This morning I received the final verification of the grading of the remaining categories, for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards, and I have in my hands a completed voting slate. I will be entering the voting slate into the database system over the next several hours and later this evening we will post the list to the Podcast Awards website.
Voting will commence on 28 July at 0001 and finish on 11 August at 2359 we will have winners announced in all of the lower categories by 15 August.

Over the past 7 days my team of volunteers at Podcast Connect, have been reviewing all of the nominations for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards. This year we had some automated tools to help us with RSS Validation, and recorded site and show grading process.
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.
1st of 3281 nominated shows the RSS Invalid rate according to FeedValidator.org was a shocking 78%
2nd of the remaining 22% that were valid 96% had glaring errors
3rd With website reviews done on nearly 500 shows. 42% did not have an RSS feed button on there home page, 99% had a iTunes link. 26% did not have a link to the file in there show notes, 21% had less than 2 lines of show notes and 3% of the sites the reviewers could not even find the podcast section.
4th We found RSS feeds over 500K in length with the longest feed having 367 entries. I guess people did not realize that iTunes stops importing feeds when the rss file exceeds 250K
5th Good luck contacting podcasters only 49% had contact information available from either a home or contact page. The remaining shows had absolutely no way to contact them besides the comment form on their websites.
Even more amazing we found of the 3200 plus shows 200 shows that were calling themselves a podcast had no RSS feed, was not listed in any directory, and only provided direct link downloads not surprisingly these shows had low double digit nominations.
This was beyond frustrating to the team and we had a conference call today to talk about it, we were all pretty blown away by the stats. It looks like to me we have a lot of podcasters that are going through the motions yet have not a clue on what it takes to build a successful show.
This was not even a issue last year, it just goes to show you that 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. Some of these folks need to pick up my book, and read the fundamentals, and promotions sections. It is beyond sad, and I am beyond disappointed on the state of RSS feeds in the space. There was even one podcast that we reviewed that said you have to use iTunes and you have to use a iPod to listen to a podcast.
The question I have is what does your site look like.

The Podcast Awards site is seeing 12,000 hits a hour with 5 days to go in the nomination process the traffic is off the chart clearly exceeding last years traffic. [www.podcastawards.com]

Got a message form GoDaddy support this morning, that said hey your busting your smtp send limit, and we wonder what is going on with your box. I called to explain to them that were sending out nomination verification e-mails, they then told me that we have been hitting there upper limit. Well they raised the limit to 15,000 per day and we will see if that is enough.
If it’s like last year I will have to call them later in the week. As expected a lot of people are trying to game the system as it was last year. Duplicate IP submissions are rampant from IP’s that we don’t expect to see duplicate entries, they can submit all day long, but in the end those duplicate nominations all go to the trash can. The new logging is easy to see the abuse, along with the cross check mechanisms we enabled is flagging the bogus entries.
People are also invalidating there nominations by putting the same show in every category.
Overall though I can say I am pretty impressed by the quality of most of the submissions.

As expected we are starting to see a major surge in traffic for the Podcast Awards site and as the long holiday weekend wraps up here I expect the traffic to test the servers. [www.podcastawards.com]

Good luck to all the thousands of podcast that will be nominated over the next 15 days. [www.podcastawards.com]

Here is what is coming to the world on Friday

This year I wanted to kick it up a notch and refine the categories on the Podcast Awards website. The final list is posted and you will notice that we have listed a “Best Podcast Directory” and a “Best Mobile Podcast” a large number of people are now listening to Podcast on their mobile phones and many of the Podcasters are creating short format shows for those audiences.
You will also see that we have worked very hard to make sure that there is no duplication in categories and that we covered as wide a base as possible without adding another 10 categories to the listing. We are pretty excited about this years event and even though Silver sponsors have been slow to come on we found this to be the case last year that a bunch of companies jumped on board.
We did a lot of advertising last year, and when we went back to some of the same sites they were asking ridiculous amounts of money for short advertising runs, these were podcasting sites and even though we explained this was a non money maker for us and that everything goes back to the podcaster most sites were not willing to cut us a break. Some where asking for banner ad CPM rates as high as $25.00 per 1000 impressions, I wanted independent verification of their impression numbers and most sites would not allow us to run our own tracking code on the site, so we have opted to not run ads on many podcasting sites. If they want their sites nominated they are going to have to promote the event on their own. [www.podcastawards.com]