Comedy podcasts run the length of the field, from one-man ruminations to frantic bit-factories to interview shows. Some are free, some cost, and many offer a combination of the two options. Below the fold, I offer a far-from-inclusive introduction to different types of comedy podcasts and have tried to include a few that are acknowledged to be influential.

What the Fuck? Comedian Marc Maron's podcast has gained huge momentum over the last year and for good reason as far as I'm concerned. Wide in scope, Maron combines introductory monologues of mind-bending self-absorption with interviews, on-site reporting (Creation Museum, anyone?) and live shows.

Sometimes the interviews are super funny. Tom Lennon of The State and Reno 911 and Bob Saget of Full House, America's Funniest Home Videos and How I Met Your Mother almost bent space-time they were so funny. Sometimes, like his interview with the late Mike DeStefano, they're touching and at other times, like Judd Apatow and Robin Williams, they're extremely interesting, winkling out details you'd never heard elsewhere.

Two interviews were profoundly squirm-worthy: Gallagher (who walked out) and Carlos Mencia (who required two interview for Maron to dislodge him from his talking points.) Few journalists could match Maron's interviewing technique, neither for quality nor for the risks they take.

Comedy Death Ray Radio. CDR Radio grew out of Comedy Death Ray, a weekly Los Angeles-based comedy show that began in 2002 and has been credited in part for creating what is now known as "alternative comedy." One of CDR's co-creators, Mr. Show writer Scott Aukerman, is the host.

The strong position the show has given the podcast in the world of comedy and comedy fans has given it a lot of reach. Wise guest choices (Paul Tompkins, Andy Richter, Nick Kroll, Reggie Watts, Sarah Silverman, Russell Brand and Tig Notaro) have kept its momentum up.

Walking the Room. Comedians Greg Behrendt (best known for "He's Just Not That Into You" and "telling jokes in front of people") and Dave Anthony (he's this one guy) co-host a slop-bucket of a podcast, sloshing with unspeakable filth, studded with neologisms and streaked with tittering.

Recent episodes include "Old Yeller Hamster and Fish Cliffhanger," "Blood Toilet and the Little Big Dollhouse Explanation" and the vacuum-inducing "Blood Face Nap Man and Cracky the Bike Thief." Sometimes the show's very funny, sometimes a bit insidery, but always a performance and (so far) free as the wind.

Other comedy podcasts of note

• Jimmy Pardo's Never Not Funny
• Paul F. Tompkins's Pod F. Tompkast
• Superego
• The Sound of Young America
• The Nerdist
• Greg Fitzsimmons's Fitzdog Radio
• Doug Benson's Doug Loves Movies

If you'd like to read much, much more about comedy podcasts, more by far than I hate myself enough to match, check out Splitside's "A Seriously Comprehensive Guide to Comedy Podcasts."

Finally, if you want to tell me that podcasts have never been more popular and will be the vehicle of our salvation, or that Gervais is a genius, or just recommend comedy podcasts not mentioned above, have at 'er. And speaking of 'er, where are my comedy podcast ladies at? They seem a little thin on the ground.

Improvements to the App

Since our last look at Augmented ID, it's clear that the company has been making great strides in the development of this mobile application. Most notably, the interface's design has been greatly improved. It now has a much cleaner layout and looks to be far easier to use. The social networking icons, for example, now appear big and bubbly, casually overlaid on top of each other in a row at the bottom of the screen, ready for dragging upward when you go to create your own profile. The same icons, all evenly sized, also float around people's heads after the app recognizes them. You can then tap the icons to see the profile information they contain. For example, a Twitter icon could showcase the user's latest tweets when tapped.

The recognition process, too, seems improved. A square shown by a broken line appears on your mobile's screen around the face you're trying to recognize. This closely resembles the autofocus systems found on most digital cameras today. When the app "sees" the face, the square's outline turns from grey to green and the social networking icons zoom in from all sides to float around that person's face.

The only downside to Recognizr (besides the fact that the prototype isn't available for use today!) is that it requires both participants to use the mobile application in order to work. That makes the app far less creepy than some all-knowing "Minority Report"-like technology, but severely limits its potential at the same time. Since the prototype is currently Android-only, too, the database of users available for facial matching would only include those who have installed the application on their Android phone and have taken the time to set up their own profile.

That's not to say that some future version of the application couldn't scour the web for faces to match - implementing this feature would be challenging, but not entirely impossible. There are plenty of photos on social networks to pull from in the case that a particular person wasn't already a Recognizr user. However, whether or not the company plans to develop their app to that point is unknown at this time.

Coming Soon to Android

After demonstrating Recognizr at the recent Mobile World Congress, Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT, announced that his company plans to partner with someone who can help bring the mobile concept app to market. He anticipates having a commercial application available in a little as a month or two.

You can watch video demos of both Augmented ID and Recognizr on YouTube, here and here.

Frankly, we're exhausted.

One topic that's been top-of-mind at RWW, though, week in and week out, has been location-aware apps and technologies. We're so excited about these kinds of technology that our next premium report is going to center around a lot of geo-based tech! More on that later. For now, fill up your iPod with these three podcasts on location-aware tech, and have a relaxing, informative weekend.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 52:50

All Points Blog is quickly becoming one of our favorite resources for location-based tech information. In this podcast, we are asked, "If consumers think of geodata as a commodity, what does that say for its future? What are the key data relationships? And what, if anything, will differentiate one offering from another?" The All Points editors ponder these questions with the full knowledge that most consumers know and care little about who makes, manages and updates basemaps.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 15:22

Finally, VerySpatial presents a 2009 retrospective and a look forward into the location-based tech that may come in 2010. Editors Jesse, Sue and Frank present an admirable year-in-review show that covers the most noteworthy computing, web and mobile trends that continue to shape the tech we currently use.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 28:00

Many thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for finding these gems, and a huge hat-tip to Huffduffer creator Jeremy Keith for making such a nifty tool for all us podcast lovers.

To subscribe to the Podcast Parade, check out our Huffduffer page and feed, or just use this link to subscribe through iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy!

But lest your brains turn to jelly during your time offline and away from work, load up your iPod with our weekly selection of podcasts sure to entertain and inform. The topic of this week's parade is augmented reality (AR), the technology used to add a layer of data and visualizations over the real world in which we live. Download these discussions of a hot new area of tech, and give them a listen at your leisure!

First up, here's Daniel Klotz and Ryan Mast, two Lancaster, PA-based technologists, discuss the social web and how our online activities increasingly "augment" our lives in the physical world. What does the future hold for us as users of technology and as human beings? How do we remain civilized in a heavily augmented reality? This is a great podcast to start thinking about how AR works and what it does in general terms.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 32:43

Next, we have critical commentary from BusinessWeek's tech editor Peter Coy and Steve Wildstrom, who feels that mobile AR isn't real enough yet. Wildstrom makes the point that mobile devices don't have accurate enough data to make AR work - not yet, at least. While he praises some apps, such as a subway finder, but still finds that most of the AR applications he's tested haven't been particularly helpful. Of course, Wildstrom does have a few ideas on how to improve the state of mobile AR - listen on for an idea of how developers and manufacturers should be raising the bar.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 8:36

Here's an interesting conversation between the editors of All Points, a location technology blog. They discuss how AR works and how it relates to geospatial technology. And they get to the point of many end users' concerns by questioning whether AR is simply a set of cool but essentially useless gimmicks or whether there are, in fact, real-world applications for these tools and - more importantly - money to be made in the AR market.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 23:03

Finally, check out mobile developers Roger Brinkley and Terrence Barr talk to Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson about how to build non-visual AR apps, focusing on API access.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 22:44

To subscribe to the Podcast Parade, check out our Huffduffer page and feed, or just use this link to subscribe through iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy!

Your primary focus at this very moment might be your Friday night drink-ups, but we've got a new feature to help you maintain your mental clarity and conversational arsenal throughout the weekend - all while keeping you at a safe distance from your computer and allowing you to roam freely through the real world.

We're happy to present the Friday Podcast Parade! Load up your iPod with this curation of experts on audio, and give these chats a listen while walking your dogs, working out or running errands. You'll be smarter for it, we promise!

Put briefly, the search giant has threatened to pull out of China entirely, shuttering its Google.cn portal and closing its offices due to a string of attacks carried out on Gmail accounts from what are presumed to be agents of the Chinese government - not to mention China's longstanding censorship of search keywords and websites, which Google stated has long made the company uncomfortable.

First up, we have commentary from NPR's All Things Considered. Although NPR's reporter Laura Sydell said the attacks couldn't be pinned directly on the Chinese government just yet, she did get to speak directly to Google's SVP David Drummond, who makes an appearance in this podcast. Sydell also spoke to Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, who discuss the involvement of authoritarian governments in online activities.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 3:42

In our second offering, Adam Segal, Ira A. Lipman Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies for the Council for Foreign Relations, is interviewed about the situation and makes several interesting points.

As we're all likely aware, this move on Google's part comes at a tense moment in the U.S.-China relationship. "The Google decision also feeds into a broader sense of China as spoiler... I would suspect the next six months is going to be very bumpy," he said.

Segal also sees the move as an indicator that the "world-wide" Web is breaking apart. With various tools widely used in some parts of the world and abandoned in others (e.g., Orkut in Brazil or Friendster in Southeast Asia), can we really argue with him? But Segal sees further fragmentation of the Internet into almost entirely separate entities, one based in the Western world and one in the East.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 9:27

Finally, from The World, we have this double-whammy tech podcast, the first half of which is a discussion of affairs in Haiti and the second half of which focuses on the topic of this week's parade. If you skip to the 10:33 mark, you'll hear Clark Boyd recapping the news and an in-depth report from veteran East Asia correspondent Mary Kay Magistad, who has covered news in this region for almost six years. She states that surfing the web right now in Beijing is like being in a different world now that Google has unblocked search terms and content, leaving China's censors scrambling to keep up. The rest of her report is a fascinating mosaic of interviews and insight - a must-listen for those who would be informed and sound intelligent on the Google-China debacle.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 19:06

To subscribe to the Podcast Parade, check out our Huffduffer page and feed, or just use this link to subscribe through iTunes. You can also check out other podcasts on this topic from our friends at CNET's Buzz Out Loud and The Next Web, who told us their audio commentary will be published shortly on their blog.

We hope you'll enjoy this new weekly feature! Please let us know what you think of our Podcast Parade in the comments, and if you have a recommendation for future installments, send us an email.

The service was expertly built by UK designer Jeremy Keith and you'll know you're in for a remarkable experience when you go through the sign-up process. HuffDuffer will make you smarter and it's fun to use. Check out our 5 minute video tour of this remarkable service below.

Come be my friend and let's share great podcasts at http://huffduffer.com/marshallkirkpatrick.

Don't Miss: The Favorite Podcasts of the ReadWriteWeb Community.

Listen is currently only available for Android-powered phones such as the G1 and myTouch 3G from T-Mobile. To download the application, users can scan the enclosed QR code and follow the onscreen instructions or look for Listen in the Google Android Market.

As usual, RWW Live will be hosted by Sean Ammirati. Our guests are:

• Dennis Crowley from the previously mentioned Four Square (iTunes link). Check out ReadWriteWeb's review of Four Square. Before that, Dennis was co-founder of Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google.
• Tom Coates, from Yahoo! (creator of Fire Eagle). See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Fire Eagle's go-live.
• Mark Josephson CEO at Outside.in. See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Outside.in.

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is now available for listening to here.

• Gregg Brockway, President & Co-Founder, TripIt
• Marko Ahtisaari, CEO & Co-Founder, Dopplr
• Hugh Birch, VP of Product Development, Yapta
• Jonah Sigel, VP Business Development, PlanetEye

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is available for download here.

Overall, the application is smartly designed - the scrolling bar for the different channels at the top of the app is a very neat feature, for example - but the amount of content is somewhat limited. That, of course, is a problem that TV.com is quite familiar with, especially after Hulu pulled its videos from the service's web site.

The fact that you can't easily see if TV.com actually has full episodes of a particular show or only clips is especially problematic. A 30-second clip from 'Numb3rs,' for example, isn't usually going to be very interesting, while short clips are probably all you want from the 'Late Show with David Letterman.'

Will TV.com Push Others to Release Similar Apps?

It's a shame that there is currently no application that features a broader range of content from a larger number of networks. The Joost application is interesting, but its content, too, is limited, and we are still awaiting the launch of the rumored Hulu application. NBC experimented with an iPhone compatible mobile site a while back that actually featured full episodes, but that site doesn't seem to feature any full episodes anymore. At least, however, Apple isn't blocking these apps, which are, after all, competing with the downloadable shows in iTunes.

Half the students (32 of 64) skipped the class and listened to the podcast only. The other half attended in person, where they also received a printed handout. A week later, the students were tested on the material.

Podcast Listeners Did Better

The students who downloaded the podcast alone averaged a C (71 out of 100) but those who attended class averaged a D. And those who listened to the podcast and took notes did even better - their average was 77.

Before university classrooms empty out, it's important to note that this is only preliminary research. McKinney's study involved only a single lecture. Also, motivation may have come into play as well. Her experiment didn't count for class credit, so students were encouraged to participate with iTunes gift cards. The high scorer from each group was awarded a $15 gift certificate for use in the online store.

McKinney now plans to further study podcasts in the classroom over the course of an entire semester, instead of just one class. She wonders if students might find podcasts more useful early on in a class, when the material is still new. Still, McKinney is a big believer in the power of technology and its impact on education. "I do think it's a tool," she says. "I think that these kids are programmed differently than kids 20 years ago."

Some of the topics we expect to discuss in the show:

• Measuring effectiveness of recommendation systems
• Draw backs / problems (referring to our recent post 5 Problems of Recommender Systems)
• Opportunities our guests see for innovation in the space

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: the audio is available now.

Download MP3

RssPlayer is a step in the right direction, and we are happy that Apple has finally allowed it into the App Store. The app does a lot of things right, but it also has to abide by Apple's stringent restrictions.

The Good

Compared to Apple's own podcast implementation, RssPlayer is a major step forward. You can check for new episodes right from the app, stream audio to the device without having to first download the show, and you can even download password-protected feeds. The app also displays show notes and has some other basic functions like marking episodes as played or deleting a download.

The Bad

The app still has its limitations, however. There is no way to search for feeds, for example. You have to enter the URL of the podcast feed by hand (including the 'http://'). You can also point the app to an OPML file with your podcast subscriptions. Starting with the next version, RssPlayer will also allow you to simply click on a podcast feed in Safari and automatically subscribe to it in the app.

Far more damaging, however, is the complete lack of playback controls. We don't know if Alex decided to leave these out as a concession to Apple, but we can't believe that the developers of an audio playback application would deliberately leave this basic functionality out. According to the developers, this feature will return the next version of RssPlayer.

Because Apple insists that the apps only function within their own sandbox environment, your subscriptions won't appear in the iPod application and the audio will stop when you exit the application (though playback automatically resumes when you re-open RssPlayer).

Verdict

In most respects, RssPlayer is a major upgrade over Apple's built-in podcast player, but the downsides of having no playback controls and no podcast directory make it a bit hard to recommend the app just yet. If you are already frustrated by Apple's podcast support, however, the $1.99 for the application is money well spent, especially once the Apple approves the new versions that iron out most of the bugs we mentioned above.

Of course, if you want to take the risk, you could also jailbreak your iPhone and install the latest version of Podcaster on your phone.

Here are the details of our guests in this show (in alphabetical order):

• Brian Kissel is CEO at JanRain, Inc.
• Scott Kveton is VP of Open Platforms at Vidoop
• Chris Messina is employed by Vidoop, runs Citizen Agency and works on the DiSo Project, facilitating the development of the "Open Stack" for the social web.
• David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart.

Some of the topics we'll explore on the show include:

• How to increase adoption of OpenID
• Plans for the OpenID Foundation
• Opinions on Google Friend Connect & Facebook Connect

We welcome your suggestions, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: the audio is available now.

Download MP3

BrightKite started as a "nights and weekends" project that they submitted to TechStars, a small funding initiative similar to Y Combinator. TechStars provided mentorship, a bit of seed capital and generally got them off the ground - in return for some equity. BrightKite did a working prototype, then raised an angel round of $1M last year.

I then asked the two companies about how their product plan will be affected, if at all, by the economy downturn. I noted that Zoho has a wide variety of products in their Web Office suite, so for example do they plan to fold some of those into bigger products due to the economy? Zoho replied that they make money from their business applications, rather than their collaboration apps. So they have made it a priority to integrate their collaboration apps into the business apps over the coming year(s). They will also continue to add new apps, however those will be money-making business apps.

I put the same question to BrightKite: has their product plan changed due to the economy? BrightKite replied that it hasn't changed significantly, they were always planning to ramp up the marketing and do more partnerships this year. They also plan to introduce revenue drivers - e.g. location-based advertising and analytics for businesses. Generally the economy hasn't changed their revenue-generating plans too much, although it's perhaps brought it forward by a month or so.

In terms of success factors, Zoho mentioned that "constant innovation" has allowed them to keep ahead of the pack. In the online word processing space, there were around 17 competing apps when they launched Zoho Writer - but continually improving their product helped them keep ahead. Zoho has about 250 staff, so that has helped. On the other side of the staffing coin, BrightKite is a small 10-person team. They believe that being open and iterating on user problems is key for their success.

There are many more tips in the podcast, which we invite you to listen to below. Also let us know your own thoughts on not just surviving, but thriving, in this current economic environment.

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Cat pic: fofurasfelinas