RawVoice Support

Hi folks

This is Blubrry.com Announcement #4, and as always you can find the old announcements in the announce list archive on Google or at faq.blubrry.com. For those of you new to the community I encourage you to read the archived post, so that you can get caught up on what we have put out in the past. It has been 96 hours since we updated all of you on what is happening. For your information this is an, announce only mailing list, and replying to it will result in the e-mails being sent to the team members only.

For those of you that have signed up for the private podcaster discussion list, we want to thank all of you, for keeping the list manageable in the amount of traffic on it.

Communications update:

Lots of great feedback on the brrycast podcast, at www.brrycast.com, if you have not listened to it please do so, as I try to convey in the first show some of the thoughts on where the Blubrry community is heading and why you’re a integral part of it. As always you can reach me at 808-741-4923 please keep in mind I am in Hawaii and we are 3 hours behind PST or you can Skype me at geeknewscentral. The Faq continues to grow with information at faq.blubrry.com. If you have common site questions that you think will come up on a reoccurring basis you can submit question there, and we will answer them as quickly as possible.

Site Update:

Angelo and Matt have been very busy knocking out bugs, and we think we got over some major hurdles last night with issues we were having with the tags. We are still seeing common words and numbers slipping through, and will have that resolved shortly. I have good news for the Video Casters we are dedicating some major time in replacing the current online player, and hope to have that rolled out some time next week. The new player will not only play video as well as audio but will increase your brand awareness, and give listeners access to your show notes directly from within the player. We continue to receive bug reports from all of you via the contact system and encourage you to continue to use that method as the primary bug reporting system. ff we do not respond don’t fear we are tracking all bugs and don’t forget all of the team still have day jobs.

Site Survey Information

In our next announcement we will be rolling out the show survey page, this is the first step in collecting information from you so that we can start building ad agency presentation profiles. The survey page will be able to updated at anytime, so as your show, and audience sizes grows you can be assured that we have the most current and up to date information to present to perspective advertisers and agencies.

All of the information that you submit will kept in very strict confidence. We will never ever share your individual show information with anyone unless you give us written permission to do so. You can review the FAQ on how we negotiate ad deals, but we will combine data to come up with aggregated totals to use in the negotiation process. This data will be tied to each individual shows and there will be more details in the page that precludes the actual survey page should alleviate any questions you may have. Again we will let you know when that page is available.

History:

I have gotten a couple of e-mails asking what makes RawVoice qualified to represent you in the podcasting space, in lieu of negotiating ad deals. In response to that, I want to give some background on each team member starting with me and in future announcements we will introduce the entire team.

Some background on me, my name is Todd Cochrane I live in Honolulu Hawaii, I am married, and have four children. I produce the Geek News Central Podcast which started in Oct 2004 and also host several smaller shows. Last year I published the first book on podcasting called “Podcasting The Do it Yourself Guide” through Wiley Publishing’s “Extreme Tech Series”, which went on to win two awards, one from the New York Times as a top 20 talked about book of 2005, and a second as an Editors choice award from Amazon. In early 2005 I co-founded the Tech Podcast Network, and am responsible today for the admin management of that site. Podcast Connect is my personal company, and manages the People’s Choice Podcast Awards which subsequently is wrapping up nominations tomorrow.

In mid 2005 RawVoice was formed as a private corporation, with a wonderful team, that has deployed a series of podcasting sites, PodcasterNews.com, PodcastPromos.com and now Blubrry.com along with some enterprise podcasting sites utilizing the RawVoice Generator. For the past year, I have been spoken at numerous national conferences, and consult with numerous companies on podcasting. I will be on a panel this year at Podcast Expo “Monetize with Ads and Sponsorship: Use An Advertising Service or Sell Your Own?”

I am sure many of you are not aware of this, but in mid 2005 I worked with GoDaddy.com to bring them into the Podcast Advertising arena, and was their actual first independent sponsorship and also did the first network deals with them, contrary to popular perception. That rolled into other Network ad deals with other companies like Citrix, USA Network and a variety of other sponsors. To date I have personally negotiated nearly 20 ad deals, for a large number of podcasters some publicly, and some privately. RawVoice actively works with other companies like Podtrac, and do not rely entirely on internal sales to find sponsorships. That’s a real short introduction, but let me say finally first and foremost I am a podcaster that understands podcasters and firmly believe, in fact as my motto says. Podcasters do the Work, Podcasters get Paid. I don’t believe in getting rich of the backs of other peoples hard work. We at RawVoice will not make any money unless you do so first.

Your Attention Data!

As a podcaster one thing that makes me mad, is when I visit a site that has my show listed and they never provide any feedback. I never know how many people are visiting the site, or using there interface to listen to my show. We are very much about giving you all the info we can about what people are doing on Blubrry when it comes to your show listings. So in the near future we will be adding in your private profiles, information about how many MyCast subscriptions you have, and a variety of other data points. I don’t have a timeline on this but I wanted to let you know we are thinking about this.

What Can you do to give listeners more options to execute or act on when they review my show page at Blubrry.com?

1^st add your Yahoo, Odeo, and iTunes subscription links to your show setting! Click “Your Settings”, Click “Edit Program Settings” Click “Feed Links” enter your data in the form (see attached image labeled feed)

2^nd Add your Header graphic 720 pixels by 200 Pixels to you show setting! Click “Your Settings”, Click “Update Podcast Images” and upload you jpg or png file

3^rd Send us your ideas either in the podcaster mailing list or via direct e-mail. This is your community site and we want you to help us grow and drive site development with your ideas.

Thanks for reading the announcement mailing have a great weekend and keep on Podcasting

Todd….