This morning PodZinger announced its partnership with Thames Valley pod.tv to power search capabilities for its Web site . Thames Valley pod.tv is the UK’s fastest growing video podcast webTV site, providing original content across a wide range of topics including art, music, culture, cooking, gardening, business, legal, illustrated audio stories, families and parenting, and documentaries. This partnership is unique for PodZinger in that it’s our first venture outside of the U.S.

For more details, click here.

It’s digg’s second birthday and with that, it launched several new features, including a section dedicated solely to pocasts. The new feature allows you to digg either a particular podcast series or individual episodes of the podcast and also lists the most popular episodes according to the number of diggs.

Digg, a community driven site, started out two years ago with mostly breaking news content. With that success, digg is starting to branch out to more content-rich media like video and podcast. Community voting has been proven to be a highly successful model in creating buzz around breaking news and for digg to start branching out to video and podcasts is a sure sign that the online video industry will have a strong stand in the next stage of online media.

Om Malik of NewTeeVee writes,

“Digg is the latest social web filter to embrace video aggressively. A few days ago, StumbleUpon added video stumbling to its offering. As more and more video moves online, finding the good stuff is going to become harder and harder.”

Malik is right. There are ton of rich media online now that is waiting to be discovered. Digg has categorized the podcasts in different categories and the top “diggs” are already populated by already highly popular podcasts. Like some of the other smaller news item, you still need to do a lot of digging to find a less popular podcast with similarly “good stuff” as mentioned by Malik. We’ll just have to wait and see if the community will be able to turn that around and use digg as a platform to “dig out” other great content in the podcasting world.

David Hallerman, senior analyst from market research firm eMarketer, recently published a report on the Internet Video Audience. In the report, Hallerman covers the number of Internet video viewers, audience demographics and how people watch video online. For advertisers and content creators this information is invaluable, as consumers can now watch TV or other videos through YouTube or DVRs without the interruption of advertising.

In the beginning of the report Hallerman poses the question, “Can Internet video ads be as effective, or even more effective, than TV commercials?” It is obvious that here at PodZinger we think the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

Some of PodZinger’s recent market research findings are cited in the report, including what video content consumers watched the most. To see all of PodZinger’s findings in detail, visit the November 20 posting, “Market Research on Online Advertising.”

If you’re interested in reading more of Hallerman’s Internet Video Audience report, you can buy it online at: http://www.emarketer.com/SiteSearch.aspx?arg=Internet+video+audience.

Twenty-three percent of Americans used the Internet as a source for news in 2000, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. In 2006, that number increased to 31 percent. Traditional media sources are taking note of this growing trend and making their Web sites more interactive by emphasizing video heavily. Major business publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and BusinessWeek already incorporate video into their online editions on a regular basis. On Monday, CNBC.com announced its revamped Web site, putting great prominence on video. The new site offers video-on-demand and streaming video that surpass their typical broadcast footage.

While these accompaniments offer audiences a greater source of information, they are only as valuable as their air time. Online audio and video search engines can extend the shelf life of this content, allowing users unprecedented access to all archived material. With more than 15,000 archived videos and 75 new clips added each day as on CNBC.com, think of how much more valuable the content would be to audiences if they could search through all of the previously aired material.

PodZinger is already in discussions with companies looking into our audio and video search technology to breathe new life into their archived content. With the ability to now tie advertising to old and new content, making this material available is going to set media apart from one another.