Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Here are some tips for Podcasters to make the listening experience a bit more user friendly:

  • Number your episodes sequentially.  This makes it easy to determine if I've missed an episode and helps sort them in my media library and my playing device.
  • Include the episode number in the first 10 characters or so of the title tag.  Most media players do not have a lot of screen real estate and it can be very difficult to select the right episode without this information early in the title.  Check out the Tips from the Top Floor feed; each of the episodes starts with tftf## title making it extremely easy to sort and view them in my iPod.  Boardgames To Go also does a good job in this area, while the Dice Tower has been inconsistent in their title tags (though they do keep the episode number).  GeekSpeak (BoardGameSpeak?) uses date information in the title but I would rather see them go with a format like bgs## - Show Title instead.  Dates are better left in the RSS or Atom tags, which leads to my next point...
  • Include the pubDate tag in your feed!  If you do this, you don't need to put it in the title.  The Dice Tower needs to add this to its feed.
  • There are a number of iTunes-specific RSS tags that are probably worth considering if you want to play well in their classification scheme. 
Thursday, August 04, 2005 7:40:44 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Here is a tip to help those that listen to podcast on an iPod Shuffle, other flash MP3 player and blind listeners.

Include an audio intro (episode number, who, what and when) in the first 5 to 10 seconds. Something like "Hi this is X and you are listening to episode Y of Z, where we will talk with W about A".

I listen to several podcast that do this well. The intro music doesn't even start until after the introduction. Others podcast require that you listen to the intro music up to a minute or two long before knowing what you are listening to and if you have heard it.
Friday, August 05, 2005 2:11:44 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Thanks, I'm trying. This is still an immature medium, and there's not a lot of convention yet for some things. Early on I read the closest I could find to some standardization suggestions for id3 tags that were geared toward easy viewing/sorting on an iPod. I don't own one of those myself, but my Treo's MP3 player has a similar display. More recently I also started putting in an audio title ahead of the music, telling the name of the podcast, the episode number, and the show's subject. Hope that helps.

-Mark
Friday, August 05, 2005 2:18:31 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Mark, your are doing a great job of keeping up with standards and conventions for PodCasting. Most of the advice I gave is derived from the good experience I've had with your show.
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