Things have been moving slowly around here all day, I’m aware, thank you to all of you that emailed me. It’s the SBS Show effect in progress and I still haven’t even syndicated it.
Lots of you also asked about the newsletter, more precisely: What newsletter? First of all, relax, we’re not jumping on the “another junk magazine with barely enough content to sell the ads” fad that’s going around (just try and go buy something in a grocery store that doesn’t have Rachel Ray on the box) we’re just trying to bring yet another way for people to share information. You can sign up for it here, on the right. We’re shooting for a postboard/newsletter hybrid, not sure where/how it’s going to go.
Lot’s of you complained that it was not in the iTunes, that it’s not in the podcast.xml file. So here is the deal – I generate the podcast.xml file by hand. The iTunes system is just an RSS feeder off that podcast.xml file. Because I didn’t update the xml file, the iTunes qon’t get it nor will the other podcast catchers like Juicer, iPodder, etc. I did this simply to find out how important the RSS feeds are and if I can spread the collateral damage done to my Internet pipe if I staggered the delivery to multiple podcast subscription mechanisms. So the first question – does anybody actually read my blog? Do you click on links? What time of the day do people read / listen to the podcast? This one was particularly interesting because the show seems to have an addictive following, some people listen to it immediately. I always figured these were just my buddy Chris Rue’s fans while he was alive (god bless his soul) but they are still with us even though the Nascar season doesn’t begin for two more months. Who listens to the podcast live in their browser and who downloads it to a device? Not that I didn’t have this data before but its a lot harder to interpret the data when you get 12,000 downloads in the space of 15 minutes of updating the xml file. It also shows interesting relationship & rebroadcasting process, for example, how are people finding about it? Me? Someone elses blog? Who will forward it to their SBS group mailing list?
In the end, I shot myself in the foot again – although there were less downloads there were more of them done simultaneously so my charts are skewed again.
P.S. I did fix the encoding issue for our Tivo subscribers – You do need to subscribe to the higher quality “mobetta” version. There is still no high quality XML stream, intend to build that one as permission-only for the newsletter subscribers.
For the less coherent, more grammatically correct realtime insight, follow me on Twitter at