Podcast Directories: The Good, Bad, & Ugly

[SPThom]

Hey all,

Trying to feel out opinions on all the podcast directories out there, to see what works and what doesn't. Feel free to comment on general practices & methods, and/or specific directories as you see fit.

Searching: Do you like tags? Categories? Searching on feed & episode summaries?

Rating & Ranking: Do those five-stars mean anything? Ratings tend to be sparse on most directories... What do you think will get people to submit more ratings? How about rating particular aspects, i.e. audio quality?

Top Ten Lists: Useless on most sites? How would you pick the Top Ten?

Subscriptions: Subscribe & listen in browser? One-click into podcatcher or iTunes?

Frontpage: When you call up a site, what do you want to see first? All new episodes? New episodes for your chosen feed? Top ten lists? Eh?

For Podcast Producers/Publishers: Yes, I want your opinions too... Do directories give you enough control over your podcasts? What per-feed/per-show features would you like to see provided?

Anything else?

...

I'll be forthcoming, lest anyone questions my motives. Yes, I'm toying with the idea of putting together a podcast directory of my own, mostly because of my dissatisfaction (as a podcast listener & producer) with other sites... iPodder.org, Odeo, etc. (Can't complain about the Alley--the directory is somewhat minimalist, but the forums rule.)

[Hittman]

Stars don’t mean a lot, because the people handing them out are generally the people who like your show enough to bother. But they do make you feel good.

Top ten lists will get you some new listeners, but the field is so crowded that getting there with a new podcast is virtually impossible. You’re better off concentrating your promotional efforts elsewhere.

I like to see recent shows right there on the front page of a web site. That’s what I went there for – don’t make me dig through it. I don’t need comprehensive show notes – but it’s helpful to have short blurbs describing the episodes so I can pick and choose.

Get listed in Podcast Alley, Podcast Picke, and especially iTunes immediately. Then get listed in Yahoo’s podcast directory. You can go after the others, if you like, but if you don’t they’ll probably find you and list you anyway.

[Xenko]

I would love if there was a Podiobook (or audiobook) section on Podcast alley. Seems to be a category that was overlooked and would be helpful.

[diggal]

Xenoko,

I happen to find a whole bunch of audio books podcast:

http://www.podzinger.com/results.jsp?q=audiobooks&col=allpods

Hope you will find it useful.

[podcastmayhem]

Diggal,

I thought a lot about the same topics you have brought up and here are my thoughts on each of them:

Searching: I found that if I provided as many options as I could for my members would be a useful tool for them, since you know they are actively looking for a podcast. Personally, I use the tags to find random podcasts which is pretty fun.

Rating & Ranking - The only thing I have on my site that even comes close to this is the "Most Popular Podcast" on the front page which is based on how many people use my player to listen to this podcast, number of comments, number of friends and other activities on my site. I tried to make the variables similar to what someone has to do to get ranked on a Search Engine. Other than that, I don't really take into account Stars or other rating systems as we all know that most of the scores are from personal friends who are helping their friend out.

Top Ten Lists: I don't have one on my site, but I think they are useful. I would of never found 808talk if it werent listed on PodcastAlley's Top Ten!

Subscriptions: Just like Search, I believe that giving the podcast every chance possible to gain a listener is the key to gaining a fan! That's why I believe a site needs to have a player, a itunes subscribe page, and a RSS link so the user can drop the feed into their own programs. I dont think you need to provide every one click option out there as there's a fine line between aesthetics and practicality.

Frontpage: This is biased since I just designed my frontpage - I like to see a search function, some featured podcasts, news, and somewhere to login to my account. If I could figure out a place to put a top ten list, I probably might add that. Also a running list of forum topics and Podcast News would be good too.

Also, I believe that you have to provide as much control to the Producers as possible. They have a vision for their podcast and who are we as Podcast Directory Publishers to display their work in any other light?

Nice Topic Diggal . . hope to see you around at the Mayhem!

[AustralianPodcasts.com.au]

I agree with podcastmayhem, rating and rankings can be rigged by gaming the system (as seen by the recent example of Digg).

As long as the directory system is open and transparent and allows customisable search options then I think the podcast user will benefit because they get where they want to go in the shortest possible time.

Cheers
Jon

[ArrowRoot]

Even though I have been online (dial-up) for 8 years (both PC & Mac, with a G4 for 2 years) I only just started downloading audio & video files.
Although I don't have an iPod, my introduction was a free weekend to download podcasts of www.bobandtom.com comedy/talk radio show. They had a very clear 'howto' page with additional pages of FAQs that told me everything I needed to know to successfully obtain their show to listen at my leisure on my computer.

As someone who still doesn't know enough about downloading/listening/viewing on a computer to even ask the right questions when a snag is encountered, sites that don't provide simple howto (with allowances for different operating systems and different programs) were/are totally passed by in favor of sites that help me take advantage of what they are offering.
I did a google search and a yahoo search 2 weeks ago: any podcast-listing website that didn't have helpful howtos were promptly closed and I moved onto the next listed site. The sites I stayed on were bookmarked and those are the ones I keep returning to. And quite frankly, once I do have things figured out, I'll probably spend most of my time at this helpful site (podcastalley.com) and it could be months before I do another google or yahoo search for other websites.

For the rest, short descriptions about the podcast is good.
Star ratings, alone, don't mean much, but if they accompany a short opinion, that's interesting and I will check those out.
Straight genre listings are so-so: too many things fall into multiple categories and it's annoying to browse different categories and just see the same listings.
Better to have a good, flexible search that also allows the search results to be sorted various ways (title, author, date, size, etc).

There are times that it is enjoyable to just wander around a website and times when you want to locate something in particular quickly. Sites that allow both are my favorites.

[BSquared]

I know it's long but you did ask :lol:

My ideal directory would…

Have a search engine like Amazon’s. I don’t know what search engine they use to power their site but it’s **** good at finding things and clearly uses a range of metadata in addition to words in the title. A search engine It should search the description and the metadata and the show notes and whatever else is available (including user reviews) and should rank the results using some kind of weighting. It’s probably a lot more expensive but we’re having a fantasy life here aren’t we? If you can’t afford a full time search guru or whatever Amazon’s set up is, try for something that allows the user to filter or narrow their search in a number of ways (go to a great cooking site like http://www.recipeezaar.com to see what I mean).

2) Force podcast producers to write a decent, meaningful description of their show and select from specified tags (rather than everyone making up their own – or at least in addition to their made up ones). By force I mean don’t list the show unless they’ve done the work. Snappy slogan lines are all well and good but when “great jokes and cold beer” is the only information about your show then it’s not likely to come up in too many search results. And it’s bloody annoying if you're a listener trying to decide which one of the 60000 shows available you're going to try next.

3) Provide all the available information about a show in the one spot. Given that I find most of my favourite shows by someone’s recommendation a directory that shows you quickly and easily what other listeners of that show also listen to or like would be helpful. The closest thing I can think of at present is the Pickle favourites – but that’s more accessible from a user perspective than from a show perspective and doesn’t allow for user comments, reviews or ratings and doesn’t link to the spot where producers put comments or notes about a particular episode (which is usually in the forums). There are other kinds of websites that have this type of thing nailed. If I use http://www.recipeezaar.com as an example again you go to the recipe and you get user ratings & comments, ratings on the reviews (ie “was this review helpful to you” button), information on who has marked this recipe as a favourite, links to other similar recipes etc. In comparison PCA has show details in one spot, a few comments accessible via another click (and these are the monthly voting comments which are normally along the lines of “cool show” rather than anything a prospective listener could use to make a decision on whether or not to listen). Any discussion of the shows or reviews of the shows are in the forums and are not accessible from the show description. Where are the links to external reviews. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ has a great way of linking to all kinds of reviews when you look at the page for a movie or TV show.

4) Allow me to subscribe to an rss or email alert mechanism that tells me when a new show that matches my pre-entered criteria has been listed by the directory. For example I might sign up as someone interested in soccer, Stargate SG1, disaster movies, Australian independent music and politics. When any show that has one of those tags is listed on the directory I would get an email to tell me about it with a link to that show’s entry in the directory.

As to your other questions:

Top “x” lists are useful for newbies. I found my first few podcasts via the PCA top ten list. I don’t even look at it or the Pickle top 25 anymore but I’m sure it doesn’t hurt to have them on the directory’s home page. You’ll never find the perfect mechanism for calculating / populating the top “x” so just find something that works for you and shut your ears to the whining.

Having the latest episodes of shows on the home page is of no use to me. I use an aggregator and don’t go to directories to find out when a new episode of my favourite show has been released. Actually I find this feature particularly annoying on the one directory I’m aware of that uses it (Britcaster) as it takes up lots of space and provides me no benefit. Most recently added shows and/or highlighted shows (such as the Pickle’s show of the day) are much more useful to me. Some listener content on the home page would be good too – maybe a listener review of the day.