I’ve been using Thesis on Weekly Web Tools and the School of Podcastingfor about a year. It’s a great Wordpress Theme that is really customizable. The one thing that I always wanted was the ability to change the color of the tabs at the top of the page. Well with it’s latest release, Thesis makes it very easy to make changes to the menu system, but also taps into the parent/child feature of both pages and categories to really allow you to completely control what shows/hides in the menu.

Throw this into the ability to change the shape, size, and number  of columns and you may see Thesis return to this very blog (the theme I have right now I designed with Artisteer).

Watch this video so see how easy it is to chagne the colors.

Check out Thesis. There is a personal version (for one website $87) or a developer’s version (for multiple websites $164)

On 9/24/04 a search for the word “podcasts” resulted in 24 hits. Now it returns 60,700,000 results. To bad Leo Laporte thinks podcasting is dead. I’m sure he’ll say it again at the blog world expo in a few weeks.

Well a new report from Wizzard Media shows that podcast listeners are up from 15 million to 18 million. Here are some samples of that report:

Wizzard Media (NYSE Amex: WZE), the world’s largest podcasting network, today announced that for the third quarter of 2009 the Wizzard Media Network saw total podcast download requests of 332 million vs. 287 million in the third quarter of 2008, an increase of 45 million.

The number of podcast shows on the Wizzard Media Network grew from 11,600 at the end of the second quarter of 2009 to 12,281 shows at the end of the third quarter of 2009. Podcasters pay Wizzard Media to use its publishing platform and work with Wizzard to monetize their show through brand advertising and more recently, content sales (Apps).

In the third quarter of 2009 Wizzard delivered over 12.7 million podcast advertisements, its second highest quarterly total on record and an increase of 130% from 5.5 million ads in the third quarter of 2008.

So to anyone who says “Podcasting is Dead” I say “quit saying things for publicity” becuase your are wrong.

Leo Laporte said at the Online News Association Conference that Podcasting is dead because its’ too hard (apparently an iTunes one clickis to hard). In the same speech he also:

Stated that he earned 1.5 million
He sates that he has $350,000 in expenses (do the math).
He states that because of the relationship with his listeners, and the power of his niche he can charge $70 CPM.

If Leo thinks a medium that produces big profits, and can charge double what radio does (from what I’ve heard) than I wonder what criteria it takes to be “alive.” Maybe this could be Leo attempting to once again get the word Podcasting off the charts (and move Netcasting into place once he gets the trademark on the word).

If you watch his speech, I do agree that the way people will continue to consume content will change (much like the way we watch movies has changed. From the big screen to the ipod screen, to netflix.com).

The folks at feedburner said the average podcast has 70 subscribers, but that subscribers are growing 20-30% a month. Sounds pretty dead to me.

Adam Corolla Gets Hired By the People Who Fired Him

Adam Corolla got fired from radio (After replacing Howard Stern) started a podcast and never skipped a beat. To bad podcasting is dead. Oh wait, the same company that fired him is now co-producing his podcast and will help sell sponsorships. Carolla is avergaing 130,000 listeners. To bad its so hard to subscribe.

It’s almost as if Leo did it as a publicity stunt. Because if podcasting is dead, then I want to be dead too! Here is the video of Leo’s speech