May 3rd, 2007 Rob
We learn something new every day at RawVoice. The tech industry and the podcasting space are moving quickly and we want to make sure that we stay one step ahead of the game.
Our constant focus on what’s happening allows us to be in a position to provide quality products and services to all stakeholders in social media. We work with individual content producers (aka podcasters) and advertisers via our communities. We work with larger content producers and corporate clients with our RawVoice Generator offering. We serve the needs of audience members by doing our best to make our products visually appealing and easy to use.
One very important lesson that we have learned is to respect content producers and their audiences when rolling out new products and new features on existing products. If it weren’t for podcasters, their audiences and the advertisers who support them we wouldn’t be here. We’d be doing something else. We’re glad to be here though.
I consider our approach a best practice in the social media services industry. Attempting to take advantage of producers and audiences is a bad idea. The community at large can move quick in spite of its size and not being in touch can yield disastrous results. Sometimes businesses take advantage when they don’t necessarily mean to do so. Sometimes they make honest mistakes. In those cases, a quick apology and a change of direction is the best approach.
SplashCast was taken to task by Adam Curry recently for introducing a feature that created and promoted alternate feed addresses for podcasts. A number of podcast shows were added to this feature without the knowledge or consent of the show producers. Some call that RSS Hijacking. PodShow got hit by the community for the same offense last July. Did SplashCast really have their ears to the ground before introducing their MyPodcastNetwork feature? They do now.
We believe that respecting content producers means that we allow them to opt in to our services. And when we do that we leave their media on their host servers and we promote the source RSS feed.
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April 21st, 2007 Rob
Recently there has been some grousing by people in the podcast space that’s specifically directed towards the larger community of podcast producers. These people believe that podcasting is not growing as a medium because….drumroll please…podcasters are killing the space.
We’ve heard some silly arguments about many issues surrounding podcasting, but this one takes the cake. Saying that podcasters are the real enemy of the growth of the medium is like saying that trees are killing the forest. So if that really needed to be said then we really need to say that we love podcasters. Podcasters are the reason why this medium has grown so robustly over the last two and a half years.
Podcasters are the reason why the Portable Media & Podcast Expo became the Podcast & Portable Media Expo. The organizers didn’t throw the work podcast in the front for nothing. Podcasting is leading the new media revolution into uncharted territory. Podcasters are also the reason that the expo (now dubbed the Podcast & New Media Expo) will be three days long instead of two.
Podcasters are also the reason that the PodCamp phenomenon has exploded. Some people think that podcasters are cheap. We don’t. The personal effort, spending of personal funds along with the travel expenses on these events tells me that podcasters are exceedingly generous with their time and their money. After all, most podcasters are average people with families and/or mortgages plus health and education expenses. We’re greatful for whatever they can spend to make these events worthwhile for the community.
We recently put the call out to help fight Cystic Fibrosis and have raised over $1000 online from podcasters generous donations. Thank you podcasters.
The message of RawVoice is simple. We’re behind podcasters. We are podcasters after all. We’re here to help. And although our resources have been stretched as we bootstrap this company we hope to have more bandwidth to work directly with podcasters soon. When that time comes we won’t charge you to learn the ’secrets’ of podcast success. We’ll share with you what we know in an open and honest manner.
We believe that educated and informed podcast producers will grow our communities (and our revenues) a lot faster than if we acted as a gatekeeper extracting a toll for the knowledge that will help this industry to continue to thrive.
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April 11th, 2007 Administrator
We have been pretty aggressive in only allowing podcasts that are active to be listed on Blubrry.com and TechPodcasts.com over the past month I have removed over 300 shows from the community because their last show that was published is over 90 days old.
While I have about a 50 more to remove I have been removing shows slowly as I have been collecting data while I removed them. One of the things I have found out is that the average podfaded podcast does not make it past show 7. If they make it past show 7 they typically have a much higher survival rate.
No one wants to listen to old content and while I would like to tighten up those participating in the community to 60 days we are going to see how 90 days works. In reality for a show to be successful the host needs to be podcasting weekly or at the very least a minimum of every 10–14 days.
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March 2nd, 2007 Rob
Jason Calcanis points out that the bad Search Engine Optimization (SEO) crowd is taking advantage of Squidoo.
The culprit as Jason sees it is older content sitting on the site without much real value. The bad SEO crowd uses sites that don’t audit user generated content to create what Jason calls “an SEO trap.” I guess this trap can occur on any site that ‘gets big’. But the real issue comes to light as a larger percentage of a site gets taken over by low value content.
The dilemma for smaller web services comes from the fact that removing content from the site means that page views and aggregate totals for content and users can decrease. This may appear to be a bad thing from the traditional ‘page views and users counts rule’ perspective. In the end auditing content is a really good thing for users of a site. So while we could have a lot more podcasts in our Blubrry community, we choose to have fewer for the sake of our users.
As organizations build community sites they need to ask themselves a simple question. Will the real users of our community find fresh, relevant content? Or are they more likely to find something that tastes like spam?
We’ve done what we can on our Blubrry site to keep the content fresh. We’re constantly searching for spam feeds or non-producing shows. We ping producers of fading shows to check if they’ll continue to produce content.
Of course, it helps to have a tool that can allow you easily identify and remove low value content from your community.
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February 25th, 2007 Rob
There’s been a lot of talk this week about the role of the iPod and portable media with respect to the proposed merger of XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. Much of the talk has focused on the role of portable media players (particularly iPods) as a catalyst for change. We agree with this analysis and so do the satellite players involved in this proposed deal. But the major media is only reporting part of the story.
The shift that is driving the necessity for XM and Sirius to merge isn’t just about a particular device. It isn’t just about the programming either, because satellite radio offers a much wider variety of programming than traditional radio. And the battle that the satellite radio players is not against iTunes or other music services even though these are the reasons stated and widely reported.
The two major issues in this situation are cost and lifestyle. XM and Sirius have spent huge amounts of money to get their businesses rolling. Satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And they’ve each paid hundreds of millions of dollars to retain top programming. So in order to make a profit these companies need to reach a critical mass of media consumers. And in order to do that they need to cater to people who increasing lead a portable digital lifestyle.
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