I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace.

While iPods have been able to speed up audio books for some time, the latest 3.0 iPhone / iPod Touch release has added the ability to speed up (and slow down) podcasts as well as audiobooks. That's the good news. The bad news is that whatever the algorithm is that is being used to speed up the audio ends up sounding quite rough.

For podcast listeners that are not using an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are not many options for speeding up podcasts, short of doing it yourself manually with a program like Audacity.

Luckily, there's a new site that is looking to take care of this problem for us. PodShifter is a site that will allow you to enter the RSS feed for a given podcast, and it will spit out a new feed URL that will deliver podcasts that are sped up to exactly the speed you prefer. You can choose from slowing down your feed to 0.6 times its original speed, all the way up to 3.0 times the original speed, in increments of 0.2. Based on the demo MP3s on PodShifter's homepage, the sped-up audio is quite smooth.

Unfortunately, in my testing PodShifter has generated new podcast RSS URLs, but when I put them into iTunes, the audio files that I get are exactly the same speed as the originals. I was surprised that they downloaded at all to begin with, so I'm hopeful that there is processing going on in the background and a new version of the podcast will arrive that actually is sped up.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is quite likely that some podcast publishers will not be thrilled about a republishing service such as this. Larger podcasts that rely on download statistics for determining advertising rates could potentially lose track of the subscribers that sit behind a republishing service like PodShifter. And unfortunately PodShifter's site is not particularly forthcoming with information, so it's hard to determine whether they offer publishers some manner of tracking statistics properly.

In any event, the service that PodShifter provides is a very useful one, and one I hope will succeed. Now excuse me while I go refresh my podcasts to see if any of my PodShifter subscriptions have delivered on its promise.

[via Lifehacker]

Phony-o? It sounds like an April Fools' Day joke, but it's not. The drop.io team is actually releasing new services at an amazing rate, and the latest is a conference calling, voicemail recording, podcast ready app called Phone.io. It works like any other Drop.io drop, in that you can set it up in a couple of clicks by just naming it and giving it a password.

Your phone.io drop has phone numbers you can use for voicemails or conference calls, and you can save the records as mp3s. Where phone.io really gets cool is in the number of ways you can share your stuff in very few steps. You can embed your audio in other sites, download it, or push it out to RSS or iTunes. If you're into social networks, you can also share it via Facebook or Twitter, and of course, you can share the Drop.io drop itself. Phone.io scores points for both features and ease of use, and it's definitely worth a look if you need to deal with over-the-phone audio.

Much has been made of the amazing number of fart noise apps in the iTunes App Store. Sure, they can be amusing, but if you've heard one iPhone fart, you've heard them all. Or have you? Pantscast is a much more refined fart machine that injects flatulent sound effects into any podcast you choose, automatically timed for maximum hilarity.

Pantscast comes preloaded with some podcasts that could use a good farting-up, like NPR's Fresh Air (pun probably intended) and a Yoga Meditation podcast. It's a great sample of the humor Pantscast is capable of, but the best part is the ability to Pantscast any podcast by entering its URL. My only complaint is that, due to the lack of cut and paste, it's kind of tedious to manually put in longer addresses, and Pantscast can't access the podcasts on your iPhone or directly through the iTunes store. If these iPhone limitations can someday be overcome, we may truly achieve fart app enlightenment.

Drop.io is known for having one of the best, most simple file storage interfaces out there. They've already expanded into file sending (usend.io) and tweeting (tweet.io), and music playlists are the next thing on the hit list. Enter playlist.io. It gives you 102mb of space to upload audio files into a playlist that you can play or redownload from anywhere.

Once your music is uploaded, you can customize the look of your playlist, or subscribe to it in RSS. Possibly the coolest feature is Dropcast, which lets you subscribe to your playlist as a podcast in iTunes. Forget turning Playlist.io into the next Megaupload or Rapidshare, though. It's not searchable, and they have a one-click takedown policy.

Making a podcast can be a pain in the butt. Most of them are distributed via RSS or Atom, to make it as easy as possible for listeners to get new episodes. What if you want to save a bunch of audio as a podcast, but lack the technical expertise or the patience to make an RSS feed for it? Or what if you know how, but you just don't want to bother? Well, that's why there's Huffduffer.

Huffduffer will stitch audio files into a podcast for you, and put them into an RSS feed automatically. You can add your own styff, or throw together some of the great "inspiration" that's already on Huffduffer. They've linked some of the best free content on the web, like TED talks and This American Life. To make things even easier, there's a browser bookmarklet you can save, to easily Huffduff any interesting audio you run across. I'm already thinking of Huffduffer as the Tumblr of podcasting: good concept, great ease of use, definitely worth checking out.

FeedDemon has been the best RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they bought FeedDemon. The best news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth every penny), it's now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is easy to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator's web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the ability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you choose to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

If you're as busy as rest of us, you may not have time to catch all the latest presidential election details on the evening news. Fortunately, you can still keep up by listening to a few really excellent podcasts while you're commuting or working out. [Note: All links open in iTunes.]

Listen to selected speeches from the Democratic National Convention in a podcast series put together by the DNC. It's got all the usual suspects like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but you can also catch speeches given by Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and some of the governors in attendance.

The Republican National Convention will also have speeches available as the event gets underway today in Minnesota.

For a general overview of what's happening with the election, have a listen to National Public Radio's "It's All Politics," a weekly podcast covering news and events in the presidential race. If it's political punditry you're after, choose from Bill Maher, Dan Carlin, Bill Moyers, and others.

Download Pod is an occasional series about our favorite podcasts. If you have suggestions for podcasts you think we should check out, let us know in the comments or via our tips page.

BlogAmp is a service that generates embeddable podcasts for your blog. BlogAmp calls them audiocasts, to include both streaming and downloadable 'casts, but we'll stick with "podcasts." Those were streaming too, last we heard. BlogAmp basically handles the generation of your podcast from start to finish: uploading, creating an embedded player, and creating an RSS feed.

BlogAmp's business model seems to be based on selling storage space. For a fee, you can upload your mp3 files -- support for other formats would be a plus! -- and avoid the need for other hosting. If you've already got plenty of storage space on another server (the server that hosts your blog, for example), you can use BlogAmp's other features for free. Some of these are cool: you can reskin the player a little bit and add download links for the individual mp3s in your list. Some of them are a little bit obnoxious: do we really want to make it easier to add "e-commerce" links to a podcast player?

If you know how to put together a podcast, but you're having trouble creating an RSS feed or finding a way to play it from your blog, BlogAmp could be a useful tool. For veterans of audio on the web, there's probably nothing here you can't already do yourself and customize more carefully.

Last time we told you about a science podcast that was all about getting to the truth, now let's look at a podcast that covers the other side of science. Escape Pod is a weekly short story podcast hosted by Stephen Eley released every Thursday. The three-year-old podcast will stretch your mind with all types of sci-fi including space, time, technology, hard science, and even weird psychological science fiction. Each episode features some of the best science fiction from the present and the past with some stories from the great digests being read as well as this years Hugo nominees.

All stories come with an introduction that helps guide the listener into the work and gives fair warning to parents about the content of the work. Each episode even carries a rating similar to movies (G to R) to help determine whether you want your kids to listen. This week's PG episode features a 2008 Hugo nominee that was published in Asimov's Science Fiction short story magazine last year. The story took our minds on an Outer Limits type journey that included a main character living out the end of his life and discovering someone who may have been the reincarnation of someone very close to him.

Escape Pod is part of a network of short story podcasts including the horror podcast, Pseudopod, and the fantasy podcast, PodCastle.

Download Pod is an occasional series about our favorite podcasts. If you have suggestions for podcasts you think we should check out, let us know in the comments or via our tips page.

We'd never, ever turn down a good ghost story. Aliens, even the abducting kind (especially the abducting kind!) are incredibly cool. Still, we are pretty sure that T. Rex existed and didn't use those huge incisors for gnashing hellaciously into cantaloupes and mangoes. And we have enough acquaintances who act a little too similarly to lower primates to believe Darwin was too terribly far off.

We really dig people who can talk about the Drake Equation. We dig people who can speak articulately about science, sound extra intelligent, and still be accessible enough that we are able to follow along.

Feel the same? Check out The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The weekly podcast is produced by the New England Skeptical Society and the James Randi Educational Foundation. Each week the panel takes on news from fringe science and takes a scientific look at controversial issues from a number of scientific fields.

Scientific podcasts are a funny thing. There are many out there that remind us way too much of our college days when we sat for two or three hours in a hot lecture hall listening to a professor full of even hotter air drone on about weather patterns. But there are gems like The Skeptic's Guide, which feel much more like you're sitting a table in a restaurant having a conversation with your smartest friends.

And these guys (and girls!) are smart. The host, Dr. Stephen Novella, is a neurologist teaching at Yale Medical School. Rebecca Watson is the resident Skepchick on the panel, and has the unique claim to fame that there's an asteroid named after her. Jay and Robert Novella are regular contributors and leaders in the New England Skeptical Society. And the weekly guest, James Randi, is the most interesting of the bunch: He's a magician. He's a world famous escape artist. And he's ready to expose, explain, and share with the layman the very scientific explanations for the magical things that go on in the paranormal and pseudoscientific world.

The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is available from their site, or through iTunes.

The NPR Intelligence Squared US (IQ2US) audio podcast is a series of recordings of public debates held in New York focusing on hot-button issues (most specific to the U.S.) like immigration, affirmative action, and global warming. The debates are held in the Oxford-style meaning there are one motion (topic), one moderator, three speakers for the motion, and three speakers against the motion.

Prior to the start of the debate, visitors cast their votes for or against the motion. During the debate, the results of the initial vote are shown, and the visitors vote again at the end of the debate to decide which side "won."

The debates move quickly, and it's nice to learn things in the car on the way to work instead of listening to drunk 30-somethings talk about "news."

The IQ2US series holds five debates in the spring, and five debates in the fall, and is available from the iTunes Store or the NPR website.

If you named your dog Spike, dream of vacationing in Sunnydale, and never quite got over what happened to Jenny Calendar, then you'll love the gem of a podcast we've uncovered for you. Buffy Between the Lines is original fan fic written and produced by a group of volunteers who probably know more about Xander, Willow, and Buffy than Joss Whedon himself.

Season One is, as they say, already in the can and all the episodes are available for download right from the site. All the usual suspects are featured, including some special appearances by Angel and his crew. The dialogue is snappy and spot-on, right down to the barbs Spike trades with, well, everyone.

Hurry up and get caught up with Season One. The cast is getting ready to start taping the second season and it should be available soon.

We spend a lot of time in front of our computers. But when we finally step away, you know what we like to do? Relax with a good book. No, just kidding! We download digital media from our computers and enjoy it on the go. With that in mind, today we're starting an occasional series bringing you reviews of some of our favorite audio and video podcasts.

We're going to try to avoid the big names at the top of the iTunes charts and bring you some of the more obscure podcasts we think are worth listening to. But that doesn't mean we won't don't love us some Science Friday from NPR or Diggnation. It just means that you're probably already well aware of them. We'd rather tell you about the Naked Scientists, Digital Planet, and Love & Radio.

If you have suggestions for podcasts you think we should check out, let us know in the comments. And stay tuned for our first irregularly scheduled review.

Podcast aggregator and search engine Odeo is beta testing a new web site, and from what we've seen so far, it's a vast improvement over Odeo's existing page. The first thing you'll notice (if you're invited to join the beta after signing up for an invite), is a new, cleaner look that makes it easier to find featured podcasts and browse by categories. But much more impressive is the new search feature. We didn't realize how poor the old search feature was until we tried searching for podcasts using the new search box and actually got accurate results immediately.

Here are a few other features of the new site:

• Users can rate and comment on shows
• Users can now submit feeds for podcasts that aren't included in the Odeo library
• There's a pretty new Flash player
  

The beta page is still a work in progress and not every feature is available. For example, in order to get embed code for placing podcasts on your web site you have to click through to Odeo classic. But we're pretty excited at the direction Odeo is taking.

Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for "excessive usage" -- yet refuse to issue that threat in writing or tell you what "excessive usage" really means?

Well, that is exactly the situation Dave Winer, tech analyst, pioneer and RSS God, has found himself in. Comcast has restored his service, but still says they will shut him down for up to 12 months if he doesn't alter his usage patterns. The kicker? They won't tell him what level he needs to adjust his usage patterns to in order to stay compliant.

Can they do this? Especially without issuing the warning in writing? And what exactly defines, "excessive" in Comcast's terms? Many of us here at Download Squad use Comcast and we DO love to download, so this issue bothers us both on principle and for practicality. Although Comcast has been more receptive via their @Comcastcares Twitter account than they were via phone, this whole situation makes us very, very uncomfortable.

We spoke to Dave earlier today (the podcast of our conversation is here) and this is what he had to say:

"I thought it was an outage and they said I had to call a special number and that I had been disconnected as a matter of policy."