Via Slashdot:

Apparently a charity called Cops On Top is climbing Kilimanjaro as a memorial to the late Officer Isaac Espinoza of the SFPD. That in itself is pretty amazing, but the /. amazing thing is that they are AudioBlogging the whole thing via Satellite Phone by calling to an audioblogging site and having their MP3s automatically posted to their dasBlog (open source blogging system) at www.copsontop.com/climblog. Cool stuff. Their latest blog post is at 15,500 ft.

These guys are audio blogging using the very fine AudioBlog tool which we demonstrated on BlogHarbor here. Nice work, Audioblog.com!

Debbie Weil has made an interesting PDF available called Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging. She’s going to make it free for 15 days only, so get it while it’s hot.

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report called The state of blogging, where they note the following:

• 8 million American adults say they have created blogs
• blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users
• 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online
• 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs
• 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Click here for their report, downloadable in PDF form.

Kathy Biehl ‘s Bloggers Beware: Debunking Eight Copyright Myths of the Online World:

• It’s okay to use anything that doesn’t have a copyright notice.
• It’s okay to use anything that’s online, because if it’s online, it’s in the public domain and up for grabs.
• It’s okay to use anything as long as I’m not making any money off it.
• It’s okay to use anything as long as I give credit.
• It’s okay to use anything as long as I include the creator’s copyright notice.
• It’s okay to use anything as long as I take it down when the copyright holder objects.
• It’s okay to use something if I can’t find the copyright holder.
• It’s okay to use something if I asked for permission and didn’t get a response.

All bloggers should read this article!

BusinessWeek writes in Let a Million Videos Bloom Online: Following in the footsteps of text blogs, video blogs are starting to take off on the Internet. This new form of grassroots digital media is being shepherded along by groups of film makers and video buffs who started pooling publishing tips and linking to each other in earnest this year. The results are astonishing, downright funny, and sometimes puzzling. However you describe it, the new video blogs, or what some call vlogs, are compelling in the creativity they’re unleashing and the changes they could bring to the media status quo.

Guess I shouldn’t be surprised; maybe suprised that we haven’t seen it sooner. From the iPodLinux Project:

So far, we have successfully ported a customized uClinux (http://www.uclinux.org) kernel to the iPod, and written a simple user interface for it dubbed podzilla. Many additional Applications have been written, adding many capabilities not found in Apple’s firmware.

Our bootloader allows for you to choose between either iPodLinux or Apple’s firmware each time you turn on your iPod. iPodLinux is currently safe to install on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation iPods. We are currently accepting Donations towards the purchase of a fourth generation iPod for us to test with. Fourth generation iPods including the click wheel, mini, U2, and Photo are NOT currently supported.

A dual boot Linux iPod… Now when your buddy starts showing off his iPod Photo, you can boot up your 2G iPod with Linux and say, Yeah, but yours doesn’t run Linux does it?

iDive is a Mac OS X application for managing your digital video, that I wrote about previously. The kind folks at Aquafadas Software just wrote to let me know there’s a new version 1.2 out. New features include:

FYI, Bryan Bell also designed our BlogHarbor logo.

Via Boing Boing: Video mashup of Pulp Fiction with vintage Rankin-Bass holiday animation. Enjoy this one when you’re done wrapping the presents. Merry Christmas all!

T. L. Pakii Pierce has just published How To Podcast with BlogHarbor, an illustrated primer for publishing your own Podcast. Complete with videos. Very nice.

CNN: Piercing the sky above the verdant hills of southern France, a stunningly modern roadway bridge hailed as the tallest in the world was officially inaugurated Tuesday.

Just read about this service in How To Blog For Fun & Profit!, it’s called Blogdigger; it’s a search engine for blogs and I dig it. Can’t believe I haven’t heard of this one before, but then again with the speed at which blog-related services are growing you can’t blame me for not being hip on everything…

There’s even a media search, very cool.

Just discovered Alton Brown‘s site/blog via Andrew Grumet. Alton has a blog he calls Rants and Raves; I found this article on his visit to see the movie Supersize Me entertaining:

Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn’t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn’t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn’t hug.

There’s more, read it.

• WholeWheatRadio posted a very useful article on MP3 encoding back in October, check it out if you want to get some more information about what frequency and bitrate to encode your podcast in.
• Hugo Schotman’s Rock solid recording with Quicktime Broadcaster shows you another podcast setup, this time using Apple’s Quicktime Broadcaster to record and encode your podcast.
• engadget posted a similar article: a Step by Step Guide to recording Podcasts on the Mac using Quicktime Broadcaster.

Great line from Adam Curry about podcasting in a recent Newsweek article about podcasting:

Anyone can come and party on my MP3 player.

Party on Adam!

One thing I learned from this article is that former Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn has a podcast, where he uploads “new” folk songs.

You guessed it, Blog is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2004. Their definition:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

Yuck. You figure they would be able to define the word a bit better. Hyperlinks provided by the writer?

iTunes is now playing: Reelin’ In The Years (Live) from the album “Alive In America (Live)” by Steely Dan