The schedule lists a closing keynote panel, so it’s unclear if Cuban will share the stage, or present on his own. Other BlogWorld keynoters include Leo Laporte and Matt Mullenweg.

OK, OK, “tomorrow” is obviously a term I use ambiguously. In any case, some thoughts about PodCamp Boston2.

First and foremost, I have to say the Podcamp Boston2 was extremely well-run, and easy to navigate. All of the sessions occurred in one enormous hallway, making it easy to find just about anyone you wanted to find. The technology mostly seemed to work, and there were plenty of seats. Registration was easy and painless. From an attendee point of view, the logistics worked.And frankly, given the remote and unfriendly venue, and the dire warnings about convention center security and the need to show IDs at every turn, I was apprehensive. But none of the potential badness materialized.

The quality of presenters, which is, of course, controlled by the people who sign up, themselves, was very good. Knowledgeable people took the time to make informed, useful presentations, and I learned a few things and copied down a few very useful URLs.

In the wake of the discussion here and elsewhere of the revocation of the “PodCamp must be free” rule, I’ve been trying to put some of my initial reactions in context. Rather than construct a narrative for you, I thought I would just put down some observations:

• Presentations tended toward the marketing and “new media” integration side of podcasting. New media has become fully buzzword-compliant, and speakers (and I would assume some portion of the audience) seem to be trying to figure out how to integrate podcasting into an overall nm strategy, rather than focusing on the practice of producing audio and video itself. I actually think that a tighter focus on podcasting is one of the great opportunities for the PodCamp model, and the thing that is most likely to keep new people who want to learn how to podcast interested in these events. I would also like to see organizers, to the extent they get involved in programming, work to encourage experienced podcasters to take on nuts and bolts topics of interest to new producers.
• Session interactivity seemed pretty low — at least when compared to other PodCamps I’ve attended. I blame this in part on the size of the audiences. It’s hard to get interactive with a couple hundred people. But PodCamp Boston2’s session culture seemed a lot like a typical tech conference. Is this because presenters were asked to submit session topics weeks in advance, and because last year’s “let’s put on a session” aesthetic was not promoted? Don’t get me wrong: every session I attended had ample opportunities for q&a, but there wasn’t much banter back and forth between presenters and audiences.
• Much has been made of the high (50 percent) no-show rate among attendees, and the 10 percent of speaker no-shows. I completely sympathize with organizers who expended funds for name badges, t-shirts and, other items that went to waste. Folks who register should understand the impact their absence has, and understand that solutions like charging an admission fee, or doing away with attendee freebies like shirts, will be the result. As an attendee, however, the size of the event felt about right, if not a little bit larger than would have been ideal, mostly because of the size of some of the more popular sessions (see above.). The concept of no-show speakers in the PodCamp model is interesting, though, because as originally practiced, the looser structure allowed for impromptu sessions, led by people who happened to be on hand, and based on the ebb and flow of audience interest. Again, I think this is among the benefits of the PodCamp structure. But the advantages of loosey-goosey structure grow harder to defend when the number of attendees goes over 500-600. Perhaps one option would be to establish a core curriculum, with trusted speakers pledging their participation, but leaving some sessions “open” til the day of the event. this would allow for more organic programming, while ensuring that attendees would have a good experience with sessions on topics of broad interest.

I enjoy PodCamp in all of its forms: I’ve been to four of them, each with its own personality and quirks. There is no one way to do a PodCamp event well, and different participants have different expectations. The openness of the model, as set out in the PodCamp Rules, is its real strength, however. I hope that continues, and that PodCamp remains a place where people new to the podcasting medium can learn how to do what they do better, and retain their excitement. PodCamp is at its best when it is not trying to duplicate the model of major conferences like New Media Expo and BlogWorld Expo. Those events have a very important role to play, and so does PodCamp. It’s just not the same one.

I’d been working on a series of blog posts about PodCamp Boston before finding C.C. Chapman’s blog post regarding the changing of a rule that PodCamps should be free to attend. Kind of turned my blogging plans upside down.

In the beginning, the PodCamp organizers wrote seven rules that define what a PodCamp is and is not. The original seven are still on the main PodCamp page. But according to C.C., Rule 4, which states

All sessions and events must be free of charge to attend

has been revoked. Since I didn’t attend the announcement yesterday (had to catch a plane), I can’t comment authoritatively on how Chris Penn and Chris Brogan came to the conclusion that the “must be free” rule needed to go, but I did attend a session on the future of PodCamp where the issue was discussed by organizers of previous “big city” PodCamps, along with the folks who run Podcasters Across Borders. Many of the 20 or so participants noted the large number of no-shows in Boston, and the costs associated with venue, staff and t-shirts for all. More than once, and it is also a theme in the comments on C.C.’s post today, I heard people proclaim that a nominal fee of say, $20, would discourage very few people from attending a one or two-day event like PodCamp. A few also pointed out that charging attendees would lessen the need for reliance on sponsors who usually expect something in return for their money.

There is some merit to these arguments, especially in terms of getting people to show up to events they’ve committed to. But the changing of a founding principal, much more than simply charging for a particular event, has wider implications for PodCamp and the unconference model of community-led learning that it’s supposed to represent.

Twenty bucks won’t break many people who would attend PodCamp, that’s true. But the difference between free and not free represents a line in the sand. Cross it and the rules and ethics by which you organize such an event become blurrier. How much can you charge? What should the fee cover? Should press people like yours truly, along with speakers and sponsors get a certain number of free tickets? Should there be a “deluxe” package for companies who want to send lots of people to PodCamp? How about an “executive briefing” or “workshop” day that costs $200 a pop and essentially funds the free stuff? Will answering “yes” to any or all of these questions change the content and community and grassroots aesthetic?

You bet it will. and it will do one more thing: it will result in at least two tiers of PodCamp events, to a greater extent than is already true.

Most of the veterans in the Saturday discussion of PodCamp’s future had put together big city events on the east coast. Their potential attendance,and their costs are higher than those of regional events like PodCamp San Antonio or PodCamp Arizona. And it is in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and other big markets, that PodCamp will cost money to attend, because the visions of the organizers will be grander, the venues spiffier, the sponsor deals bigger. On the flip side, regional organizers will still find community colleges wiling to loan a classroom or two, the presenters will be podcasters with more to say about how to code an RSS feed or choose a mic than how to brand yourself in new media way, and folks might just decide that they don’t need another t-shirt. Personally, I’d like to retain some middle ground, where local podcasters can listen to and participate in great discussions, but not feel burdened by the trappings of industry conferencing. That’s valuable in Philly AND San Antonio.

I’m disappointed that the revocation of the always free rule was not announced early on, or at least made an announced topic of discussion at the sparsely attended PodCamp’s future session. If ever an idea needed community discussion and perhaps further refinement, this one certainly did. Here are a few points I would have made;

• Alternative funding options exist, including charging for “extra” events such as parties, lunch and t-shirts. Attendees could also be asked for an optional donation at registration, or encouraged to donate to the umbrella organization, which could distribute money to help local PodCamp organizers get going. More creative people than me can surely think of additional means of raising funds.
• Rules and ethics for the acceptance of sponsorship money, the maximum price of PodCamp admission, etc. should be discussed and drafted.
• Organizers who feel they need to charge attendees should examine their own expectations and those of likely attendees, to be sure that the two match, and that the organizers are in touch with what potential attendees want to get from their local PodCamp.

Tomorrow, I’ll have a few things to say about content and aesthetics at PodCamp.

Did you hear? Google bought Jaiku. I learned of this latest Google gobble while reading — you guessed it — my Twitter stream. Friends have been popping their Jaiku pages into Twitter posts left and right, while others ask one another, high school style “Are you going to Jaiku, because if you go I’ll go. But I don’t want to go if no one else is going.”

Actually high schoolers aren’t usually that straightforward. It’s good to be old.

The idea that Jaiku is all of a sudden more appealing than it was yesterday, just because Google owns it, is part of the point. If Joe’s Software Shack, or even my fearless publisher, Larstan, let’s say, had purchased Jaiku, no one would be re-evaluating their social networking and blogging activities. It wouldn’t even matter that the new owner had paid a lot of money. Jaiku would be Jaiku, and if you’re a Twitter person, it would require some convincing to get you moved over, not to mention a whole lot of friends and followers doing the same.

Google has not (yet) changed the service, or integrated it into its other offerings in any way, but most Jaiku users know/hope they will. And even if updates to Jaiku are awhile in coming, no one knows better than the Twitter crowd that the place you want to be is the place everyone else is, and Google, like Apple, has the power to create such a place in a way few others do.

But as all this craziness plays out, don’t underestimate the power of social network fatigue. I know plenty of people (wait, maybe that was just me) who ignored all attempts to get me into Yahoo Mesh.

If you laid out the features and tools available on Twitter versus those on Jaiku, the latter service would probably come out ahead. And Jaiku has (and has had for some months) powerful and influential fans. But people have stuck to Twitter, despite its sporadic downtime and lack of big upgrades. to drive home the point yet again, you stick with Twitter because that’s where your friends are. The question of whether Jaiku will cause the death of Twiter, or make it irrelevant does remain open, however. How many people will actually leave Twitter, and will the prospect of Google-ku affect the folks at Twitter to get to work on improving the mousetrap? I think these are unknowns at this point. Google has a way of integrating things so you can’t ignore it. But for the moment, I’ll stick with Twitter, and watch Jaiku out of the corner of one eye, just in case it makes any sudden moves.