Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online announces it’s Top 10 words for 2004. I must say I am surprised that “Blog” has risen to such a level of verbal importance. The other top few words directly link back to the 2004 election campaign topics.

Based on the number of online lookups, the #1 Word of the Year for 2004 was “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.

Here are the other words in the Top Ten List for their definitions in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton : noun (1951) : the main body of riders in a bicycle race
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration

Click here to see complete word list with links to definitions.

This post is in response to a great blog post by TDavid, host of Webmaster Cookbook Radio and Scripts School Radio on the topic Revenue from Podcast Dilemma.

I briefly ran into TDavid at a November Webblogger Meetup in Downtown Seattle.

TDavid blogged:
I briefly met WebTalk Rob at the last Seattle meetup, but he was engrossed in other conversations so I couldn’t really spend any time with him beyond a brief introduction. Hopefully that will change at a future event because we are only 15 or 20 minutes away from each other.

I will be attending the next meeting and hope to actually meet everyone at the Meetup next time and not get wrapped up in an extended conversation during the whole meetup.

I am listening to Scripts School Radio right now and I do need to say, TDavid’s audio commercials are entertaining and even caught my 15 year-old daughters attention. It seems like listeners attention is always peaked by wacky spot bits and sound effects, but does that really generate better purchase results.

TDavid blogged:
Here’s a thought: what if a show (or station) switches gears and tries to entertain listeners through the commercials — especially in a niche audience — for an intermission from the content … well, now you have a model that can and does work.

It could be a creative challenge for some podcasters to actually create entertaining ads and the sponsoring company may not approve of wild ads that do not properly reflect on the company brand image. Sure the ads need to bring results for the advertiser, but a balance needs to be reached that is approved by the advertiser. The area for open creativity is the live read mentions in-content. I see the live read sponsor messages in the content part of the program as the most valuable for any advertiser as it is a testimonial by the show host. Every advertising deal I have recently done requires live type reads.

I would also like to stop breaking up my show into segments like most other podcasters, but that is the baggage of being a terrestrial radio broadcaster. I would like to eliminate all standard 30 and 60 second spot breaks and someday I might be able to do it. As you can see I am looking forward to being all Internet radio.

TDavid blogged:
IMO, the problem with most audio commercials is that they suck. Most of them sound the same (NASCAR and wrestling-like over-produced and over-polished pitches: Shouting! Special! Messages! [insert cool or weird sound] That! Folks! Need! To! Hear!) and ultimately aren’t creative, interesting and/or useful to listeners. All too familiar audio pitches without any real soul and nobody wants to be pitched in the middle of listening to an interesting content program. It’s an interruption, it’s the phone call in the middle of something important, the mosquitoes at the picnic; a nuisance.

We just have to live with the reality that listeners will be able to fast forward through breaks and thus the reason to mention sponsors in-content and not during defined breaks.

The other thing that I cannot do on my WebTalk show is use four letter words or better known as PROFANITY! It seems like many Podcasts and Internet only shows are open to speak very freely. I am required to bleep these words out and thus my show has been sanitized per FCC as we are also satellite distributed to 12 broadcast radio stations. We recently had ONE “fuck’n shit head” slip into our on-air version of our show that featured a snippet by David Slusher of Evil Genius Chronicles podcast. After that segment aired the world came crashing down on me, with angry phone calls from the stations saying they had shocked listeners call in to complain. Stations told me that they could be shut down by the FCC for letting that air. The FCC has the whole broadcast radio folks scared to death. Now you can see why Howard Stern is leaving broadcast as fast as he can.

TDavid Blogged:
We haven’t tried to go ego crazy and be the show with the most listeners, or the most professional setup or have the best guests (though we’ve definitely had some notable guests) or blah, blah, blah, we have primarily focused on providing good, relative content to an influential and active target niche audience. This makes selling advertising much, much easier. Advertisers don’t care about huge numbers if those huge numbers don’t convert. It may sound good to say: we have 50,000 listeners a day, but if 0 listeners a day actually are conducting any business, then what value is that to advertisers?

It is important to keep in mind that Internet broadcasting has a slightly different expectation on the part of current advertisers. This is an important distinction to be clear on. Advertisers who advertise on Internet radio expect direct response results or instant results, like sponsored links or even direct mail. I have had this discussion many times with advertisers that running ads on Internet radio is not entirely a direct response medium. It is still radio and still has those dynamics. Radio can drive quick results, but it is a stronger branding medium as listeners do not always have the ability to take purchase action while listening in the car or while working out as many podcast listeners are doing activities while consuming podcast content. This delays purchase action and thus drives awareness through frequency that will ultimately drive purchase action.

It is my real world experience that advertisers are still looking for large listener numbers as most advertising buyers are still buying Internet radio like they are buying broadcast radio. Sure it is true that they care about conversion primarily, the truth is that they will not even consider advertising with your show unless you have a large audience and 50,000 or less is not generally large enough to attract the large advertisers who have good sized budgets.

TDavid Blogged:
Ask the advertiser who they really want to advertise to and they will all say the same thing: the people most likely to buy their products and/or services. Bingo.

What you are talking about is targeting your audience with the advertiser. This can be a very tricky thing to do with certain results. You can match up demographics and income and interest in a topic, but that does not mean they are ready or need to buy the advertisers product or service when they happen to hear a spot mention. That is not to say that they will never need that product or service at some point. I think that branding and awareness advertising leads to long-term purchase conversion. This purchase would happen outside of the accepted window of tracking and thus not counted towards advertising effectiveness.

The podcasting thing is an ego trip for some, but I have to say that when you sit all by yourself or with one or two others to record a show it is a very low ego experience. The only time it is an ego boost is when you see the log file numbers from the servers or when you read emails from listeners from all over the world. I have been giving away Gmail accounts all this past week and I have been getting very nice emails from people all over the world. Very cool experience!

TDavid Blogged:
The problem with podcasting is that anybody can download, including machines and machines burning bandwith for shows that don’t guarantee actual human listeners is a waste of bandwith. The auto-download concept is flawed because of this. You are hoping that subscribers will actually listen to your downloads, but like the overweight kid in the Willy Wonka movie, it’s much too easy to over-indulge. If there was some way to force listening of files before downloading more files from the source, then that would make this more attractive for advertisers inside podcasts. Until then, it’s almost like piling up material in a closet for a rainy day that never comes. Advertisers collecting dust on hard drives.

I agree that the current podcasting model is very primitive and thus very inefficient in distribution and use of bandwidth. I concur with your reasoning on the over indulgence as my own hard drive has been filled up with many podcasts that are going unheard. I get many programs that I will not consume. Some of the guests on IT Conversation are generally unknown folks that do not connect with me. Listening does follow a certain amount of celebrity or reputation. I don’t think we will ever have tools that force us to listen to a program before we get a new one. Listeners want the choice and power. They will resist being forced to listen. The only real solution is to track playback over the network or have the player report files played when synchronization occurs.

TDavid Blogged:
We’ve done very few downloads, mostly streaming as Rob described was better for advertising for their show. However, we are now experimenting with podcasting and downloads with our newest web radio show (which contrary to our established show, is definitely not profitable yet, just like the situation IT Conversations is facing, it seems).

It is also very possible that we will see a continues dominance of on-demand streaming to mobile media devices when ubiquitous wireless Internet access is available on every device or phone. This whole download thing is generally inefficient for long-term success. Streaming is where the big-time game is at now and I am not really sure that will ever really change. The concept of delivering bits just in time for playback is the model that built the current media world that became so popular over the past 50 years. I don’t see downloading or podcasting being a trend that will last the test of time and expanded technology innovation.

We may also see content pre-installed on playback devices as storage becomes unlimited as well.

TDavid Blogged:
If Microsoft isn’t at the forefront actively supporting audio like this through spending advertising dollars marketing in these areas, despite the fact that they have Windows Media Player and that they do sponsor some shows like .NET Rocks (do they support WebTalk Radio too?), then this could be sending a discouraging message for tech-related radio shows trying to get advertiser support for their respective audiences. Then again, how much more advertising does Microsoft need?

Microsoft has been very supportive of WebTalk Radio and is indirectly sponsoring us through software, some bandwidth and increased distribution. We do get paid a royalty by Microsoft for WebTalk distribution via Microsoft’s Sync n’ Go download synchronization software to the Pocket PC platform. The folks at Microsoft do support .Net Rocks and have a deal with KenRadio.com. KenRadio is the longest running technology talk show on the Internet. They are supporting the old guys like WebTalk and KenRadio and just have not had enough time to get relationships with some of these new podcasts. I just don’t see Microsoft getting behind many podcasts yet as they only work with very established programs that have a track record. The other challenge is that most podcasters do not support streaming and that is a partnership requirement.

Doug Kay, the creator of IT Conversations has posted his business model dilemma publicly and he is getting feedback from his listeners. This is an important discussion as it is currently difficult to keep and online radio show funded and operating. I am interested in hearing any of your thoughts on the topic of podcasters making money to pay for the bandwidth and content production time. Dana and I are generally covering our time and costs, but that forces us to host other websites and streams to pay for our 5 web servers and bandwidth.

Here is my comments about the dilemma.

Doug, the ad insertion model that plays a short 15-30 sec sponsor ad at the beginning of each streamed program would work, but most of the IT Conversations audience downloads. You would need to voice a very short program topic tease and then play the streaming sponsor ads. This is a similar model that is currently working with streaming video ad’s.

The problem is that advertisers do not value downloads as much as streams right now. The model for sponsor advertising only really works for streams. Getting sponsors for downloads or podcast is virtually impossible right now until download file playback can be tracked. I am getting streaming sponsors for WebTalk right now - download and broadcast radio distribution is just a bonus. So the Ad model for IT Conversations is not a very good option and thus leaves podcasters high and dry until mp3 playback on a mobile device can be tracked. Somehow this tracking and network ad insertion technology needs to be developed and embedded in downloadable media formats.

I also like Joshua’s comments about The David Lawrence Show. David was the pioneer in using BitPass for his show archives. I think micropayment per ad-free download or annual subscription is the only way IT Conversions can generate revenue from these shows. Doug will need to sell RSS ad’s and generate AdSense revenue from page views on his website. The short term revenue solution is a donation button and a roll out of BitPass on selected programs and conferences that have the highest value. I have thought about the integration of BitPass links into Bit Torrent RSS feeds and think it would work well, but the iPodder software will not work with it yet. Podcast feed readers need to support micropayment and featured podcast directories of feeds that offer pricing, audio sampling, listener comments and media file metadata display as all part of the point of sale. We are seeing the beginnings of all this at PodcastAlley and with iPodder software.

Live streams should be event sponsor supported. I agree that selling the complete audio from conferences is valuable and is a great idea. I firmly believe that revenue from advertising inside podcasts is not viable unless the podcast is also streamed and thus able to gain a large streaming or broadcast radio audience.

I think this is a valuable discussion and from these types of discussions will come the technology solutions to this current problem.

Please post your ideas on how WebTalk is doing in the area of advertising placement in our show. Has it been too much in the past? Should we stay ad supported or go subscription?

We will also be randomly selecting some audience members who register at our website to get FREE software for the holiday’s from Microsoft & Symantec Norton that have been sent to us by those companies. We will be randomly selecting winners from the complete list of registered members in our database. Everyone who has registered will be eligible to be entered to potential receive one of these software giveaways.

The software give away registration deadline is December 20th and randomly selected winners will be announced in our registered member area on our WebTalkRadio.com website by December 21st and then mailed when we get your mailing address.

If you see your name on the winners list then send us your mailing address via our comments for on our website.

All you need to do is login using your user name and password to see if you have been selected to get one of the software packages.

We will randomly select who get which software package and everyone who registers on our site.

Items to be given away:

4 - copies of Microsoft Works Suite 2005 (includes Word 2002, Money Standard 2005, Encarta 2005, Works 8, Picture It Premium, Street and Trips 2005, Microsoft T-Shirt)

1 - copy of Norton Internet Security 2004 (AntiVirus, Personal Firewall, Privacy Control, AntiSpam, Parental Control)

2 - copies of Norton AntiSpam 2004

2 - copies of Norton AntiVirus 2004

Join WebTalk Now and get entered.

Thank you for listening and visiting our website. We hope you have a great holiday season.

This flash video had an impact on me and got me thinking about how Google, Amazon and Microsoft will impact the internet and the media over the next 10 years. This video reaffirms an earlier post made on this weblog that we are coming into a time when we will see a growing digital media battle between everyday people and copyright, patent holders of all kinds. I think this war over the next 20 years will divide this world like never before. We will also see more and more individuals like you and me around the world become online media publishers in some way or another. I also think that just about every company will become some sort of media publishing company as a necessary way of marketing and building sales. This trend is what will ultimately make it more difficult for many current major media companies to thrive over the next 10 years. While at the same time I think the media companies that really innovate to keep in touch with an audience will thrive.

Might I say that it got me thinking plenty hard about how all the online companies are mining all sorts of online and database data. While timing of the predicted events in this video are dubious and unreliable. The elements of the videos seem to follow logical evolutionary progression of some plausible mergers and events. The one that surprised me was the prediction that Google would buy or merge with TVIO. Does this mean that Google should be a major player in digital media? I certainly think it could be if they are able to completely index audio, video and virtual world content. This would be a smart play if you start thinking about how IPTV will change the media landscape.

The video brought more questions to the table then it really answered.

The other hard to believe element in this video was about the name of the new online monster “EPIC” that puts all the old media out of business and aggregates all the information on the Internet. The ironic twist to this story line is that EPIC is currently the name of Electronic Privacy Information Center. I think EPIC would clash with EPIC. That is a true clash of ideology.

Watch and feel your own light bulb turn on.

Important terms in the video are Googlezon, MSN Newsbotster and EPIC.

Funny thing going on at Target.com as they seem to be offering FREE shipping on a $30 dollar order of Marijuana. Target must be advocating it for medical treatment or they are just trying to be customer friendly. See for yourself

Just register as a member of the WebTalk Community and sign-up for our weekly email newsletter and you can get an Gmail account and possibly win some FREE Microsoft and Norton Software. Sign-up Now

I think this push on the part of the music industry to block the recording and time shifting of Internet audio streams could have a negative impact on the future of commercial Internet-based talk radio programming.

They can do what ever they want to digital radio as I agree HD radio is a real problem for the RIAA and should have a broadcast flag that blocks recording.

The correct path for Internet radio would be to legally limit the stream bit rate to 96K streams for stations airing music and leave talk radio programming out of any legislation and broadcast tags.

It was not very long ago that we were all excited to have 20 MB hard drives on our PC’s.

I think this topic only starts to get interesting when we start to discuss whether limits exist in the potential of hard drive or solid state storage capacity. I know very boring, but it will be very important years from now.

I also think the real challenge we have is to develop a solid state digital storage medium that will support hundreds of GB storage capacity and have an almost unlimited life. I have heard that CD’s, DVD’s have 3-5 year life spans and we all know hard drives have about the same life.

Reliable long-term storage is bad for content and hardware companies as selling reliable long-term storage would limit long-term revenue from people replacing storage disks and hard drives. But, consumers over the next few years are going to be upset as movie disks and family videos on CD’s and DVD’s will start becoming unreadable. All those consumers will start demanding more reliable storage. The good part is that with better and more reliable storage will bring an enhanced ability for content companies will sell complete archive storage devices of every commercial movie, video and audio content ever made that could be sold via DRM off of the storage medium. We will only need the ability to add more current content to these huge storage devices. The content updates could be done over wireless broadband networks, DSL and cable networks. With huge storage capacity will remove the pressure on building out last mile optic networks. I think wireless will also continue to get faster and faster.

I think we just need to look at the current Podcasting craze as a sign that people will want to store media for playback and getting the content delivered automatically is the ticket.

Podcasting is also an example that everyone will feel empowered to become broadcasters to family and to create niche video and audio programming from the home and office. Those same people will want to store it all and have reliable storage on these same huge storage devices.

The consumption of media will dramatically change again in the years to come as we will have cheap storage beyond the Gigabyte as we get into Petabyte and Exabyte storage.

Robert Scoble passed along this resume link in his weblog and it is a must see. Has finding a new job reached a new low or is this a new high? Decide for yourself.

Watch Flash Resume Here

I really see very little difference between the new MSN Search Beta and Google. What is remarkable is what Microsoft has accomplished in a short focused amount of time. Sure the new MSN search beta is not really good enough now to switch from Google, but it is safe to say that Microsoft is now on the playing field. The whole area of relevancy is very limited to a few keyword combinations and is overblown at this stage of search technology. The demand for relevancy is pushing more search words and longer search phrases into searches boxes.

Present day search on single words pulls lots of results, but in the future will be worthless. The next stage of search relevancy will be based on more natural language. Meaning and interpretive intent will be the bases of search in the future. The combination of meaning filters with the accumulation of historical personal digital data on each of us will create very relevant results for us.

Google is working hard to gather personal information on all of us as a basis for better search matching. Microsoft is really far behind Google in this area, but is sitting in a great position to catch-up to Google.

When you type more than 4-5 words in combination to refine your search both Google and MSN Beta fail miserably to refine meaning to return decent results.

Search of today will continue to be lame until semantic web search is deployed. Semantic web search technology that matches meaning is where both companies will end up. I think this is a race to searching meaning not the short keyword phrases of today.

Japan: http://beta.search.msn.co.jp
UK: http://beta.search.msn.co.uk
US - EN: http://beta.search.msn.com
US - ES: http://beta.search.latino.msn.com
France: http://beta.search.msn.fr
Germany: http://beta.search.msn.de
Belgium - FR: http://beta.search.fr.msn.be
Belgium - NL: http://beta.search.msn.be
Denmark: http://beta.search.msn.dk
Italy: http://beta.search.msn.it
Netherlands: http://beta.search.msn.nl
Norway: http://beta.search.msn.no
Spain: http://beta.search.msn.es
Sweden: http://beta.search.msn.se
Australia: http://beta.search.ninemsn.com.au
Canada - EN: http://beta.search.sympatico.msn.ca
Canada - FR: http://beta.search.fr.sympatico.msn.ca
New Zealand: http://beta.search.xtramsn.co.nz
India: http://beta.search.msn.co.in
Austria: http://beta.search.msn.at
Finland: http://beta.search.msn.fi
Malaysia: http://beta.search.msn.com.my
Singapore: http://beta.search.msn.com.sg
South Africa: http://beta.search.msn.co.za
Switzerland - DE: http://beta.search.msn.ch
Switzerland - FR: http://beta.search.fr.msn.ch

Listening to the ‘Bogus Celebrity Weblogs and Live Journal Theatrical Muse‘ discussion and want to follow along? Here you go…

Quenton Terrantino Bogus Blog
Nick Nolte Bogus Blog
Garden State Blog [Zach Braff / Scrubs]
Wil Wheatons Blog [Stand by Me / Star Trek: Next Gen]
Cameron Crowe Blog
Museum of Hoaxes
Live Journal Theatrical Muse
Alan Shore / Boston Legal in Theatrical Muse [Live Journal]
Brad Chase / Boston Legal in Theatrical Muse [Live Journal]
Joel Campbell / The Watcher in Theatrical Muse Community [Live Journal]
Boston Legal Theatrical Muse Community

The Bin Ladin video transcript is a must read. I know this man attacked our country on September 11. Read it for yourself as it is time well spent. Keep an open mind and really think about what may be motivating our side and Bin Ladin’s side.

The truth comes from within us and not from Bin Ladin, but would we feel any different if we were in his shoes. The Bush Administration and our allies are bombing civilian areas and killing women and children.

How can we not think that big corporate profits going to companies like Halliburton and control of oil in Iraq would not be a powerful special interest motivation on the part of this administration. I only care about the truth and don’t like to be lied to. Click here to read the full transcript.