Geek News Central’s Todd Cochrane, a long-time podcaster and the author of a book on podcasting, has taken a look at the state of podcast sites and podcast feeds and found widespread quality problems.

“The amount of garbage sites out there astounded me,” said Cochrane.

Cochrane looked at the podcast feeds and sites of podcasts nominated for awards at his Podcast Awards site. He found that many podcasts suffer from basic problems:

* 82% of the sites checked had feed errors.
* Of those with errors, 61% of those feeds were completely invalid according to FeedValidator.org.
* 81% of those sites that had RSS feed errors were hosted on a Wordpress blog.
* 93% of the bad feeds were being served up by FeedBurner.

In addition to feed errors, Cochrane notes that many podcasters are still not providing clear links to their podcast feeds, or are providing only iTunes links; many podcast feeds are way too big, with one topping 1.1 megabytes; and most podcasters fail to provide a way to contact the host to provide feedback.

http://www.podcastingnews.com/2007/07/28/podcast-problems/


I see Eric has all ready jumped into the comments on this one. Good comments too!

Personally, I wouldn't say they are necessarily garbage, but people just need more education about the details of podcasting. I think it's also up to others in the podcasting community to help out too, by commenting and letting others know if things are missing (ie: feed links).

It's a very helpful and friendly community overall. I bet feedback on how to make sites better would be appreciated, if you run across a site with problems. Hell, we do it for this site all the time, LOL!

Dani

It's important to keep in mind that the vast majority of podcasts out there are faded or fading and only contain a few, or just one, episode. It would be interesting to see what the stats are for casts with more than 5 episodes.

Jeez, I would hope that shows that have podfaded or only have a couple episodes aren't up for podcast awards.

For the record, I just checked my feeds, something I haven't done for a while.

Planet Retcon (Hand Coded): 2 "errors" and a "warning". One wrong day of the week (boo hoo), I'm missing GUID elements in all items (nobody uses them that I know of) and 0:60 isn't a valid itunes:duration (Probably would prefer 1:00).

Good Music Show: (Podpress): 1 "warning" (so it validates): wfw:commentRSS should be wfw:commentRss Wah.

Volcanicast: (Podpress): Same 1 "warning" as the Good Music Show.

So I guess I'm in the majority. But of course, I'm not up for an award so the point is moot

(Note: IMO, a raw text file list of URLs to mp3 files should be a valid feed. Maybe, if you really want to be picky, wrap them in extremely basic xml. But that's an arguement for another day)

When anyone can have a go at a Podcast you're gonna get crap and unfortunately Podcasting is an area where everyone either has a go and gets bored, or continues to put complete crap out there because they think people enjoy it.

Blogging and Podcasting allows people to broadcast what they want, but the fact that people still don't care for most of it hasn't.

Bottom line, nowadays just because something is available don't mean it's good whereas in yester year, it had to approved and worked on by professionals to get it publically exposed.

Oops. I missed that part.


90% of podcasts are far better than nearly anything on the radio IMHO. Also, I much prefer reading blogs to reading traditional newspapers. Mainstream media tends to be a wasteland of watered down PC crap. Give me Jawbone over Imus any day of the week.

And how many gawd-awful web sites were there during the first two years of the Web?

This technology is still in its infancy, and when there aren't a lot of easy-to-use, standardized tools out there, you get garbage. Plain and simple. Maybe instead of complaining about the amount of garbage out there, these people should work on developing a solution to it.

And the fact that most of the feeds in error are served up by Feedburner/Wordpress is probably due to the fact that most of the feeds in general are being served up by Feedburner, and a good number of podcasts use Wordpress to run their blogs. That's like saying that most of the crimes committed in the US are being committed by US citizens.

Also, if FeedValidator.org is claiming that half of all podcast feeds are totally invalid (61% of 82%), then maybe it's Feedvalidator that needs to be fixed, not the feeds. If the feeds were totally invalid, then they wouldn't be submitted for awards, because no one would be able to listen to them.

Last year I was notified that my feed was potentially invalid for the Awards because it failed when run through FeedValidator.

It turns out all that the main thing that was missing was a permalink. As far as I understand, this wasn't affecting anyone's ability to get the shows from the feed. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I didn't view the permalink as "mission critical" -- especially since I don't run a blog. Still, I added it in so I would get a clean bill of health when I run the show through the validator.

It's unclear what percent of the 82% were issues such as this.

Are not errors and dead feeds two different things?

FeedValidator.org is very picky if your show is coming through on the major feed readers you should be fine. We all need to check to see if our shows are coming through on the major readers each time we post!

I have to agree with the jet setting Todd-o. We were checking out some other shows the other night and in some cases it was down right difficult just to grab some audio.

But with all his fantastical stats and percentages I think its safe to say 99% of podcasters out there do it for fun/hobby and have many other things to do in there day.

I didn't explain that very well. I just meant that the majority of feeds represented people who dabbled in podcasting for a short time and then quit, usually without staying with it long enough to get around to troubleshooting their feed and website.

Anyway I misunderstood the first post and didn't realize that it referred only to award nominees and not all podcast feeds as a whole. (My IQ today is low.)

I just went thought my feed and I was valid but had 6 errors. I am on a Wordpress blog. So that would put me in to the 83%, if I had been nominated. The errors were links to other show sites that I forgot to add, and had a / where the web address should be.

Stats can be made to lie, just look at how they were used. Wordpress didn't make my feed have 6 errors, I DID! I fixed them, but still it is irresponsible to use the numbers that way, it isn't the whole truth, it is spun truth, which in my opinion is as bad as lying! Now I am mad!

I gotta say though, my #1 gripe with other shows is that there is no obvious link to either the mp3 of the current episode, the feed, or a promo. I myself am guilty of that last one (I'm workin' on it), but plaster the first two all over the frickin' place. You really can't link to your shows and feed enough, people.

As far as the feed not validating, that one was a shocker to me. We are up for an award and I just ran our feed through the validator and got a big old error message. Our feed is indeed served up by Feedburner. Why? Because quite frankly, we don't know how to hand code it and aren't likely to learn.

Instead of targeting podcasters for that one, I think the blame would be more accurately pointed at the services that are not performing up to standards. They are free tools, but then again, so are the podcasts!

Still, I've never heard of someone having issues grabbing our show, so I'm not sure how critical the errors can truly be. If there are people having problems, they either refuse to complain or just don't exist. Either way, I don't think I'm going to lose sleep over this one.

THANK YOU! Podcasting isn't all about iTunes. There are people who don't have iPods, but yet I'm constantly seeing podcast sites where the only way they give you to get the show is through iTunes. Obviously they HAVE an RSS feed, or they wouldn't be on iTunes! Give us the link!

That is why I have both in the top of my site, iTunes and RSS. It is extremely obvious. I am glad I have it that way, but I do want to thank Fried Geek for setting it up that way. He was the one who made my site as cool as it is. I can't remember though if we talked aobut that piece of it or not. Anyway it is always important to have the feed there just incase iTunes gets screwy, which it has been known to do.

C'mon...it's not only podcasting. There has been plenty of stuff that I consider complete crap on the radio for years. And have you seen some of the books published? Utter rubbish IMHO.



Gotta disagree. So-called professionals have been responsible for such great work as Big Brother (the TV show is the one that annoys me not the Orwell book), Baywatch, Police Academy 5 etc etc etc. All media has good and bad examples - it doesn't mean that the media itself is a bad thing. Life is all about finding the good stuff.