The 2008 People’s Choice Podcast Awards Ceremony is this coming Saturday December 6^th at 1pm PST. We will award these trophies and prizes and announce the People’s Choice and Best Produced Winners. It will be a great event.

Congratulations to all shows. See you at the Awards Ceremony!

Best Video Podcast – Geek Brief TV

Best Mobile Phone Formatted Podcast -DL.TV

Business – Manager Tools

Comedy – You Look Nice Today

Cultural / Art -This American Life

Education – Grammar Girl

Entertainment – MuggleCast

Food and Drink – Grace Before Meals

Gaming – The Instance

General – Extralife Radio

GLBT – Feast of Fools

Health and Fitness – Healthy Catholic

Mature – Distorted View

Movies and Films -The Signal

PodSafe Music – Catholic Rockers

Political – Free Talk Live

Religion Inspiration – Daily Breakfast

Sports – SkydiverGirls.TV 

Technology and Science – This Week in Tech

Travel – WDW Radio Show

They reached out to us, and the team at Blue is privileged to support the 2008 Podcast Awards. I hope you will take time and visit the Blue Microphone site..

If your looking for a really awesome deal they have a great microphone package available through Costco which includes their ever popular snowball mic. The pricing on this package really cannot be beat anywhere else.

Congrats to All that made the list,

We also had a number of podcasters that once again encouraged their audiences to nominate them in every category. Imagine being a Gaming show and have your audience nominate your in GLBT.

I will talk more about all the shows in the near future but these were a couple of the big takeaways

This years review was exceptionally daunting as a number of the reviewers were not able to complete the task and we had to solicit alternates to do the reviews at the last moment.

The review process is lengthy and can take as long as 3–5 hours per category. Having overviewed the slate, I am impressed with the diversity of shows that have made it.

There were some shows that disregard the rules and had their listeners submit there podcast in each of the 22 categories. We also had shows that received a fair number of nominations yet failed to have RSS feeds on their sites or a number of the other factors we look at in the review process which in a number of cases which caused a show not to make the slate where they would have if they would simply invest some time in their websites.

I will be providing a full analysis as I do every year at a later date. But for now make sure that you tune in tomorrow to see if your show made the final slate when we announce it at 4pm Pacific.

We have down-loaded all the categories and will be sending the databases out to the reviewers here in the next 2 days. A huge amount of work has to be done and I will get a closer analysis of the submissions and will release some preliminary data later tomorrow.

We will have a live stream to announce the nominated shows on October 19^th. More details to follow on that shortly. For now stay tuned to PodcastAwards.com for updates

For the 4^th year in a row I get a chance to look at the state of podcasting and in particular the state of podcasters websites. The usual results don’t surprise me anymore and I guess I am a little cynical at what I find.

Tonight I decided to pull a 10% sampling of the 1874 shows that have been nominated so far. What I found continues to make me want to take a shot of Tequila as it is quite sobering in what I am seeing once again.

My first reaction is do some of the podcasters even care about there audiences?

1^st How many Podcaster know what the correct iTunes Image Size is? Well if you don’t you may want to find out.

2^nd How many Podcasters know what www.feedvalidator.org is? If you don’t you better find out

3^rd You would not believe how many podcasters do not have a link or graphic on their website to their RSS feed.

4^th I am simply amazed at the number of sites that have no way to contact the show host.

5^th I really do not understand why people use Blog Talk Radio the Audio is beyond terrible and getting to the rss feed is a maze of menus that would confuse any newbie.

6^th Do you think using a 20 different proxy services is going to get you 20 extra nominations. Sorry but you wasted your time.

7^th Having a Audio program on a website with only a Hyperlink does not constitute a podcast.

8^th Of the 10% sampling only 51% actually had a download link on their podcast show notes entries and a large number required me to guess where the podcast could be found on their website!! (Wish I could take screen shots and share) Hey lets not even talk about the 1 sentence show notes. Google can really index a show well with that.

9^th Of the 10% sampling only 31% of podcasters had some sort of media player on their site. Do they not realize that at least 50% of the audiences today want a player to listen to the show directly on their site. Preferably one that pops up and allows them to continue to surf the net.

10th I don’t know why I punish myself looking at some of these elements on the podcasters page.

Oh an finally we will be looking at 100% of the sites before this is all over, if you think your show has a shot at being nominated their may be a few nuggets up there in that list for you.

Ohh here is the 2007 Report

Todd…

Some interesting trends are developing this year that we did not see before. The data sets are so different that I predict by the time nominations close we will have a interesting mix of shows.

Get your audiences involved now and nominate your podcast today. www.podcastawards.com

I am pretty excited about this year, as I opened the sponsorships up to podcasters and bloggers. This will help us reach the monetary goals we have laid out for 2008 as we are still well short of our fund raising goals.

Nominate your Favorite Shows now www.podcastawards.com

Good Luck All!