Last year we ran a small number of the shows that were nominated for a podcast award through a site review and validation program. This year we processed all shows that were nominated for a podcast award.

I have some initial statistics to reports that should not surprise those of you that followed this information last year. It is sad to see people are still not doing some of the key fundamental things a podcaster should do to insure uninterrupted delivery of his podcast.

The amount of garbage sites out their astounded me. There were at least three services that need to examine what they are doing in their core podcast hosting business. While I am going to be respectful and not slam them publicly, podcasters would do good to really examine where they are hosting their media.

1^st 4097 shows were nominated that is up from 3281 shows nominated in 2006

2^nd Of the 4097 shows that were nominated only 2911 had a visible RSS feed link on their Page or was auto detectable.

3^rd Of the 4097 shows 3761 of them had an iTunes link on their page it was obvious that many podcasters think iTunes is the only way to consume a podcast.

4^th Of the 4097 shows nominated only 2012 had a physical link to their podcast show media on their show postings or had a media player of some sort.

5^th Of the 2911 sites that had a visible RSS feed, 82% (2387) had feed errors. The 2387 that had errors 61% (1456) of those feeds were completely invalid according to FeedValidator.org.

7^th 81% (1933) of those sites that had RSS feed errors, where being hosted on a Wordpress blog.

6^th Of the 2387 RSS feeds that had either RSS errors or were invalid 93% of the feeds were being served up by FeedBurner.

7^th The biggest RSS feed this year was a whopping 1.1 megs. The podcasters listing had not updated in iTunes in over 1 year. The podcaster received 2 nominations, yet had produced a show each week for the past 16 months. When we e-mailed the podcaster he was astonished to find his listing had not updated in iTunes and had no clue that their was feed size limitations.

8^th Their were approximately 230 feeds whose size was over 250K

9^th Of the 4097 Shows nominated only 41% had a means to contact the host where it be through a voice mail hot-line or a email contact.

I still have more data to compile but I have been getting queries to post these results. I have a pile of data here and will pull some more data that we collected. I am going to do a double validation on the above numbers but I am real close.

Todd Cochrane