I am simply amazed that a show that I listen to from time to time would be so bold as to think their was a conspiracy to keep them from being on the candidate slate. I find the e-mail exchange I had to be very arogant which shows me how little respect some of the bigger sites have for podcasters out their building their fan base. We laid out the contest process very clearly, and only one person has disputed how we organized the event. I will say that we have learned some things, and will make some changes next year but for being a initial event we can’t be expected to be perfect.
I will say this the slate of shows was put together largely from the nominations, some shows missed the cut because of some of the rules criteria. There were no ties luckily, and some shows that I consider to be pretty popular simply did not end up with very many nominations.
We did our best to advertise, and announce the contest in various forums and ran a significant number of paid ads on podcast specific websites. I feel we got the word did get out as the nomination, post nomination and now voting traffic is at the expected level, with the site seeing close to 500,000 unique hits in the past 4 days. This is on mark with what I expected, and the website bandwidth is holding it’s own. The number of votes is staggering and the vote spread across most of categories is very narrow within 3-5%
Todd..