Australia's podcasting boom

ABC Radio will top 2 million podcasts a month by the end of 2006, Australian podcasters are expected this trend to continue.

read more | digg story

Podshow and Alexa

I'm not going to go into huge detail about what Alexa is and how it works, but it's regarded as a reasonable gauge as to which websites are generating the most traffic in the world.

The Keith and the Girl podcast have a bit of a 'tiff' (I don't know what else to say about it) with Dawn and Drew, and on the KaTG forums someone put up info on which of the two have the best Alexa rankings.

Here's a post from said forum; quote

Alexa Stats Keithandthegirl.com 51,570 dawnanddrew.podshow.com 14,751 Very distrubing until i did some more searchs Dawnanddrew.com 4,301,756 podshow.com 14,751 deltasierracharl.podshow.com 14,751 yeastradio.podshow.com 14,751 i think you get the idea. Basicly every time someone goes to a website of a podcast owned by podshow the main podshow.com gets a hit on alexa. So podshow can boast huge numbers and the individual podcasts can also boast the same numbers.

End quote.

Does this make Podshow evil? You decide.

UPDATE:
I've posted this up to various podcast forums and the overwhelming response has been that, not only is Alexa a fairly ignored-by-the-ordinary-person statistic, but that sites such as Blogger, Libsyn etc have the same issue. Alexa looks at the main domain, ignoring the subdomains.

What's happened with Podshow is common and most certainly not evil.

Here are some comments;
From the Britcaster forum-
Why the accusations without the research? Makes KATG look like they can't be bothered to research how the Alexa chart is compiled.

Quote:

"Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com)"

Plus:

Quote:

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.

The dawnanddrew.podshow.com domain has been there for a lot longer than 3 months, the beta has only been going for around 4 weeks so anyone freshly registering won't be able to accumulate as many hits in the last 3 months.

If registering under any podshow.com subdomain increases your Alexa popularity surly thats a good thing as your stats are bumped up by Podshows popularity.

Is it me or is anyone else fed up with podcasters bitching at each other over hits and popularity? Can't we just all have a laugh instead of throwing out rattles out of the pram with the instinctive reaction to make anyone above you in a chart into an enemy'? I'm honoured to be alongside some big name podcasts in charts, who cares if they get a thousand more listeners or clickthroughs to their site? Put your energy into making a better show rather than complaining that "its not fair" when a third party site that ranks stuff puts you below someone else.
_________________
Us : www.topofthepods.com
Skype : topofthepods
Email : topofthepods@gmail.com

From Podcast Pickle -
The people that use alexia are advertisers and such. I do not think any listeners would care. If you were a company interested in working with Podshow you ma use their Alexa rating to get an idea of how popular they are.
Posted by P Dilly

Conclusion:
This proves nothing regarding Podshow's alleged evilness, rather a quickness for people to interpret stats incorrectly!

eBay auction now closed

For the past week I've had an eBay auction running to win a 30 second ad slot on the tartanpodcast. The auction finished today, and I'm delighted to say that Will from Smart Bomb Radio has won.

I'll keep the blog posted with details as to whether Will's ad in the tartanpodcast has the desired effect; in Will's case driving listeners to his podcast.

PUM podcast August edition

 The PUM podcast is now online.If you'd like to support the marketing of the magazine and put the podcast down your own feed, then here are the details;

enclosure url="http://media.libsyn.com/media/tartanpodcast/PUM0807.mp3" length="7362820" type="audio/mpeg"/

Just add the <  and  > at the start and end!

I love this stuff

As heard on TWiT 63, I looked up the 'Chinese black helicopters' story.

You can read about it here.

Road-warrior travellers targeted with airport podcasts

Taken from Podcastingnews.com - with an 18,000 acre, five terminal complex, Dallas-Fort Worth Internatioinal Airport has introduced a series of podcasts aiming to help their 59 million annual visitors with information on parking, restaurants and shopping.

read more | digg story

The 1% Rule

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

read more | digg story

PodShow+

I had a bit of difficulty adding the tartanpodcast to my Podshow+ page (http://tartanpodcast.podshow.com - as an aside my old page still exists - http://tartan.podshow.com) as the tartanpodcast was already in the PS+ directory.

When I registered for my personal page I chose the name 'tartanpodcast' which precluded me from automatically adding my podcast to my personal page; the name 'tartanpodcast' is already taken.

Here's the solution; you need to put a post in your feed containing a piece of code provided by Podshow. Once that post is up, choose a name for your podcast. In my case I chose 'thetartanpodcast'. I then entered the my podcast's feed address. PS+ 'vacuums' the feed, finding the post containing the piece of code it needs.

Your personal page now lists your podcasts.

But PS+ alerts you to this;
By Creating a new Show or Importing an exisiting podcast you agree to be bound by the terms of the PodShowPDN Free Edition Agreement

Upon opening the Agreement I found that it was a trimmed and tidied version of the producer's contract I signed last June.

Of note are;

Quote:

You hereby grant to PodShow the non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to digitize, convert, install, upload, select, order, arrange, compile, combine, synchronize, use, reproduce, store, process, retrieve, transmit, translate, distribute, publish, publicly display, publicly perform and hyperlink your Programming; and make archival or back-up copies of your Programming in any venues, media and channels of distribution now existing or yet to be invented. (hereinafter collectively referred to herein as “Use”).

Well, we've pretty much covered that already here.

There's also this;

Quote:

PodShow may at its discretion place advertising before or after the Programming at its discretion.

This is interesting. Is there justification for PS to add adverts to your podcast just because you've got it listed on your personal page? If they were, for example, hosting the podcast files without charge to you as a the producer, then fair enough. But I pay for my podcast hosting. So are podshow caching my podcast on their servers, then when someone plays my podcast via my personal PS+ page it's taken from their server and ads are auto-inserted?

Also;

Quote:

PodShow has the worldwide right as part of its promotional efforts to utilize your likeness, name, personality and celebrity during the Term, as well as all show related graphics, logos, slogans, fonts, and other such podcast items.

I've brought my podcast's RSS feed onto my PS+ personal page and as a result PS can use my logos, my likeness, my name etc etc for their own marketing? Confusing.

Could this all be made a bit more transparent or am I nit picking?

All in all, I like the site. But I'd love to know what was really going on.

originally posted on Britcaster.com

Some pictures from holiday