Podcasters Across Borders co-founder and organizer Mark Blevis sent word that registration for PAB2009 is opening today (December 1, 2008) at midnight Eastern Time. The three-day podcasting and new media conference is scheduled for June 19/20/21, 2009, in Kingston, Ontario (Canada). This is the fourth year of the event, which focuses on not just podcast creation, but also on "building and engaging communities, using social media dynamics, and honing the skills we use in all aspects of our online presence."

Early registration cost is cdn$120, rising to $150 on January 1. Registration is limited to 120 participants.

This weekend, PAB organizers also issued a call for speakers and presenters:

"The theme for PAB2009, Outside-in: Learning from beyond the fishbowl, was selected to evolve the conversation to draw on skills, communications styles, experiences, innovations and people from outside of the social media and new media communities.  We want our program to energize, motivate and advance the community."

The event features more structured 25-minute presentations (with Q&A afterward), and five-minute "Jolt" sessions. None of the sessions are used to promote specific businesses or services.

Last week, the UK Podcasters Association appointed Neil Fairbrother (of Pod3.tv) their new chairman. Previously the position was held by Dean Whitbread, one of the founders of the organization.

I caught up with Dean recently, and asked him to give me a rundown of the things he and the UKPA worked on, fought against, and/or celebrated during his tenure. Here is his list, which he titled
"10 Things In Two And A Half Years:"

1. WIPO Broadcast Treaty - kicked into touch 2006 (but now it's BACK!)
2. MCPS-PRS - podcast license reformation 2006 - 2008
3. Seminars and speeches:
In the City, Manchester 2006
The Radio Festival, Cambridge June 2007
BPI (the UK's RIAA) ACM 4th July 2007
Radio at the Edge November 2007
BECTU (TV /film technicians union) Digital Futures 2007 at BT HQ
BECTU @ BAFTA 2008
4. Sony Awards to include podcasting 11/06
5. Judged AOP award category podcasting mid-2007
6. Judged Sony Radio award category podcasting end-2007
7. Secured benefits for members including discount on the AIM podcast license 2007
8. Podcamp UK Sept 2007
9. Guardian, GCap join UKPA Jan - Feb 2008
10. Hosted seminar on music rights @Guardian with Open Rights Group, AIM, MCPS-PRS April 2008

Formed in 2006, in response to licensing and legislative concerns, the UKPA now represents more than one third of the "independent" podcasters in the United Kingdom and includes a broad range of independent podcast producers and major media organizations.

UKPA co founders Dean Whitbread, Mark Crook, and Paul Nicholls continue to serve as trustees of the organization.

iPhone application review site 148Apps reports that Apple's App Store has hit a milestone, now offering more than 10,000 iPhone apps. 

Other interesting facts:

• Most iPhone apps sell for less than $2.00
• Games and Entertainment are the most popular categories for iPhone apps
• If you purchased every iPhone app, it would cost you over $31,000.

Joost has released a new app (App Store link) that brings the social video site to the iPhone. 

The app lets you find/watch videos in several ways:

• Browsing by category
• Select "most popular" videos
• Watch our favorites 
• Search for a specific video

While the idea behind this is great, the app only works on WiFi connections, and even with that the video is a bit jittery. 

If they could get decent quality streaming going over 3G, this could be something big. Because of the WiFi dependency, the Joost iPhone app is of limited usefulness.

Blubrry has announced that they've released version .5.0 of their Powerpress podcasting plugin for Wordpress. The latest version incorporates a number of bug fixes as well as some minor enhancements. 

Here's a summary of the changes:

• Options to report media duration and file size next to download links.
• Added and to header portion of podcast feeds by default.
• Added to post items by default.
• Quotes and extra spaces are no longer removed from from the fields.
• Player auto-play bug fixed when quicktime media mixed with non-quicktime media.
• Added option to ping iTunes in a new browser window in settings.
• Verify flash player check added. The check is only necessary if your in-page player no longer appears on your site after upgrading Blubrry Powerpress. (Wordpress built in plugin update may corrupt the flash player. This bug in Wordpress is fixed in the soon to be released version 2.7)
• Media URL now displays a warning if the URL contains characters which may cause problem for some applications.

The addition of the Media URL warning was in response to issues many podcasters have been having when they publish episodes with file names that contain spaces and other special characters. Spaces and special characters such as apostrophes, # and ? may prevent some web sites and podcasting applications from downloading the media. We recommend only using letters, numbers, dashes and underscores for your file names for maximum compatibility. Users may ignore the warning message if they so desire.

If you're a PodPress user, let Todd and Angelo know what you think of it.

Vicoustic has introduced a budget solution for recording vocals, Flexi Screen Lite.

The £65.00 unit has a dual functionality, absorbing the singer's energy on the inside to give a less ambient sound, while at the same time, partially absorbing scattered room reflections on the outside. According to Vicoustic, Flexi Screen Lite's acoustic foam has optimum density and thickness, using a series of air cavities both to reinforce the absorption effect and add structural support to the joint mechanism.

The screen can be used with a range of microphones and can be adjusted either vertically or horizontally.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Apple appears to be using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to limit what iPod owners can do with their portable media players:

At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating system uses to keep track of what playable media is on the device. Unless an application can write new data to this file, it won't be able to "sync" music or other content to an iPod. The iTunesDB file has never been encrypted and is relatively well understood.

In iPods released after September 2007, however, Apple introduced a checksum hash to make it difficult for applications other than iTunes to write new data to the iTunesDB file, thereby hindering an iPod owner's ability to use alternative software (like gtkpod, Winamp, or Songbird) to manage the files on her iPod.

The original checksum hash was reverse engineered in less than 36 hours. Apple, however, has recently updated the hashing mechanism in the latest versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Those interested in using software other than iTunes to sync files to these new iPods will need to reverse engineer the hash again.

Discussions about that process were posted to the public bluwiki site. Although it doesn't appear that the authors had yet figured out the new iTunesDB hashing mechanism, Apple's lawyers nevertheless sent a nastygram to the wiki administrator, who took down the pages in question.

In a nutshell - Apple appears to be using the DMCA to limit you from using other software to manage your iTunes library. Even worse, Apple is trying to use the DMCA to limit your free speech and keep people from discussing how they can hack iTunes.

Apple may have some legitimate reasons - besides eliminating competition - to limit what apps can write to the iTunesDB file. It's hard to imagine, though, a justification for Apple using the DMCA to censor what people discuss on the Internet.

PodCamp co-founder Chris Penn has posted his thoughts on the future of PodCamps, a series of user-organized podcasting conferences.

Penn offers six suggestions for 2009 PodCamp organizers:

1. Use the tools! 2008 showed rapid growth in every social network of note, and as organizers, the more you can help people meet and greet prior to the event, the better. Set up Twitter accounts for your event, groups on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many others, use search and readers and RSS to keep tabs on word of mouth.
2. Separate lecture from conversation. Figure out what makes your local PodCamp special and what?s just talking head stuff, and provide talking head stuff well in advance so that participants can maximize their time together. 
3. Go paid. Plan your PodCamp to run 100% participant-paid at the door. Continue to publish your ledgers publicly so participants can see how every dollar is allocated, but strongly consider going paid and having the event be wholly ?sponsored? by the participants.
4. Support your local community. Pick a local charity and find a way to divert time, energy, or resources to it so that your community is a little better off for having a PodCamp.
5. Stay lightweight. Keep expenses to a minimum. The magic of PodCamp isn?t in refreshments or epic sponsored parties, but in bringing together people to learn, share, and grow their skills.
6. Add pieces along the way. Start with barebones expectations for attendees. As funding becomes available, you can add amenities later. Set expectations low, and you?ll never disappoint.

See his post for his full recommendations and some interesting discussion. 

The future should be bright for the PodCamp concept - tight budgets could make inexpensive, local conference more popular than ever.

TV By The Numbers' Bill Gorman has posted some revealing stats on TiVo subscribers that suggest that the technology is headed for the dead pool. 

The above graph charts the change in TiVo subscribers, by month. Starting with February ‘06, TiVo subscriber growth stalls and by February ‘07, TiVo started bleeding subscribers. 

Gorman notes:

In the quarter ending October 31, 2008, TiVo?s total subscribers fell to 3.46 million, approximately the same level they had in Spring, 2005. As we?ve covered before, TiVo may have a valuable intellectual property portfolio, but its hardware selling business is over. For the most recent quarter, it sold fewer than 500 TiVo DVRs a day.

What's killing off TiVo? Has the TiVo audience moved on to Internet media?

Podcast Channels is a new WordPress plugin designed to fill in some of the gaps in WordPress's native podcasting support:

What do you need to podcast with Wordpress? Nothing — Wordpress puts enclosures in the feed for you. That's the bare bones and it works well enough.

But iTunes metadata would be nice. And, how about different info in different categories? Podcast Channels lets you specify iTunes metadata for the home feed, specific category feeds, and even ‘user defined' ('Conditional') feeds (see the FAQ).

The user defined feed feature basically lets you set up a podcast feed for any arbitrary collection of media files on your site. 

If you're using Podcast Channels, let us know what you think of it in the comments.