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There was a time when podcasting seemed to belong to those mythic representatives of digital innovation – guys sitting in their underwear at their home computer night and day. It couldn’t be more different now, with ever-more levels of sophistication (not least video iPod) coming along, and the entry into the field (or perhaps the conquering invasion) of mass media’s Big Boys.

The recent top twenty list of Apple’s most iTunes downloads showed industry heavyweight The Cartoon Network at number 2 with its AdultSwim.com video podcast. Items from other industry heavyweights, VH1, MTV, ESPN and Nickelodeon were scattered throughout the most-wanted listings.

ESPN launched on April 10th a whole new podcast-centric hub on its website, offering podcasts on specific sports, mainly regular pro action, but including poker as well.

Some providers are leery of trying to earn a quick buck with their iPod offerings. The SciFi Channel, for instance, is happy with their audience’s “voracious appetite? for podcast material but wants to wait before adding advertising to the mix. But the bluff, hearty executives of ESPN have already slapped in a 15 second pre-show spot and a 60-secong post-content ad.

April’s annual ritual of tax-filing seems a time for fresh insights. The media get to see how much money politicians personally earn, at least officially. And divorce filings – I just recently learned – traditionally hit a peak at this time, presumably because discontented spouses get to learn some financial truths, too.

One new reflection is that the whole burgeoning field of doing business online has received a massive underscoring of approval (metaphorically in some bright-colored ink, perhaps) by the Internal Revenue Service. The tax authorities, backed by Congress, say they aim to get 80 percent of the US population filing our taxes electronically by next year — one more blow, and a pretty huge one, against high-volume paper-wastage.

A blow also for governmental cost-saving, of course. Processing an e-file return costs the IRS about 75 cents, while processing a traditional one on paper costs about $2.70.

Security and reliability are the obvious concerns that prevent converts being made among old-fashioned paper-filers. But while we not have known it, the IRS has been accepting electronic returns for 20 years now, and the IRS says no info has ever gone missing from the 500 million e-returns they have processed.

Congressional watchdogs are a bit skeptical, though. The IRS’s overall governing department, the US Treasury, was last year rated at only “D minus? for online security by the House of Representatives’ Government Reform Committee, down from “D plus? the previous year.

And there are die-hard taxpayers who will probably never switch from paper. When Lillie Coney, Senior Policy Analyst with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was asked if she files electronically, she said: “Oh, no. I don’t bungie-jump either.?

It’s been strange to see the? wow!? factor so much in evidence across the mainstream media, as they have covered the huge immigrant-supporter marches nationwide.

It’s almost as if a whole new section of our society has only just been noticed. And I suppose for some reporters it is – or at least its size is – wholly new.

Hispanics were probably the biggest element in the protesting crowds, although most demonstrations were remarkable for their diversity, embracing the Irish, Chinese, African and more from varied corners of the world, but it is extraordinary what a flurry of almost anthropology-like features have been sparked off in newspapers magazines and TV shows. They seem designed to introduce the majority population to this enormous minority.

I suppose they come as a welcome, if belated response to conflict and controversy. The news co-anchor Maria Elena Salinas of “Noticiar Univision? angrily went after (as so she should) her biased and bombastic CNN opposite number, Lou Dobbs. Their argument was an interesting piece of news-showcasing in itself. But in its wake some English-speaking analysts appeared astonished (even shocked, Claude Raines might have said in the movie Casablanca) to discover that Salinas’ nightly show regularly reaches some 79% per cent of households in a total population of 42 million.

Overall Her network, owned partly by Mexican and Venezuelan interests, now ranks fifth in the US – just behind, the long-standing Big Three and Fox.

One under-reported facet of the viewership, however, is that 57% are proficient in English too – they are not merely the recently-arrived, low socio-economic group they are sometimes assumed to be. The audience as a whole is estimated to have spending power of $800 million.

And what almost no-one seems interested in reporting is that, again counter to some prevailing mainstream impressions, Hispanics are important internet users, too. In fact The Pew Hispanic Centre reports they use the net for getting news information rather more than the general population, though on the web they tend to favor English rather than Spanish-language sites.

I wrote recently that while Google was the darling of many, it had failed to make it into one particular velvet roped-off area – Wall Street analysts Standard & Poor’s generally respected choice of the nation’s top 500 companies. Well now there’s been a reversal. Google is in the magic circle – as of March 31st.

But at the same time, Google is sliding down the scale of popular admiration. The search engine company with the unofficial but widely quoted motto “Do no Evil� has had its collaboration with oppressive Chinese authorities held up to public disdain. And there are mixed feelings about it first resisting, and then moving a bit to compromise with the US Justice Department’s efforts to get information about users who might be googling for child pornography.

Now it’s doing what many a corporation does when it’s got an image problem. It’s hired lobbyists in Washington DC, including the 18 year-old firm Podesta Mattoon, which has neat connections with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and the DCI Group which is led by a former aide to troubled former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Investing in a professional presence deep within the capital’s Beltway is probably wise. And it may buy Google more friends among politicians … but among the internet-using public at large? I doubt it.

The comment of Keith Benjamin, a venture capitalist from the Levensohn partnership in San Francisco, didn’t surprise me when he offered his simple explanation for the way big media companies are currently scrambling to buy internet social networking services. He said they are out to “recapture the audiences they are losing at an alarming rate�.

Corporate giants like Rupert Murdoch of News International certainly understand the need to staunch the hemorrhaging of their audience, even if they don’t quite comprehend the nature of their new competition, which is often very cheery and not even primarily profit-driven. The New York Times made me laugh out loud when they described the anxieties of Murdoch and Viacom’s Sumner Redstone as amounting to fear of “death by smiley-face�.

Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace.com, the decidedly perky network used predominantly by teens – and the race is now on to capture Facebook, the favorite of college-aged mean and women. Some analysts, including Business Week, say it could be worth $2 billion. That’s an extraordinary number – and it’s very hard to say what it’s based on.

Nobody even knows exactly how many young people use Facebook – but the Wall Street Journal reports that “the vast majority of students at many collegesâ€?  maintain Facebook home pages, checking in to those pages  – like two thirds of all Facebook users do – at least once a day. Not a bad advertising target – by anybody’s measure.

someone pointed this out to me earlier in the week, and i thought i’d share..

On Wednesday of this week (today), at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00
in the morning, the time and date will be: 01:02:03 04/05/06

“So glad you called, but no thank you� has become my practiced way of hanging up on the inevitable dinnertime cold-call from a telemarketer. But it happens less and less these days, partly because of the national “Do-Not-Call� list that the US Congress brought into force in 2005, and partly because marketing companies have in any case lost their enthusiasm for the cold-call as a tool.

The internet world, and practitioners of e-commerce in particular, have of course developed their own ways of being intrusive. Remember the days when you couldn’t innocently click on virtually any website without “pop-up� ads breaking out all over your screen like a small plague of boils? That distressing phenomenon, too, is somewhat in abeyance now, and not just because of pop-up blocking programs.

A change of approach, if not a change of heart, by web-marketers is under way. The case of the major pop-up pioneer, Claria Inc, is instructive.

Clara originally gained fame, or notoriety, for its ubiquitous web presence as Gator, a company name it jettisoned in 2003. Its applications carried some perhaps unfortunate names like “eWallet� (designed to track data entered on purchase forms, like credit card numbers) and DateManager.

An upsurge of anti-Gator feeling spread through the ‘net and obviously played its part in changing its operations. A critical point was reached when Yahoo turned against the growing adware company. Yahoo had benefited from revenue that Gator generated, in its then-partnership with Yahoo’s subsidiary, Overture Services – but, dramatically and ungratefully, Yahoo’s anti-spyware toolbar application introduced in 2004 started targeting and blocking Gator’s pop-ups. Other companies sued Gator for trademark infringement. (Gator’s hutzpah included this easy but galling trick: when visiting the Expedia travel site, for instance, you could get importuned, courtesy of Gator, by Expedia’s rival, Priceline.)

Now, Claria’s people (and please don’t call them Gator any more) are firmly emphasizing the willingness of its customers to be recruited into its marketing efforts. It’s new venture, PersonalWeb, offers an internet-user the chance to build his or her own website, through which personal interests will be reported (but only with the user’s agreement permission) to companies that can provide information and goods to match those interests.

There’s always going to be, in any commercial realm, a conflict between advertising that is seen as assaulting, and the seller’s need to communicate information – with the potential buyer’s desire to know existing in the middle as something of a wild card. We’ll see if, this time, Claria has gotten the balance right.