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

A few days ago I noted that Law.com was creating a Blog Network, re-publishing selected law-related blogger’s posts. Along similar lines, Steve Rubel’s excellent Micro Persuasion blog is now going to be re-published within WebProNews, and Steve has posted an insightful article about the pros and cons of this arrangement:

…WebProNews immediately augments their high-value, professionally written articles with more folksy contributors who live on the edge of the content tail – all at no cost. In return, I benefit from more visibility, in-bound links and traffic. This is a harbinger of the partnerships we’ll see many big media construct in the near future.

Prediction: You’ll see a lot of this blog network/re-publishing/aggregation from big media in the next few months, then this will snowball as bloggers figure out how to do this all by themselves… RSS and the MovableType/MetaWeblog APIs make it easier to than ever to aggregate content, and bloggers will figure out very quickly how to self-assemble their own blog networks. And once they do, you thought cross-linking and blogrolling was an effective way to increase page rank? Watch how fast bloggers game the system again with reposting networks…

The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to Technorati.

Technorati’s chief executive David Sifry says the current number of blogs is now more than 8 times larger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. They are seeing 15,000 new blogs every day…

Check out this article for more interesting stats on the blogosphere.

Law.com launched a new blog aggregating content from other blogs on legal topics. The new Legal Blog Watch is an example of what will surely be a trend for brand name content provider to aggregate blogs on related topics.

Podcast Research is a blog by graduate students from the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo which examines the podcasting phenomena and studies it with an academic eye.

There are various themes the study is interested in such as whether it can be considered a serious medium as blogging has become, and whether commercialization (like it or not) has to happen before it can reach critical mass.

ComputerWeekly has an interesting article today on Google’s use of blogs internally. The article notes that Google started blogs for staffers in early 2003 and has seen these internal blogs put to a variety of uses:

…people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they are thinking about and what they are up to.

“There is a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It is going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years,”said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google.

Read the full article.

Andrew Grumet is amazing. His latest creation is GigaDial, which he describes as follows:

GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters.

It’s kind of like a web-based podcast aggregator. Or an audio bookmark list. Or something…

From Michael Gartenberg:

Last night blogging hit this weeks episode of the West Wing. This is the first time I know of where weblogs played part in the storyline of a TV show. It was interesting how the weblogs were portrayed.

I am sure there are more, but on April 1, 2003 an episode of CBS’ Judging Amy had a character’s blog have an impact on the storyline.

Who woulda thunk Judging Amy was hipper than The West Wing?