Whoring

Dear Madge,

Another podcaster recently sent out a message saying that if his audience didn’t vote for him, he would withhold the two shows he’s currently sitting on. I’m voting for you Madge, but not for him. And I’m unsubscribing from his show. What a prick!

Dear Madge,

Another podcaster recently sent out a message saying that if his audience didn’t vote for him, he would withhold the two shows he’s currently sitting on. I’m voting for you Madge, but not for him. And I’m unsubscribing from his show. What a prick!

I dont think podcast alley is bogus – what’s fucking up the voting system is every podcaster asking people to vote for them, the more friends the more votes ! what about cuntent ?
I’ll be voting for you again this month because you still have the most consistantly entertaining show around and next month I may vote for one of the other 4000 podcasts out there depending on how much I enjoy it.

Hmmmm… I went to vote for you and several other podcasts at PCA, and I got a message stating that I had already voted for X podcast this month, which is BS, cuz I haven’t voted for anybody yet.

So the system is screwed up in more ways than one.

And, no, I’m not trying to vote under multiple email accounts, I’m not clearing my cache or in any way trying to cheat, and no one else uses this computer.

Just voted for ya, Madge. Keep up the good work. And give Chancy a scratch under the chin for me…

Will AC not keep your show on his Podshow network, if you fall out of the top ten?

voting is just annoying.
a) i just don’t want to have to do it every month. and have every caster ask me to each month. seems like overkill. there’s probably a “good” reason for it on the podcastalley side

b) email confirmations are tedious. i’m sure there’s a “good” reason for this on the podcastalley side.

there’s got to be a better system for measuring.

Hi Madge
I liked your comments on podcastalley and ratings and so forth for podcasts, and I have a few thoughts of my own, not that you asked.

Controlling the one-person/one-vote formula through a podcatching client is a neat idea, though it might be tough to get the makes of popular podcatching clients (which all suck by the way – lemon, playpod and x, i’m looking at you) to get on board. That said, a really simple rating system for an individual episode or the show as a whole (iTunes 1-5 stars comes to mind) would make ratings easy to share.

That said, voting per episode isn’t, I think, realistic, because it expects too much of end users. If you could find a slick way of doing it that stayed out of people’s way, made it easy and even fun, it would provide an incredible level of ratings granularity. But without a mechanism that appeals to a large pool of people, you’ll get a tyranny of the minority who do vote for each and every episode, so the actual audience ratings would be skewed in favour of people obsessive or faithful (it’s all semantics) to vote on each episode.

Giving a rating per show isn’t such a bad thing, and I think people can appreciate that a well-rated show will have an off-day now and then.

I think if you want people to see your best, save your best based on your own judgement and listener feedback as featured episodes. Getting those featured episodes to sit in a persistent ‘sampler’ feed might be a nice trend to start, as it would let someone try you out at your best and then decide if they want to subscribe or not.

Sorry for taking up so much space on the comments – please don’t ban my ass. And thanks for not telling people how to cheat podcast alley voting – fausto was doing this and when i complained i got told. Peace.