Sydney Podcaster

You guys probably know it's been done before (see TPN and RocketBoom's efforts), but what do you think of eBay as an ad sales tool. Rocketboom got pretty decent coin when they did it but they had huge exposure for their auction from the start (massive audience and a lot of net talk about it). For those of us wanting to start putting in ads, what can we hope for. In my case, it would seem highly unlikely for a producer of wine related products to; 1. know of podcasts, 2. want to advertise on one, and 3. think to look on eBay. It seems more likely for me to (once i have a few people keen to advertise on my podcast) set up an auction on eBay and let them loose on it.

One of the main advantages of being on a network, is not having the problem of finding advertisers (the other would be the additional exposure it brings). TPN (the podcast network) is doing eBay auctions again and it'll be interesting to see how it goes. Although it's global in content and reach, CEO Cam Reilly is from Melbourne. Anyone wanting to join a network should seriously consider TPN (over podshow) as the business model appears to give podcasters a greater slice of the pie. I'll be putting future podcasts i do on TPN but for now, The Oz Wine Show is a podcast i enjoy doing everything for. For now that is . 

Stephen Eley at the Podcast Pendant has noted a good point about recording. SMILE . I realised this recently after my girlfriend cautiously broached the subject that a few intros i did were dead boring. I knew they were because i’d recorded them at 1am after editting
interviews for a few hours. I since made a rule that i don’t record
anything unless i’m feeling fresh and happy (those episodes will always haunt me though).  I just had a thought - Q. What do you get when you cross a podcast with a perfectionist? A. 9 shows in 9 months.

Google Trends has been out for a few weeks now and a lot of people have poo-poo'd its existence. I think that maybe, like with Apple releases, people expect every google rellase to be mind-blowing. I didn't see any huge claims from google when they released Trends though so I don't know why everyone has been so harsh. It is actually quite useful for specific tasks.

For who haven't seen it, you enter two or more terms (single words or statements) and google graphs their relative search popularity over time. It lets you compare what people are searching for and even ranks it by individual cities, regions and languages if you so desire.

(more…)

Just been perusing PodShow+ (got a ticket from DevCast 5) and thought I'd post about it. As was to be expected, it's basically like any web 2.0 site but with a podcasting slant.

It does seem a little PodShow friendly. I'm sure this will change as more people enter the site.

I don't think it will totally bridge the gap between podcasting and regular content consumers as most features are a little jargon heavy.  It is however probably the most comprehensive community portal podcasters have seen yet. 

The feed management features are pretty nice though and will be useful for anyone with half-decent tech abilities. Overall it looks promising and will no doubt increase exposure for non-big-business podcasts which is always good.

Wow! PodPress is the best WordPress Plugin going around (SpamKarma excepted). The latest build added the ability to offer different feeds based on Category (with indvidual iTunes elements for each). Won't harp on the virtues of the plugin but instead list the features which speak for themselves. It's free by the way.

• Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
• Podcast Download stats
• Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
• Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
• View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
• Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Supports unlimited number of media files.
• Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Preview image for videos
• Support for seperate Category podcasts

A pop-up mp3 pleayer is a great feature to have on your site. I have a PupuPlayer right at the top of my WordPress sidebar for the Oz Wine Show so that at any time people can access any episode and be able to track to any part of it with a slide bar (see below).

The pro version costs US$15 and gives you a lot of control over the look and feel of the display box. There are a number of similar products on the market nowadays;

• PodTrac has one but it's justed a licensed version of Pupu's.
• PodPress adds a player for each individual episode but doesn't have a universal option. 

I've been happy with PupuPlayer so I haven't tried to change. I did however notice today that it wasn't forwading properly. Sent me to the hompage which had this to say;

Recently we have been experiencing difficulty with our third party redirect system. SOLUTION: please replace all instances of http://www.pupuplayer.com with http://www.pupuplatters.com/pupuplayer

Replaced the errors and it now works perfectly. Does show the need to regularly chech for bugs and link errors though.