RawVoice Support

Hi All

Angelo and Matt have rolled out some new features on Blubrry.com most importantly we now support Video Podcast. One thing for sure we have learned a lot about RSS feeds and I am going to address that in this update as well so that all of you are aware of the importance of maintaining a validated RSS feed.

As always you can find the archived announcements in the announce only 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 catch up on what we have put out in the past. It has been 5 dasy since we updated all of you on what is happening.

Additionally for those of you that have signed up for the blubrry podcaster discussion list, we want to thank all of you, for keeping the podcaster mailing list traffic levels manageable.

Communications Update:

There is a new edition of the Brrycast, the official Blubrry Podcast online and
you can listen to it at brrycast.com or download it at
http://media.libsyn.com/media/pcn/PCN2006-07-25-14252-160-003.mp3 the RSS
feed is http://www.podcasternews.com/feeds/brrycast.xml so you can subscribe
today.

Site Update:

We have rolled out the new media player that will play Audio and Video Casts we hope that you will give us some feedback on the player, most importantly we want all of you that are using browsers other than Firefox and IE to test it.

We have improved the site navigation on the shows page, along with some improvements to how your content is displayed in your programs page allowing listeners a quick reference on whether new content is a podcast, videocast, or blog post.

Happily we have cleared about 40 outstanding bugs and development now resumes on bringing more features to the site.

RSS Feeds.

The wide variety of RSS feeds errors and compilations continue to amaze us! We highly encourage you to utilize www.feedvalidator.org and try at a minimum to get your feeds valid. One thing I have always prided myself in is maintaining a valid RSS feed and I check the feed after the posting of every podcast to make sure I have not introduced errors. One of the biggest issues is that people have not updated there iTunes category tags from the change Apple put forth just before the 4^th of July. This will not effect your listing on Blubrry but could effect your directory listing in iTunes at some point.

RSS file sizes are currently one of our bigger issues, due to some shows RSS feeds being in excess of 300K and taking a very long time to load. Just like iTunes we have been forced at this point to put in a RSS file size limit, until we can work out a better parsing solution. We will no longer parse RSS feeds over 300k in size. The overhead on the server for feeds this large is significant. We are going to continue to work on solutions to handle feeds this large but currently we will not be importing them.

I encourage all of you to study the RSS 2.0 specification then visit the various directories and even look at how your data is being displayed in iTunes. Most of the podcatchers have had to add a lot of code like we have to make sure that the data is obtainable no mater how bad the formatting is. With your RSS feed your most valuable asset it would in my humble opinion be wise to make sure it was valid and as error free as possible.

Ad Surveys

I am pretty pleased in that we are sitting at about 44% completion rate in those of you that have filled out the Ad Survey, we hope to get that number up around 80-90% by the end of the week so if you have not filled out the Ad Survey for your show please do so via the link in “your settings”

Ad Deals

We sent the first round of ad details to those sites that were picked for the campaign. Negotiations continue with the vendor and we hope to have everything in place by the end of the week. The vendor is overseas so it is taking a little longer to get things completed through e-mail.

That’s all I have for now as always keep podcasting and remember it’s you show

Todd Cochrane
ceo@rawvoice.com
808-741-4923