The podcast industry's biggest spammer

• Which company is sending the most unsolicited commercial email to podcasters, by scraping your RSS feed to gather your email? We have been running a spamtrap on our podcast feed for the last three months, and today, we reveal the podcast industry’s biggest spammer. (No, it doesn’t start with an “A”).

• Tumble Media, along with research partners, has been awarded a $1m grant by the National Science Foundation. The team will study podcasts as a classroom tool to engage blind and visually impaired students.

• How is podcast listening growing abroad? Good Data this week, from Sounds Profitable with Podscribe, looks at the numbers from other countries.

• A new platform called Jam is the latest short-form audio app to be launched. It uses SMS to deliver short voice notes and podcasts. Here’s their website.

• Daniel Einhorn at Adswizz wrote a blog about how targeting works with Comscore Predictive Audiences, for advertisers and for publishers.

Moves and hires

• Jeff Guo and Nick Fountain have been named co-hosts for NPR’s Planet Money.

• Daniel Batista has been hired as Chief Digital Officer for Exile Content Studio. He will oversee Exile’s podcast and digital content studios.

Tips and tricks - with Podscribe

• How to write great episode titles for your podcast - Rachel Corbett suggests using keywords, and keeping it short

• Here’s how to embed a player into your website, so people can just hit a play button and listen.

Podcast News - with Pushkin Industries

From Pushkin: Coming Oct 27: The Last Archive is unlike anything you’ve heard before: history animated by long lost archival tapes and documents, intrepid reporting, and radio drama reenactments. Host Jill Lepore unfurls episodes like a classic 1930s gumshoe mystery but takes on the big issues of today. How do we know what we know, and why does it seem, sometimes, lately, as if we don’t know anything at all?

The Drop is new from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age; a new podcast that showcases the best of culture journalism from two of Australia’s biggest newsrooms. It will be hosted by Osman Faruqi, who previously hosted The Culture from Schwartz Media.

Back to the Beach with Kristin and Stephen has been launched by Dear Media - it’s a rewatch podcast for MTV’s reality series Laguna Beach. Kristin Cavallari and Stephen Colletti rewatch episodes for the first time in 18 years, and tell us what really happened.