I had to chuckle when I read Todd's post on Geek News Central. Todd and crew were going through the initial batch of nominations for the People's Choice Podcast Awards and discovered that many podcasters are clearly uncomfortable with RSS feeds and basic site promotion.
Some of the stats that Todd provides from the first 3200-ish nominations:
78% of them failed Feed Validator (this doesn't concern me by itself as Feed Validator is an unreliable piece of garbage in my opinion)
42% of podcaster's websites did not have an RSS subscribe button on their site.
Only 49% had any type of contact information on the site anywhere.
I have to agree that this sucks. I've made all sorts of noise around here over the past few months about how people present themselves online and the two biggest foilables from a blog perspective are no contact info and posting under a pseudonym. Sounds like podcasters aren't so good at putting their contact information on their site either.
I can't dig up the article now, but I recently wrote about how unsettled I was at the basic types of questions being asked in the Podcast Pickle forums. A few minutes in three will quite quickly let on that many, many podcasters don't have a very firm grip on the technology they're using. I was actually encouraged by this because it means that unlike the first 5 years of blogging, podcasting tools have developed fast enough that non-technical people can provide content. This is good thing because now we have podcasts on all different topics instead of all geek and tech podcasts.
There is too much of a good thing, however, and if we're seeing crap like Todd is seeing, that's pretty bad.
Just for kicks I took a look at my site. Other than my feed failing validation (partially because I can't be bothered to update my iTunes categories because....well....let's just say I'm not a fan, and partially because of FV is tragically and unexplainably overrated), I'm good. Good show notes, lots of contact information, links to the audio files easy to find. Yup, I look like a podcaster.
Take Todd's list to your site. Do you look like a podcaster?
People's Choice Podcast Awards, not the peer awards or whatever they are are called we are not associated with them..
Posted by: Todd Cochrane | July 25, 2006 1:51 AM | Permalink to Comment