It is hard to believe it is time again. But I am starting planning for the 4^th Annual People’s Choice Podcast Awards. We will be looking for Independent judges to help with the review process after the nominations.

I will also be looking for sponsors for the 2008 event. If you are interested in participating or being a sponsor drop me a line at podcast@podcastconnect.com

Honolulu Hawaii 8/15/2007 7:43 PM GMT Podcast Connect, Inc., manager of the People’s Choice Podcast Awards at PodcastAwards.com, announces the category winners in the Third Annual People’s Choice Podcast Awards.

Podcast Connect wants to congratulate the lower category winners listed below, and look forward to announcing the top two winners at the Podcast Awards Ceremony to be held at the Podcast and New Media Expo, on September 28th.

Todd Cochrane Founder of the awards says that over the course of the awards process that over 350,000 people initially nominated 4097 shows, of those 220 were selected by the independent review team through a formal review process. Those shows that made up the 2007 slate were voted on over a two week period.

During the two week voting period 1.3 million people voted for the slate of shows. This exceeds last year’s participation 4 times over which shows the audience for podcasting is growing and general awareness of the People’s Choice Podcast Awards is strong. This level of participation truly makes the People’s Choice Podcast Awards the People’s Choice no other podcasting award allows the audience to decide what shows are the very best.

Each winner will be presented a uniquely crafted award, along with additional prizes as provided by the event sponsors. The Podcast Awards would not be possible with out our sponsors; a special thank you goes out to Platinum Sponsor Wizzard Media, for supporting the event this year. It is anticipated a total of $5000.00 in cash and prizes will be awarded during the awards ceremony.
People’s Choice Podcast Award Category Specific Winners

About PodcastConnect.com
Podcast Connect Inc. is an innovative marketing firm which has developed into a new media marketing arm for the podcasting community. Its mission statement is simple: “Podcasters do the work; podcasters get paid.” Its model is based on trust and respect.

Contacts:
    
Todd Cochrane
Podcast Connect, Inc.
podcast@podcastconnect.com
808-741-4923

The 2007 People’s Choice Podcast Awards response has been nothing less than amazing. We destroyed every benchmark that was set in the previous two years.

Even though listeners could vote once every 24 hours over 1.3 million people voted at least one time. The average number of times a person voted was 3. The most votes that were submitted and later verified in one hour was 22,109.

The investment to move up to a better server served us very well. The MySQL database went from about 1k in size before we started to about 1.5 gig by the time we were finished.

Attempts at cheating were down this year but we did have a significant number of people that voted with more than one email address that had their votes nullified in our validation and cross check process.

I am going to have to pull last years data but I am nearly positive that we had a 4x increase in the number of people that actually voted. We will be reviewing the data now and putting it through the Audit process so we should have an announcement on Wednesday.

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

The nominees for the 2007 People’s Choice Podcast Awards have been announced at www.podcastawards.com with voting to commence on July 28th.

Over 335,000 people placed 6 million plus nominations during the nomination period. A team of over 40 listeners reviewed and graded those nominations and from the feedback I received the work was quite significant. I am very impressed with the slate of shows, while no awards process is perfect we are confident those nominated have audience members who are highly engaged.

Audience engagement is a trait that makes podcasting different, and while the space is still maturing the audiences of these podcasts are definitely heavily involved with the programs.

Todd Cochrane
Founder People’s Choice Podcast Awards

I have the final list of 220 Podcast that will be on the slate. I am now awaiting verification from the folks that do the auditing. I will be posting the complete list here and on the PodcastAwards.com site as soon as I get the thumbs up.

We had a lot of shows that did not make the cut some did not meet the minimum show requirement or had started podcasting after the cut off. I was fairly impressed this year as we only disqualified 7 sites for not having RSS feeds on their websites.

One thing that is still beyond shameful is that of everyone that was nominated nearly 70% had RSS feeds that either had errors or were completely invalid. I will have some more info on that later. PodcastaAwards.com

Well now the truly grueling work begins. I have a team of 40 volunteers that have to review the 6 million plus nominations that were submitted by 335,194 listeners.

The task is made easier through some tools we have but it is still a huge job each team of 2 will spend about 8–12 hours on each category to make sure that the candidate shows are all eligible.

I am estimating we will have a slate of shows in 7–10 days. Hopefully sooner but we will be ready for round 2 shortly.

Podcast Connect would like to personally thanking Bob Heil and Heil Sound for his support of the People’s Choice Podcast Awards 2 years in a Row. This will be the third year that we have given the Top two Winners Heil PR-40 Microphones.

I personally absolutely love the PR-40. Past Winners Adam Curry, Leo Laporte use the PR-40, it is a rich sounding dynamic microphone. The perfect microphone for every podcaster. We hope that you will support Heil Sound and pick up one their microphones today.

Todd Cochrane
Founder People’s Choice Podcast Awards