Let me tell ya – working together with talented folks like Daniele Rossi, John Leschinski and Tommy Vallier has been an exciting, “open-source” experience!

Go check out the PodCamp Toronto 2010 site! Subscribe to our feed or grab the podcast.

I am looking forward to seeing you there on February 20 and 21. It will be fun! If you are new to PodCamp Toronto, here is the elevator pitch:

PodCamp Toronto 2010 is a FREE “unconference” bringing together professionals and hobbyists from Toronto and the surrounding area to explore the cutting edge of new and social media. If you are an online content creator – hobbist and professionals – who are building communities online in a variety of ways, then PodCamp Toronto 2010 is for you. Share ideas, discuss theories and learn lessons from an audience of experts. Network, network, network. All are welcome. Join us!

The official hash tag is #pcto2010

* Same things don’t work over time – Chris Brogan
* Social media is a cultural revolution, not a commercial revolution – Collin Douma
* The “trust economy” emulates the human relationships on the web – Julien Smith

See some of the pictures I’ve taken and the whole podcamp flickr stream.

“Talking” Blackberry with PodCamp co-founder, Chris Brogan:

In the mean time, this one – PodCampToronto.com, just slipped through the fingers of a domain name broker, so I’m more than happy to put it back to work for this vibrant community. See y’all there on February 23.

Once your PayPal payment is approved, simply subscribe to your feed in iTunes and automatically receive all Premium podcasts that you have chosen to purchase individually – no monthly fees.

If you like the music we play on the regular podcast, you can enjoy it in a premium version, free of commercials and other talk. Pay only for episodes that you like to build your collection on. It costs less than a Tall Caramel Macchiato, but it’s premium quality!

iSPINIT.com Premium is a chapterized AAC/M4A enhanced podcast – artist/song info being displayed for each tune. All previous episodes are available as premium content.

Give it a spin @ http://iSPINIT.com/premium/

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in – S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket – e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!

• Creators – those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities – 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
• Spectators – they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts – 55 percent own Macs;
• The majority of Inactives – they don’t participate online – 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

I had the privilege of sharing the “cool table” with Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and Julien Smith:

Some quick facts worth mentioning:

• YouTube usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 616%! [Mitch Joel]
• FaceBook usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 2424%! [Mitch Joel]
• If MySpace were a country, it would have been the 6th largest country on the planet! Want to buy a banner on the homepage? Be prepared to pay $1.000.000 per day! [Chris Penn]
• Canadians spend 48% of their leisure time online! Is that the whole winter?! [Mitch Joel]
• “Google couldn’t care less about your podcast!” [Julien Smith]

More:

• PAB2007 on Flickr
• PAB2007 on Technorati

iSPINIT is a channeled music podcast that comes in several different flavours: (iSPINIT) Pop, (iSPINIT) Rock, (iSPINIT) Electronic and (iSPINIT) Jazz. You can subscribe to any one channel, depending on your taste, or get them all. Ella is hosting the rock and jazz shows, I get the pop and electronic/dance editions.
Since most of the music featured on the podcast comes from the Podsafe Music Network made sense for us to join the PodShow family.

Enjoy our hand picked “Naturally Famous Tunes”!

What’s next though? I have moved my blog under a new domain – mircea.net, trying to add a more personal note to it. More exciting though, I’m ready to move to the next stage – music podcasting. More details about iSPINIT.com soon!

I’ll probably need couple of days to go over my notes and summarize all my thoughts, in the mean time recordings, transcripts or simply photos are available online:

• PodCamp Wiki
• PodCamp Blog
• PodCamp on Flickr
• PodCamp on Technorati

I have finally met Chris Penn, Bryper from ‘historic Boston’, Mitch from ‘beautiful Montreal’ and Michael Seanton.
Always interesting to listen and talk to Bill Sweetman to learn his from Internet marketing secrets! ;-)

Looking forward for more events like this!

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full.  This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.  It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.  And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

Would be interesting to find out a music/podcast/video/photo split ratio on an average iPod. I bet Apple has the figures :)

1. Brazil $327.71
2. India $222.27
3. Sweden $213.03
4. Denmark $208.25
5. Belgium $205.81
6. France $205.80
7. Finland $205.80
8. Ireland $205.79
9. United Kingdom $195.04
10. Austria $192.86
11. Netherlands $192.86
12. Spain $192.86
13. Italy $192.86 
14. Germany $192.46
15. China $179.84
16. South Korea $176.17
17. Switzerland $175.59
18. New Zealand $172.53
19. Australia $172.36
20. Taiwan $164.88
21. Singapore $161.25
22. Mexico $154.46
23. United States $149.00
24. Japan $147.63
25. Hong Kong $147.35
26. Canada $144.20

You can take artists like Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Tony Bennet of Gloria Estefan on the road with the Chrysler Music Legends Podcast. Way to go! According to the Wall Street Journal, Ford and Chrysler are both paying Sony BMG a flat fee to license music for podcast distribution for one year, no matter how many copies are downloaded.