Podcast Awards Site Announces Nominees; Creator Laments Sad State of Podcast Feeds
Jul 25th, 2006 | By James Lewin | Category: Podcasting Events, Podcasting StatisticsPodcasting guru Todd Cochrane (Geek News Central, Blubrry.com) has announced the nominee slate for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards. Voting for the nominees will be open July 28th to August 11th.
Cochrane notes that the overall quality of the RSS feeds for podcasts that were nominated was surprisingly poor. “I have never been so utterly blown away by the sad state of affairs when it comes to podcasters’ RSS feeds, and some of the crap we have been sorting through,” notes Cochrane.
Here are problems that shocked Cochrane:
- 78% of the submissions had invalid feeds, according to FeedValidator.org.
- Of the remaining feeds, 96% had glaring errors.
- 42% did not have an RSS feed button on their home page.
- 26% did not have a link to the file in their show notes.
- 21% had less than 2 lines of show notes.
- Some feeds were huge, as big as 500K and 367 entries.
- Only 49% of the submissions provide a way to contact the podcaster.
- 200 of the submissions that called themselves podcasts had no podcast feeds.
“The more people that are doing shows, the lower the bar becomes in taking the time to make sure the most basic functions of a site is maintained,” laments Cochrane.
