The Chicago Tribune has a story that says there are 27,000 podcasts on the Internet, which is double the number that was quoted to me by the people at Podshow last month. This story talks about the passion of the podcasters, but there’s still that tricky issue of how to make money. Outside of Mommycast and perhaps a few others, no one’s figured out how to crack that code yet.

The University of Arizona is podcasting some lectures. If they had had this stuff when I was in school, there’s no way I ever woulda made one of those 8 a.m. classes :-).

No posts for a week. Shame on me! But I’ve been rebuilding my website, you see, and writing a newsletter.

Speaking of which, I got around to writing down more detail on the GM Fastlane Podcasts and the Whirlpool American Family podcasts based on my interviews with the people responsible for both. These are innovative uses of the medium and should be an example to others.

You can read the detailed account here.

I’ve also expanded my list of podcasting resources for marketers. Read it here.

Edelman, the giant global PR firm, has gone and hired Steve Rubel, whose Micro Persuasion is considered the number one advertising blog on the Web. This is a big endorsement for word-of-mouth marketing as a legitimate communications channel. This Ad Age piece (registration required) has more about the Rubel hire and also mentions that Weber Shandwick has hired Jeremy Pepper, author of the Pop! PR Jots blog, as group manager in its San Francisco office.

The Boston Globe has a very well-reported two-part series on Wikipedia this week and it’s none too complimentary about the online reference source.

David Mehegan, who’s one of the best reporters at the Globe, documents the abuses that have emerged since Wikipedia achieved cult status last year. He goes beyond the endlessly cited John Siegenthaler case and talks about the real doubts that serious scholars have about the reliability of information in Wikipedia. Those doubts are based on real experience, too. The article raises questions about whether you can believe anything you read there, on the supposition that even a 5% inaccuracy rate is enough to cast doubt about the validity of the entire site.

I’m a huge Wikipedia fan but I also recognize that these kinds of problems are an inevitable consequence of success. No one paid attention when Wikipedia was the 100th most popular website. Now that it’s bigger than AOL, the vandals are crawling out of the woodwork.

Wikipedia’s reliability problems can be solved but it will probably require some sort of registration/identification system to verify accountability, if not accuracy. The Wikimedia Foundation has an important task ahead trying to figure this out. But they will figure it out. Wikipedia has been perhaps the most prominent example of the power of social media and a lot of smart people will be helping it overcome this obstacle. Articles like the Globe‘s are important because they force change. Wikipedia will need to change constantly if it is to continue in the leadership role it has carved out for itself.

Michael Schrage, who’s one of my favorite tech columnists, has a column in CIO Magazine this week called Think Before you Blog. It makes an excellent point: that blogging by itself doesn’t necessarily enhance your image and can actually make you look bad. That’s why you have to think before you get online and start spouting.

A friend recently told me about an executive she knew who decided to get into blogging. He set up a blog on the company site and began raining invective on competitors and other players in his industry. He’d been told that bloggers were supposed to be controversial, but he apparently didn’t distinguish between being controversial and being an jerk. His blog was so obnoxious that it became a joke and an embarrassment inside the company. No one wanted to be around him. Only he thought he was doing the company a favor. The company didn’t. He was fired last December.

Blogging is about having something to say, not about insulting people.

I rarely take PR people to task for their tactics because I have a lot of respect for their profession and I understand the difficulty of generating good PR in this constantly changing media world. But I had an exchange with a PR person today (name withheld for obvious reasons) that provided a case study of what not to do in pitching a client.

I had posted an inquiry on PR Newswire’s very useful Profnet service seeking experts in corporate wikis. Of the many responses I received, one stood out as being completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. It was a pitch for a vertical market reseller. I responded to the PR person asking what the relevance of the pitch was to the topic at hand. Her response: “He is a software expert comfortable with addressing any tech topic.”

There are a couple of problems with that statement. For one thing, it’s an inherent contradiction. Anyone who believes that he or she is an expert in software is, by definition, not an expert in software. The field is far too vast, complex and specialized for anyone to be a general expert. On the contrary, this positioning makes the so-called expert look like an idiot because anyone who really knows software would know that general expertise is impossible to achieve.

Secondly, the response from the PR person made no attempt to relate the client’s expertise – whatever it is – to the topic I was writing about. In fact, it was clear to me that the PR person knew little, if anything, about wikis to begin with. In a situation like that, the PR rep should either research the topic or remain silent.

It’s very possible the client told his PR rep to position him as a general-purpose software expert. In that case, shame on the PR person. Her job was to help the client refine and focus his message, not spray it out to a general audience.

Performancing.com has a useful article on how to create links back to your blog or site by posting information that informs, intrigues or offends. It’s at The Art of Linkbaiting. Opinion columnists will recognize a lot of these tactics as being standard operating procedure for generating readership. There are a few quirks in the blogosphere, though. For example, when you post a link, click on it so the author of that page will know the link exists!

Two days, 25 hours (including evening events) and one full notebook. Demo is like drinking from the proverbial technology fire hose. I didn’t get a chance to meet with all 68 exhibitors but I saw my share of cool stuff. If any conference does a better job of cluing you in to where innovation and venture capital is going in the tech industry, I don’t know of it. Hats off to Network World for keeping this venerable event fresh and relevant.

Here are my picks for the best demos I saw at Demo. Keep in mind that most of these products are unreleased and I haven’t played with any of them. They’re organized by category. We’ll start with personal productivity and I’ll add others as I get my notes together.

Personal Productivity
Accomplice Software’s Accomplice – This is a time organizer on steroids. It bolts onto Microsoft Outlook and PDA organizers and allows you to organize your tasks flexibly but powerfully. You can quickly move tasks around, re-categorize them, change priorities and integrate all kinds of files and clips through a drag-and-drop interface. You can also share and organize your tasks with other people.

Iotum – It’s not a personal product – in fact, you have to connect it to a PBX or VOIP switch – but its benefits are very personal. Iotum does intelligent call routing, making sure the calls you get are only from the people you want to talk to. You’re not bothered by anything else. If the call’s from someone you want to speak to, Iotum will find you at any phone number of IM address it has. If not, it’s off to voice mail land. It also learns from your past behavior and gets smarter as time goes on.

Publishing
There was lots of interesting action in this field as the personal publishing trend gathers momentum.

Blurb BookSmart – My choice for best-of-show. Drag and drop photos into a template, add text and ship off to a service that returns a hard-cover coffee table book. Think of the possibilities. Your contract is up for renewal so you put together a custom volume showing the great work you’ve done for the client for the last year and present it as a gift before the renewal meeting. Or create family yearbooks for the holidays. I just love this idea.

Grass Roots Software’s Freepath – This adds a bunch of new tools to your PowerPoint arsenal, enabling you to seamlessly mix in multiple data types and jump quickly around a presentation.

Riya – Pattern matching and face recognition software has huge potential but the technology available to the public has never been very good. Riya can spot patterns in photos – be they faces, words, objects or something else – and then sort through databases of photos looking for the same patterns. People will initially use it to tag their photo collections and publish them for private and commercial use but the potential applications of this technology are endless.

Simplefeed – RSS is the best tool to organize the vast and growing river of data that surges over the Internet. But there are few tools that organizations can use to understand who’s reading their RSS feeds or how they’re acting on that information. Simplefeed has some very cool technology that make RSS a more effective and trackable medium than e-mail or even Web pages for anyone who publishes information.

More to come…

Given all the lip service being given to the small/medium business market, I was surprised there weren’t more products targeting those users. Nevertheless, there were three that caught my eye.

Digislide Holdings, Pty Ltd.’s Digismart – You couldn’t beat this technology for sheer ”Wow!” factor. It’s a tiny projector, about the size of a keychain fob, that plugs into a cell phone or PDA and projects an 11” X 17” image on a wall or screen. It runs off the power supply of the handheld device and basically lets you take your presentations on the road with you without the hassle of lugging a portable projector. This is still very early-stage technology; the Australian company hopes to ship it this year and doesn’t even have a projected price. It also isn’t yet effective beyond the 11” X 17” size. But if Digislide can make this technology work, everyone’s going to want it.

Interprise Solutions USA, LLC’s Interprise Suite – I didn’t think the world needed another ERP suite, but Interprise thinks it’s got a winner in a fully integrated and internationalized ERP/CRM suite for small business. And it has 1,300 beta sites to prove it. Pricing will be in the $5,000 range for five users.

Sprout Systems, Inc.’s Sproutit Mailroom – The first in a planned suite to SMB productivity tools from this El Cajon, CA-based startup is Sproutit Mailroom, a flexible e-mail management tool that allows users to automatically categorize, route and respond to e-mail messages based on a set of rules. Enterprise products are available with the same functionality but Sprout is focused on SMB organizations that are drowning in e-mail.