A German blogger has posted a cool tool that compares Google and Yahoo rankings. I tried it on “church Kansas City“.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church built their website within Typepad, a popular blogging platform. The website doesn’t have a blog, or refer to staff blogs, it IS a blog.

iTunes Podcast Directory
iPodder
Podcast Alley
Podcast.net
Podcast Directory
Digital Podcast
Podcasting News
Podscope

I’m using Feedburner to take a Blogger blog and turn it into a podcast feed.

The Appian Way podcast feed is simply the Feedburner feed of The Appian Way blog. When you enable the “SmartCast™” option, Feedburner finds any MP3 or other attachment and surrounds it with an enclosure tag. Right now it’s finding the MP3 from Dave Winer’s podcast and the PDF in the post on Blogs and power laws. iTunes will actually download all of these, including the PDF. Interesting.

For a more traditional podcast, take a look at the Living Water podcast feed. It has sermon MP3s served from an ordinary web server over HTTP. It’s based on an LWCC podcast blog I created.

To use the feeds, the best “podcatcher” options are:
1. Download iTunes 4.9 and subscribe via a pick on the Advanced menu.
2. Download iPodder 2.1.

Check out this FAQ regarding the Google video service. They let people upload videos to their servers. Searchers can then find the videos and play them in the browser.

Could we use it for sermons? Resurrection currently doesn’t meet their “preferred video specs“. (They want MPEG4 video with MP3 audio. We use Windows Media Video. They want a minimum of 260 Kb/s. We’re doing 185 Kb/s.) That would probably be the only strike against us. Otherwise, I don’t know why they wouldn’t accept video from Resurrection.

Will the fact that this is free impact Playstream (our streaming video provider) and other content delivery networks like Akamai?

A little blurb in the May 24 issue of PC Magazine reports that 50% of people in the 18-28 age group have downloaded at least one podcast (compared to 20% of people 29 and above). This according to the Pew Internet Project, April 2005.

This video is one hour long, but very interesting. Scoble with his digital video camera in the office with various Microsoft folks. Gives a good idea of Microsoft culture, explains their thinking on RSS, and demos how it can go way beyond podcasts.

If you can’t afford an hour, Scoble has full coverage on his blog here and here.

“5 guys from Microsoft” who are actually doing and/or trying to do all these Web 2.0 technologies and Cluetrain Manifesto ideas. They’re well funded, passionate, and on the leading edge. We can learn from them.

Dave Winer gives a preview of tomorrow’s announcement by Micrsoft.

Also, did anyone else notice how prominently RSS was featured on Microsoft’s home page a couple of days ago? Looks like they’re changing their lead story frequently, so it’s gone now.

Frank Johnson of Strategic Digital Outreach offers an interesting theological foundation for his view on church websites. I’m pondering it now.