The 2010 Podcast Award Nominations are open and the audiences are off to the races. This is always a time for me to see what kind of engagement shows have with their audiences. If you are a content creator make sure you tell your audiences to nominate your show. For my fans this show is not eligible to be nominated.

This is a great sponsor opportunity as well. So think about becoming a sponsor.

I decided to pull the trigger and go ahead with the 2010 Podcast Awards which will be the 6th Annual. The work involved to do the awards is significant, fortunately I have had a number of folks step forward and volunteer to help this year.

We kick off nominations on November 7th and run for two weeks. We will start voting in early December and hold the awards during my 24hr Podcast to be held about a week before Christmas. As always we are looking for sponsors for the 2010 event.

The number of sponsors we get will determine if we have trophies in 2010, as last year I had to cover about 30% of the cost of the trophies and I really cannot do that two years in a row.

The 2009 People’s Choice Podcast Awards Nomination period gets underway on Oct 4th 2009. Podcasters have had over a month to prepare their audiences for the 14 day nomination period. As the founder of the awards my show is not eligible, but it brings me joy to recognize the nominees and ultimately the winners of the 22 categories.

The bags of ice are ready for the servers because in just a few short days the site will go from a sleepy 5000 hits a day to over 300,000 hits a day.. It’s pretty amazing to watch. Lots of opportunities for podcasters that get their audiences nominated. I look forward to moving through the stages..

We are still looking for some more sponsors as well take a look at the advertising opportunities! Finally I want to wish all the shows good luck.

It is Podcast Awards Season again and for many of you that helped me in 2008 you know  how much hard work it is to put this event together. I had contemplated not holding the event this year. But the number of emails that I have been responding to convinced me to go ahead and get the ball rolling.

We will follow the same rules as 2008 and will be looking for sponsors to provide some great prizes for all of our winners. Last year we were able to give away more than $5000.00 in prizes to all of the award winners.

Nominations open on Oct 4th, 2009 at 2100 EST. Details are on the Podcast Awards website. We will be putting the site into pre-nomination mode tomorrow when our good friends from One Technologies login and get the site ready for the 14 million visitors over the next 60 days.

Last year the servers nearly melted we will see if we can actually bring it to it’s knees this year.

Todd Cochrane
Founder Podcast Awards

The 2008 People’s Choice Podcast Awards Ceremony is this coming Saturday December 6^th at 1pm PST. I will be awarding these trophies and prizes. I will also announce the People’s Choice and Best Produced Winners.

See you on Saturday at 1pm PST!! Todd…

The 2008 People’s Choice Podcast Awards Winner announcement happens today at 4pm Pacific / 7 PM Eastern / 1AM GMT. Watch here or join chat at live event at www.podcastawards.com 

The 2008 Podcast Awards slate of shows that will be voted on has been finalized and will be announced Sunday Oct 19th at 4pm Pacific.

I personally want to thank those in my audience that volunteered to do the review. It was a huge amount of work in fact for a few of our reviewers it was more than they bargained for and I had to solicit some alternates.

The slate looks pretty impressive and I look forward to making the announcement on Sunday. The announcement will take place via a live streamed event starting at 4pm Pacific @ PodcastAwards.com

Every year at the end of the Podcast Awards I do a pretty big study on the shows that are nominated. I have a whole laundry list of things I look at. I had some extra time tonight and did a real quick look at about a 187 shows.

When the Podcast Awards is over I will look at the 3000 plus shows that will be nominated for a Podcast Award. You would think that shows that are looking to win the biggest award in the podcasting space would have done their homework and had their sites ship shape.

Well like always I am pretty disappointed in what I have found so far. Plus I am giving podcasters plenty of heads up so maybe for the first time ever people will clean their sites up. Read my Quick Look Here.

Todd..

The first nominations have already started to come in. In fact 92 seconds after we opened the nominations up we started getting submissions!

The challenge now will be to see if the server can hang as we were recording about 300,000 hits a day during the nominations last year. Pretty good load and my fingers are crossed.

Go nominate your favorite shows now!! www.podcastawards.com

The 2008 People’s Choice Podcast Awards start in about a week and I have been very busy getting the site ready for the kick off. This year I have made some significant changes to the sponsorship model.

For the first time ever podcasters are going to be able to become sponsors to help promote their shows. This was done because we have had a huge demand in the past for a podcaster sponsorship category.

I am expecting a little over 3 million individual nominations and over 13 million page views in the next 6–9 weeks of the event.

For all of you that have asked to be a reviewer this year, I will be contacting you within the next week or so and getting you up to speed on how the process will work.

If your a podcaster get your audience members ready to nominate you as we are about to kick this thing off.

Yesterday I made the decision to proceed with the 2008 Podcast Awards with the new awards ceremony format. The current plan is to start the nominations process on September 15^th. The nomination period will be 15 days.

This will be followed by nominations review and slate selection in October with voting to commence shortly their after.

A big change this year is the decision to have the Awards Ceremony 100% virtual. In years past we have had the awards ceremony at the New Media Expo. Having the awards their was great but their were always a lot of unknown variables that caused me a lot of stress.

This year we will be doing a 100% live event and the awardees will be participating in the ceremony using modern technology. We had over 1500 people watch the live stream last year but I think we can draw a lot more people by advance planning the event.

I have started to collect volunteer names to review the nominated shows. I still need a lot of Volunteers to make the review process go easier. If you are not a podcaster and would like to be on the review committee drop me a line at podcastawards@gmail.com

Please visit the PodcastAwards.com website for more details. As always we are in need of sponsors for the 2008 event. I need to raise about $8000.00 in the coming weeks to meet the minimum prize amounts we have in the past.

Last year we ran a small number of the shows that were nominated for a podcast award through a site review and validation program. This year we processed all shows that were nominated for a podcast award.

I have some initial statistics to reports that should not surprise those of you that followed this information last year. It is sad to see people are still not doing some of the key fundamental things a podcaster should do to insure uninterrupted delivery of his podcast.

The amount of garbage sites out their astounded me. There were at least three services that need to examine what they are doing in their core podcast hosting business. While I am going to be respectful and not slam them publicly, podcasters would do good to really examine where they are hosting their media.

1^st 4097 shows were nominated that is up from 3281 shows nominated in 2006

2^nd Of the 4097 shows that were nominated only 2911 had a visible RSS feed link on their Page or was auto detectable.

3^rd Of the 4097 shows 3761 of them had an iTunes link on their page it was obvious that many podcasters think iTunes is the only way to consume a podcast.

4^th Of the 4097 shows nominated only 2012 had a physical link to their podcast show media on their show postings or had a media player of some sort.

5^th Of the 2911 sites that had a visible RSS feed, 82% (2387) had feed errors. The 2387 that had errors 61% (1456) of those feeds were completely invalid according to FeedValidator.org.

7^th 81% (1933) of those sites that had RSS feed errors, where being hosted on a Wordpress blog.

6^th Of the 2387 RSS feeds that had either RSS errors or were invalid 93% of the feeds were being served up by FeedBurner.

7^th The biggest RSS feed this year was a whopping 1.1 megs. The podcasters listing had not updated in iTunes in over 1 year. The podcaster received 2 nominations, yet had produced a show each week for the past 16 months. When we e-mailed the podcaster he was astonished to find his listing had not updated in iTunes and had no clue that their was feed size limitations.

8^th Their were approximately 230 feeds whose size was over 250K

9^th Of the 4097 Shows nominated only 41% had a means to contact the host where it be through a voice mail hot-line or a email contact.

I still have more data to compile but I have been getting queries to post these results. I have a pile of data here and will pull some more data that we collected. I am going to do a double validation on the above numbers but I am really close.

Todd Cochrane

The nominees for the 2007 People’s Choice Podcast Awards have been announced at www.podcastawards.com with voting to commence on August 28th.

Over 335,000 people placed 6 million plus nominations during the nomination period. A team of over 40 listeners reviewed and graded those nominations and from the feedback I received the work was quite significant. I am very impressed with the slate of shows, while no awards process is perfect we are confident those nominated have audience members who are highly engaged.

Audience engagement is a trait that makes podcasting different, and while the space is still maturing the audiences of these podcasts are definitely heavily involved with the programs.

Todd Cochrane
Founder People’s Choice Podcast Awards

We have six days left before nominations close for the 2007 People’s Choice Podcast Awards to date this is how the 2007 event is shaping up.

We have received over 2.1 million nominations with over 110,000 people having nominated their favorite shows so far!

Make sure you send your audience members to nominate your show today, as 200 of the top shows in podcasting will be competing later this month for the 22 award categories.

Well it begins, we wish we had a couple more gold sponsors but I have always said it will be what it will be. This is where podcasting companies get a chance to pay back to the podcasting community.

I want to take a moment and give a big thank you to the folks over at Wizzard.TV for coming on board to be our Platinum Sponsors this year. Their participation is greatly appreciated.

Thus far we have raised $4000.00 in cash and have about $1600.00 in prizes and trophy sponsors.

These other fine sponsors have made it possible for us to do this again this year. This is a non profit event for us as all money and prizes go back to the podcasters

• Gold Sponsor RawVoice and Blubrry.com
• Awards Ceremony Host Podcast and New Media Expo
• Prize and Trophy Sponsor LapWorks
• Prize Sponsor Plan Nine Print

This event has grown and Podcaster query me all year on this event so we are glad to finally be under way.

We will announce in a few days who the 2007 Platinum Sponsor is for the People’s Choice Podcast Awards. We are now looking to fill the 4 Gold Sponsorship spots. Details at the PodcastAwards.com website. Or email me at podcastawards@gmail.com

The Podcast from PRWEB is online this is a interview I did on the announcement of the award winners. [PRWEB Podcast Page] [Press Release that Accompanies the Podcast]

Podcast Connect would like to thank our Platinum Sponsor StreetIQ and out Gold Sponsors Melodeo, Podcast Ready, IpSwitch WS_FTP and Podango along with all of our Trophy Sponsors along with those Contributing Prizes.

We also want to thank the 20 plus volunteers that helped out during the review process. Congratulations again to all of our Awardees.

Ok the list is up at PodcastAwards.com voting starts on Friday, congratulations to all that made the final cut! More tomorrow!

The Podcast Awards Website is seeing unique page hits of 12,000 per hour. At this point we are clearly exceeding anything we saw last year. [www.podcastawards.com]

Good luck to all the thousands of podcast that will be nominated over the next 15 days. [www.podcastawards.com]

Tonight starts two weeks of open nominations for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards. Have your audience members nominate your show at [www.podcastawards.com]

I am looking for a really awesome audio promo for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards if you submit one and we choose it to the the official promo for the network I will give your podcast or your company free advertising on the PodcastAwards.com website for an entire year. Entries need to be received by the 26th of June please limit the length to 30 seconds. Submit to podcast@podcastconnect.com

Do you have experience in pushing live video? We are looking for some volunteers that will be at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo to help us in streaming video of the Podcast Awards Ceremony. If you have the equipment and the expertise to do this let me know. podcast@podcastconnect.com

Today the team at Podcast Connect refreshed the Podcast Awards site in preparation for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards with nominations scheduled to kick off July 1st. With a revised category list that we feel we is well positioned to bring maximum exposure to all the 2006 nominees and ultimate winners. We will honor the winning podcasters at a ceremony to be held during the Podcast and Portable Media Expo on Sept 29th.

I am happy to announce that all of the Major Sponsorships are sold with Financial Content Podcasting Site, StreetIQ.com being our Platinum Sponsor for the second consecutive year.

Our four Gold Sponsors this year include Podango.com, and their soon to be released Podcast Stations, IPSWITCH the World’s leader in file transfer with WS_FTP, Mobilcast they make listening to Podcast easy on your mobile phone powered by Melodeo, and PodcastReady.com podcast directory and MyPodder, the podcast download client you can use on a memory stick.

We have plenty of opportunities for companies to provide prizes, with some remaining opportunities to become Silver level sponsors or even sponsor a trophy for a particular category. The Podcast Awards site saw record traffic during last years event, and over 6.5 million page views have accumulated since the sites launch. We look forward to Podcasters and their Listener participation. With over $4500.00 in prizes given away in 2005 we are well on our way to being able to give away more than $10,000 in prizes this year

Have your audiences prepared for the July 1 start of the 15 day nomination window. [www.podcastawards.com]

Well I am very happy and we are learning a lot about the process surrounding people voting, and the verification process. Probably make some changes next year but we are going to roll with what we have now. The site is seeing about 120,000 front page loads a day. The shows that have been nominated are really getting out the vote.

The script writers have been busy also but so far the voting engine is doing what it is supposed to do. I have even received some probing questions which the developer has found useful in defending the integrity of the voting. Regardless everything has been logged.

I cannot even count the number of hours we, and the developer have put in to make sure that we have a viable awards site for future years.

The Podcast Awards site is open for voting and immediately the server was just about brought to it’s knees. We did detect within 15 minutes a group trying to cheat but those tries were going straight to the trashcan. We tested quite heavily but I have the team watching the server and the log files to make sure that if a bug pops up we squash it right away. In the first hour we did have one issue that we fixed and thus far the voting is off to a good start.

Visit PodcastAwards.com