We have been able to hold the event on a very small budget in the past, and I do not think this is possible this year with the NME being in Vegas the cost are considerably higher. I am open to suggestions.

One thing I thought we could do is have the awards ceremony virtually, while not as glamorous we realized last year that more people watched the awards ceremony via Ustream.tv than actually attended the event.

I will have more information shortly. But don’t fear we will have a great event regardless of the awards venue. Heck I might even consider having the awards ceremony at a Podcamp event. [PodcastAwards.com]

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

People’s Choice Podcast Award Category Specific Winners

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

We have received over 2.1 million nominations with over 110,000 people having nominated their favorite shows so far!

Make sure you send your audience members to nominate your show today, as 200 of the top shows in podcasting will be competing later this month for the 22 award categories.

I want to take a moment and give a big thank you to the folks over at Wizzard.TV for coming on board to be our Platinum Sponsors this year. Their participation is greatly appreciated.

Thus far we have raised $4000.00 in cash and have about $1600.00 in prizes and trophy sponsors.

These other fine sponsors have made it possible for us to do this again this year. This is a non profit event for us as all money and prizes go back to the podcasters

• Gold Sponsor RawVoice and Blubrry.com
• Awards Ceremony Host Podcast and New Media Expo
• Prize and Trophy Sponsor LapWorks
• Prize Sponsor Plan Nine Print

This event has grown and Podcaster query me all year on this event so we are glad to finally be under way.

We have changed things up considerably this year.

• 1st your Audience member only need Nominate your Show one time multiple nominations will be rejected
• 2nd We will expand from 5 to 10 the number of shows that will be put on the slate in each category

In January 2007 I recruited 36 people with 3 people assigned to each category to review nominations. Podcasters that are nominated will have their websites inspected and graded by the reviewer. Some of the things on the grading sheet that the reviewer will be looking for. Site Branding, RSS Feed Prominence, RSS Feed Validation, Visible Link to Media in Show Notes, Show Notes Quality, Consistency of Production, Content Quality, Ease of finding Podcast on Websiye. Combining the graded worksheet information with the number of nominations each show gets will determine the break out of the 10 shows in each category.

After the nomination review process and posting of the slate of shows to be voted on a two week voting period will commence.

Top Winners will be announced at the Podcast and New Media Expo Awards Ceremony.

Last year we gave away over $8000.00 in cash and prizes, sponsors and podcasters nominated received over 8 million site impressions in 2006-2007.

This year we will be running the same promotion we were last year where you put a link code on your website and every time someone clicks on the banner your site will be in the running for free advertising on the website three 120x120 banner spots will be awarded. To get a graphic for your site visit http://tinyurl.com/2a4dev

Todd..