One of the more curious growth areas in media has been the rise - largely under the radar - of podcasting. The simple act of voices telling stories, conducting interviews or teaching weird and wonderful things has made it one of the most important communication mediums of the 21st Century. Around 73 million Americans identify as regular podcast listeners, and that number is only forecast to rise. With that in mind, we want to help you get started making your own with our pick of the best podcasting microphones around.

The popularity of podcasting can be largely attributed to communities that form around popular podcasts. So it makes sense that more and more people are looking to podcasting as a way of telling their story.

The good news is that there is a relatively low barrier to entry.

Best Podcasting Microphones

JD: Podcasting — then and now; what do you make of its evolution?

DC: It has gone from being passive to a very personal on-demand commercial work. We have the ability to totally integrate content and commercials - it’s a good mindset. It went from a Howard Stern read to a re-envisioned, re-engaged conversation. It is the new native, a really positive, advertorial. We have the ability to weave in the right message at the right time and see more organic growth for both the listener and the advertiser. If you can think of a subject, there's a podcast for it and more coming on daily.

A solid, standalone microphone will offer a wider frequency response range than a basic headset mic, letting it pick up all the nuance in your voice for a richer sound. With different pickup patterns they can also make it easier to cut down on the background noise that might be coming from your gaming PC or gaming keyboard. Some microphones can even let you switch between different pickup patterns, so you can focus on just your voice with a cardioid pattern one day while you might try to record you and a guest with a bi-directional pattern the next day.

With all that in mind, we will help guide you through a variety of quality microphones that can fit in a range of production environments. So, whether you just want to stream games on weekends or plan on making a half-dozen podcast series, you'll be able to find a microphone suited to the task.

For those of us who are iPhone users, I asked Jimmy Atkinson at Edu-Tastic to share a list similar to the one I posted for you yesterday but for the iPhone. Here it is! (The link to the webpage is: http://toponlineuniversityreviews.com/2009/25-essential-free-iphone-apps-for-lifelong-learners/

by Miranda on July 14, 2009

11. Speeek!: Contains over 1,500 useful phrases while traveling overseas. By simply talking into your iPhone in English, Speeek! will find the phrase and speak it in Chinese.
12. Events Finder: Provides events from multiple event sources, such as Upcoming, Eventbrite, and TicketStumbler, all in one application.
13. iSayHello: Speak German, English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish or Polish. Choose your language course and off you go with the language travel guide. This easy-to-use talking travel dictionary with superb audio output is more of a vocabulary trainer and dictionary than a translation program.
14. New York on Tap: New York on Tap was designed to help people find great bars in New York City. It’ll also help you locate the nearest subway and help you figure out where to go next.
15. Payless Car Rental: Rent a Car using your iPhone. Travelers can view, modify, or cancel their reservation using the iPhone. "Call to Book" button connects the customer directly to Payless Car Rental’s call center.
16. Bell Hop: Find photos, information, rates and more on this fast, easy-to-use lodging mobile search.
17. London Travel Guide: Packed full of cool features our London Travel Guides are everything you that would expect from an electronic tour guide, only it’s free.
18. Good Food: GoodFood by Goodrec is the best way to find great places to eat! See what other users love and hate.
19. TripIt: Use your iPhone to access your TripIt itineraries whether you’re online, offline or in airplane mode. TripIt is the best way to organize and share your travel plans. Forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt automatically creates a master itinerary for your trip, with detailed information about flights, hotels, rental cars and much more. It also includes maps, driving directions and local weather.
20. SushiGuru: Take SushiGuru with you to sound like a pro when you order sushi. SushiGuru provides you with a searchable database of over 200 entries of Japanese and English names of sushi and sushi rolls.

21. Art. Learn all about great artists and their works with this factbook app that also lets you quiz yourself to see how much you are learning.
22. Art Gallery Premium. With over 7,500 works of art in their database, you can bring up your favorite famous work of art on your iPhone or browse to learn about artists you might not know.
23. Art Envi Deluxe. Like having a giant museum in your phone, this app contains works by famous artists as well as specialized categories such as Japanese art.
24. Kaleido. While not high on boosting knowledge, any art lover will appreciate taking photos and creating kaleidoscope effects with them.
25. Photo Lab Daily. This free version allow you to take a photo with your iPhone and once a day you can use the Photo Lab tools to enhance your photos. There is a version available for a fee if you want to do more than one a day.
26. MyPaint Free. Finger paint on a blank canvas or use one of your photos from your photo roll to find your artistic talent with this app.
27. Pencil Pusher. This app allows you to draw as if with a pencil. Write, erase, choose from a variety of backgrounds, choose colors, and more.
28. Bonsai. Learn the traditional art of bonsai care with this app that provides you the opportunity to adjust water, trim the tree, and monitor its overall health.

29. Taber’s Medical Dictionary. Touting 30% more medical terms than other medical dictionaries, this one offers definitions, photos, Patient Care Statements, and more.
30. Registered Nurse. Any nurse studying for the NCLEX exam will love this app that provides a practice exam that tests you in over 20 different subjects.
31. Normal Lab Values. Medical professionals or anyone interested in learning more about laboratory results will appreciate having normal values readily available.
32. Medical Drugs. This app provides detailed information on hundreds of pharmaceutical medications.
33. Diagnosaurus DDx. With over 1,000 diagnoses, anyone can perform differential diagnosis quickly and easily with this app.
34. MedCards. This app replaces the laminated cards physicians carry around and also allows anyone interested in learning to have instant reference to such things as EKG values, Mental Status Exam guide, Snellen chart, and more.
35. MedAbbreviations. Get over 13,000 medical abbreviations with definitions, explanations, a search feature, and more.
36. Skyscape Medical Resources. Find all kinds of medical information such as drug information, evidence-based clinical information, medical calculator, and a med-alert based on a specialty of your choosing.
37. Human Atlas. Geared for medical professionals, patients, and consumers, get a 3D explanation along with over 150 common medical treatments and conditions.
38. Medical Exam. Whether you are studying for your medical exam or just want to have a profound knowledge of medicine, this app helps you learn from 14 different categories.

39. Where to Golf: Gives golfers all the information about a golf course and how to get there. Whether on business, on vacation or in your home town, you’re only a touch away from finding the course you’re looking for.
40. Tetris: Take Tetris for a spin on your iPhone and iPod Touch to experience new twists and enhanced graphics. Drag, Flick and Poke your way through 15 challenging levels.
41. Sudoku: This application has more than 10,000 puzzles. So enjoy one of America’s favorite games, but try to get some work done, too.
42. Crossword: This is a very thorough Crossword application with various levels of difficulty.
43. Word Warp: Make words out of the six jumbled letters provided at each game’s start.
44. Cube Runner: Think eSnakei for current generation telephones. Boatloads of fun, just don’t run your boat into the cubes.
45. Topple: Topple is a quick, tower building game that is theoretically simple yet surprisingly addictive.
46. Trism: A little bit like Bejeweled meets Tetris, Trism stands alone as a distinctive, fun and brain-taxing challenge.
47. Wurdle: a Boggle-like word game available in the iTunes app store. The game is jammed-packed with features, challenging, and most of all, it’s fun.
48. 400 Free iPhone Games: The perfect cure for boredom. This go-to site has 400 free games, from logic cames to old-school arcade games.

49. USA Factbook Free: This reference packet is great for anyone in a civics, history or political science course that covers the U.S. Access key documents, lists of the flags, state capitals and other stats.
50. Stars: Anatomy students can use this tool as a resource when studying constellations.
51. The Chemical Tough: Lite Edition: View the periodic table when you download this free app.
52. Formulas Free: This app brings you free calculus formulas.
53. iQuotations: Look up quotes to use in papers or just as general inspiration.
54. Math Ref Free: Get free reference packs for geometry, algebra, trig, derivatives and more.
55. AllTheCountries: Get facts about literacy rate, economy, population, area and more for every country.
56. Your Rights: Use this app for political science courses or just as backup when you get into trouble at school.
57. iTranslator: Study abroad students and panicked foreign language students can use this tool to connect to Google Translator, Babel Fish or Free Translation.
58. Quickpedia Lite: This app makes it easier and faster to use Wikipedia.

59. Jourist Visual PhraseBook English. Use this visual aid with 20 different languages to help you show the person what you mean. It also include the written phrase in both English and your target language.
60. iTranslate Ultimate. Translate words between English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian, then have the words repeated back to you in the target language with this app.
61. Translator with Voice. Get translations in 34 different languages with voice support on most of them.
62. DragonDian. Use this dictionary to draw Chinese characters to quickly and easily find an English translation.
63. WordPower Lite – Italian. This free app gives you one Italian word a day to practice and master by listening to audio, recording and playing back your own voice, and using flashcards.
64. iSpeak Spanish. Translate between Spanish and English with this app that also allows you to hear words spoken in high quality English and Spanish voices.
65. Gengo Flashcards – French. This app uses visual cues and the voices of native French speakers with flashcards to help you learn French. Take a picture of any object, then add the French and English words to it, and you have created your own flashcard to add to the stack.
66. Lonely Planet Japanese Phrasebook. Whether traveling or learning Japanese, use this app to get over 600 written and spoken Japanese phrases.
67. Byki German. Learn German in no time with this app that includes native speakers, quizzes, and a phrasebook.
68. WordPower – Thai. Listen to 2000 Thai words for proper pronunciation and see the words and phrases in three versions–original Thai, Romanized, and English.

69. Inquisitor: This super fast search tool also makes suggestions for your searches.
70. Last.fm: Search music, artists and more with Last.fm for the iPhone.
71. Repairpal: This app will help you find auto repair shop and support.
72. Job Search: Indeed.com’s search application lets you find jobs by location and job description.
73. SearchMe: SearchMe is a new way to search the web on your phone. Unlike all other search engines that return a bunch of links, SearchMe lets you see a "coverflow" of pages that match your search results.
74. U.S. Historical Documents: U.S. Historical Documents contains over 100 of the most influential documents in U.S. history and they will be stored directly on your iPhone/iTouch. Quickly and easily find any text from any document with the fastest and most powerful search engine available on the iPhone.
75. 3GPS OS 3.0: 3GPS OS 3.0 tells you how fast, high and where you are. Whether you’re climbing a hill, touring or running a marathon, with 3GPS OS 3.0 your iPhone shows your current altitude, speed and course.

1 MILLION FREE VISITORS ON YOUR WEBSITE !!! Hurry up downloading the secrets while it's in here!

What if you could synchronize the contacts in your Apple Powerbook’s Address Book to your cell phone? What if your car could use the same contacts in your phone to make calls with Bluetooth? That would be cool!

What if you could use your Mac Powerbook to check your email and get on the internet wirelessly. Yea sure, you can drive around looking for wireless hotspots, or pay to use the wireless service at Starbucks. But what if it did not matter where you were.

Dial into your office computer using your Bluetooth phone and MacWise terminal emulation.

Use Your Mac Powerbook to Connect to the Internet using your Motorola Razr V3xx Bluetooth Phone and a 3G High Speed Internet Connection .
(Browse the Internet and check your email)

A very easy and convenient way to record and email a voice message
from your iPhone or iPod Touch to yourself or to others.
http://www.carnationsoftware.com/SayitMailit.html

Say it & Mail it version 1.4 was submitted to the iTunes Store today. It should be released in a couple of weeks and will be a free upgrade. You will be able to send a voice memo, picture and map location to an iPhone as an instant message. Pretty cool!

Leo Laporte is a Radio and TV Personality.
He hosted Tech TV for many years and now is host and producer of the TWiT Netcasts at http://twit.tv

You can take a look at Apple's web page to see their featured business apps for iPhone and the current top 10 selling apps.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-everything/work.html

It is very cool to use your iPhone from anywhere and post to your blog. All you need to do is record your audio, take a photo or movie, turn on the map location switch and send your email to your blog.

Record and email voice memos using your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Use it to email reminders to yourself or email messages to anyone.

There have been several requests to create a MacWise iPhone app. Unfortunately, that would require a jail-broken iPhone and a year of programming time. But the next best thing is actually very cool and has advantages over a limited-function iPhone app. It uses Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to let you see and control your Mac screen from anywhere on your iPhone. It's just as if you were sitting in front of your Mac using MacWise via your iPhone.

Say it & Mail it is the quickest and easiest way to email a voice memo from your iPhone or iPod Touch to yourself or to others.

This new version lets you 'Shake it & Mail it'. You can optionally shake your iPhone or iPod touch to start and stop recording. Then just one tap to email a voice memo.

MindFull List is a simple checklist program that syncs your checklists with devices on your iCloud account including other Macs, iPhones, iPads and the Apple Watch.

Create a checklist on your Mac and it will magically appear on your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

Download printable scrapbooking supplies, titles, phrases, quotes, sayings and ideas ebook. Download Free Sample expressions ebook.

Now you can learn Photoshop in less than 2 hours thanks to newly released, interactive video tutorials that play on your computer screen. You don't even need to own the Photoshop software to use these videos. Everything you need to learn Photoshop is included

Call it laziness. Call it busy-ness. (As opposed to busi-ness. Which is actually true... I love words...) But as much as I love to produce audio posts (which stems from back in the days of my poetry site, circa 1999-2003), it takes way too long to really do it well. Once a week I can commit myself to doing a full-fledged radio broadcast on some type of a continuous basis. But most of the time

Following a re-design of the MadeForOne.com site architecture, a new full content feed has been set up. As a result, the existing feed files, including this one, will soon be retired. Mfonews.xml has been re-directed to http://www.madeforone.com/Articles/index.php/feed/ . If you use an aggregator to view MadeForOne.com headlines, and it has not re-directed automatically to the new feed, please replace http://www.madeforone.com/mfonews.xml with http://www.madeforone.com/Articles/index.php/feed/ . This change is intended to facilitate more frequent updates of news and features on mass customization topics. Thank you for your co-operation and your interest in MadeForOne.com.

Ninjalane Podcast: In this episode the duo talk about the current state of mobile devices and how they have really become more of a fondle device and less of a communication tool. Later they update us with the games they have been playing including some that aren’t so good.

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The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.21. This release fixes several bugs as well as CVE-2015-0231, CVE-2014-9427 and CVE-2015-0232. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.21 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.5. This release fixes several bugs as well as CVE-2015-0231, CVE-2014-9427 and CVE-2015-0232. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.6.5 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.37. Six security-related bugs were fixed in this release, including CVE-2015-0231, CVE-2014-9427 and CVE-2015-0232. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.37 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.38. Seven security-related bugs were fixed in this release, including CVE-2015-0273 and mitigation for CVE-2015-0235. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.38 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.22. This release fixes several bugs and addresses CVE-2015-0235 and CVE-2015-0273. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.22 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.6. This release fixes several bugs and addresses CVE-2015-0235 and CVE-2015-0273. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.6.6 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.39. Six security-related bugs were fixed in this release, including CVE-2015-0231, CVE-2015-2305 and CVE-2015-2331. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.39 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.23. Several bugs have been fixed as well as CVE-2015-0231, CVE-2015-2305 and CVE-2015-2331. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.23 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.7. Several bugs have been fixed as well as CVE-2015-0231, CVE-2015-2305 and CVE-2015-2331. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.6.7 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.24. Several bugs have been fixed some of them beeing security related, like CVE-2015-1351 and CVE-2015-1352. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.24 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.8. Several bugs have been fixed some of them beeing security related, like CVE-2015-1351 and CVE-2015-1352. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version. For source downloads of PHP 5.6.8 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.