Odeo (formerly known as Sonic Mountain) has acquired FireAnt – a podcast and Vodcast directory. TechCrunch reports the acquisition to be worth $400,000.

Acquiring Technology – Not Users

By purchasing FireAnt, Odeo has gained the FireAnt desktop media player for Windows and Mac, as well as FireAnt’s database of feeds and metadata.

However, in terms of users FireAnt is thin on the ground with a very low Alexa rank of 245,000 which I estimate to be anywhere between 5000 – 20,000 visitors a month.

Wallstrip is a site which produces short online video pieces covering stocks. Born of the blogosphere, it’s a fascinating and unusual business, so we thought we’d take an in depth look at it.

Wallstrip is a company founded by a venture capitalist who says he never intended to run it as a long-term business. It was funded with seed capital and sold less than a year later, so the company fairly screams “test project”. 

The fact that it was sold to CBS for $5M (as reported by Techcrunch) a mere nine months after launch proves that the test was successful.

Investor/advisor Fred Wilson reports that he met founder Howard Lindzon on blogs, and Howard told me that he met the show’s producers Adam Elend and Jeff Marks the same way. 

Fred, Brad Feld and others invested $600,000 and the production team was sent off with a mandate to produce a short video every business day for less than $1000, and to cover high-flying stocks with humor.

Interviews conducted: Howard Lindzon, founder and Adam Elend, founder/producer.

Google have added the ability to upload videos to Blogger, their free blogging service. The additional feature to the service was added as part of a series of updates last week.

These were mainly to resolve a technical problem with the blog publishing and hosting service. 

Publishers who use Blogger had been experiencing trouble performing various editing and posting operations last Monday and Tuesday. Google was quick to notice and repair this issue, as it was no longer a concern by Wednesday.

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One of the hardest things to find when it comes to video or audio podcasts is free music. It’s almost the holy grail for regular podcasters who don’t want to repeat the same tunes and background music again and again.

Most audio available online is currently copyright protected, and most of the rest is illegal. But it is possible to find and gain access to music that is free to download and distribute. This article is designed to help you with that goal.

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Some of you may know Kevin Nalts as the guy that put mayonnaise in his family’s hair and looks and sounds like a distant cousin to John Malkovich.

Others will probably know him better as the video viral marketing guru who has had all manner of success on YouTube with his video blogs.

As Nalts is both a Fortune 100 marketing director and something of a YouTube legend he has decided to combine his skills in the name of ridding the internet of slipshod viral marketing video blogs. And how does he intend to do this?

The number of Internet video players and aggregators is increasing, each of whch is promising to bring the latest movies, TV and podcasts to your PC.

Most of these however, rely on closed, proprietary technologies in which the viewers are passive viewers. But this isn’t the case with Miro, the newly re-branded Democracy player.

With a new look, a more cohesive website, some added features and a growing social community, Miro shows all of the signs of a good product that is going mainstream.

This is the reason behind the name change, for instance, which was decided on to remove the political connotations many had associated with the Democracy Player brand.

Miro still packs the same great features that made Democracy such a great tool:-

You can watch and store just about any video format in the player, subscribe to over 1800 online video channels, search and download movies from most of the major video publishing destinations and even download torrent files to watch them in the full-screen player.

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More vloggers are setting up their own video blogs on independent blogging platforms, causing an overall decrease in the percentage of vlogs on YouTube, according to a quarterly Mefeedia survey.

The number of independent vlogsites are up a total of 7% this quarter. The popular vlogging platform Blip.tv seems to have benefited the most from this shift, registering a 17% rise in just three months and now hosting 56% more vloggers than YouTube.