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Techcrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick reveals an interesting new technology development designed to improve the podcast format:

Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them. It’s more than just speech recognition.

This is one of the most compelling examples I’ve seen lately of a growing trend: making multimedia content more granular and letting users take even greater control over the media we consume. We don’t just want to consume what we wish, we want to consume it in the way we wish.

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What did I expect when I called Robert Scoble, perhaps the best-known blogger to have become famous for blogging? I wasn’t sure. Maybe someone very Californian. In the bad way.

Anyway, he isn’t. Yes, he’s laid-back and he did use the expression ‘real good’. We only had a short conversation, but I can imagine him being a big hugger. I like that sometimes, though. Anyway, I was disarmed. He seems to be a charming man. Actually, I’ve been really lucky so far, and only a couple of my Web 2.0 interviews have been with people who turned my flesh. Bottom line? You try to knock the scobleizer and you go through me first. Also, cheers to Robert for doing a live interview after the recent debate on the subject.

So what got you into blogging?

Back in 2000, I used to work as a conference organiser for a tech company and I was asking all the speakers what the sessions should be about. Quite a lot of them said ‘blogging’. At that point, I had no idea what that meant. *laughs* I went and Googled it, and there seemed to only be about 150-200 blogs out there.

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Updated statistics. Following the Bivings Group report into US newspapers’ adoption of Web 2.0 approaches such as blogging and podcasts, which I wrote about here, BBC English Regions Community Producer Robin Hamman has compiled a similar survey for the top eleven UK dailies. The results are as follows (click for bigger):

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Mark Glaser offers a great summary of a new report about the online offerings of America’s top 100 newspapers produced by the Bivings Group, a Washington PR company. The full report is available for download here (PDF file) and offers an insight into the ways the papers have, and haven’t, embraced Web 2.0 technologies.

Rather than mimic Mark’s excellent digest, I thought I’d just comment on one part of the report, since it happens to be something I’m doing other work on at the moment, video and podcasts.

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