by Lee Gibbons, CEO
Today Rob Walch, a friend, very capable podcaster, and leader in the podcasting community, latched onto a story that on its face looks like good, juicy news about Podango being evil and maliciously hijacking the feed of one of our valued customers, and posted about it in his blog.
Gratefully, Paul Colligan gave me a heads up, allowing me to participate in this important conversation. (Thank you, Paul.)

Regrettably, Rob, who has been great about advising Podango and participating with us at events such as our Podcasting Unconfernce at PME ‘06, chose not to call or email to try to gain an understand of the whole picture or to confirm his assertion that we are evil and malicious. Hopefully, the response I posted in a comment on his blog will help him, and you, understand the facts and help to remedy the damage done by his post. I applaud Rob for looking out for podcasters and defending Ginger in this situation. Our community needs that. But I hope he will be equally fair as he better understands our actions and the facts.

Here is what I posted there, simultaneos to this post.

First, thanks to Paul Colligan for giving me a heads up about this post and series of comments. Also thanks to Rob for providing such a forum for the podcasting community.

Secondly, an open statement that Podango does not lock people in by using the type of methods Rob accuses us of here. We provide instructions that simply allow users to redirect their RSS traffic to Podango so that we can include their pocasts in stations with minimal efforts on their part and provide them with advertising revenues by stitching short, pre and post-roll ads on their content, just like what is enabled by PodTrack, GigaVox, Kiptronic and others. We never go out and maliciously take people’s feeds and lock them into our service. If the directions we provide for feed redirects are followed, things go smoothly. When anyone wants to leave Podango, we go out of our way to help them redirect their feed, including the Podango feed, to any other universal locator they choose.

Now, to, you, Ginger, since you have brought this matter into a public forum, which is your right and perhaps obligation to do, I feel a real need to reply and help clarify this situation.

I openly acknowledge that you are experiencing difficulties with your feeds since redirecting them to Podango. Please acknowledge that we ARE actively and diligently working and communicating with you to resolve the issue.

I do feel you have not accurately and openly represented the facts here. So, I am sure you will understand my pointing out what you are perhaps unaware of or chose not to share here in this forum:

1. You have been party to every step of the redirection of your feeds. You voluntarily and honestly attempted to follow our instructions and wound up in this unfortunate position. Podango did not hijack your feed or do anything willingly you did not consent to. With that said, we are also actively working to meet your request to aid you in reversing your choice.
2. You made an honest mistake in the manner in which you redirected your feed from within your Libsyn and Podnago
accounts. This error, the failure to follow a key final step in the process as documented caused your listeners to be directed to Podango in a manner that caused our system to throw errors and not deliver your content to your users as it should have.
3. Upon becoming aware of the situation, which took place over a weekend, we responded to your email messages and you have subsequently had conversations with one of our support people, whom I am sure you will agree was professional, helpful, and kind, and we have rolled back and hand-manipulated database records to restore things to a healthy state.
4. We have put additional safeguards in place to help our system respond to and prevent this error condition in the future. We have also reviewed our document and made it more clear as to the vital nature of the step you skipped.
5. Independent of this post, and previous to receiving Paul’s email this a.m., I met for an hour with my team yesterday reviewing what we need to do to reset your feeds back to the state you were at prior to this honest mistake on your part and our admitted systematic mishandling of it.
6. We have scheduled a call with you for this morning to understand this general request more specifically. This call will take place between you, Doug Smith (Podango co-founder and operations lead) and Shalon Ironroad (our support rep who has patiently and kindly supported you through out this mishap).

Finally, I want you to know again of our sincere apology for this mishap. We will remedy the situation to your satisfaction, and will support your request to help you restore your settings in Feedburner and LibSyn.

Rob,

Thanks again for being a friend. Your participation in our initial development of Podango, at the Unconference PME event, and your ongoing advice has been helpful. Once again, you have helped us improve. We regret that you have chosen to characterize this situation as you have and hope you will also follow through and help the community understand that we are neither evil nor malicious. As always, you would have been welcome to call and discuss this and get some clarification, but you were probably just extremely busy, as usual.

Sincere, best regards, Rob.

Lee Gibbons
CEO, Podango

lee@podango.com

P.S. I have also posted this on http://podango.com/blog/

We’re excited to announce that David lawrence has just launched a new station at Podango. TheLatest.AT reports on the latest breaking news and top stories from the most popular websites including Amazon, eBay and YouTube with one minute daily podcasts. The one minute summary podcasts are condensed from daily blog postings which track the most up-to-date events on each site.

“The days of giving sixty or ninety minutes of your time to someone to get the news on your favorite websites is over. People crave more info in less time - they want efficient, fast paced, exuberant reporting from a fan perspective. Whether you’re into YouTube, MySpace, PerezHilton or the goings on at Hollywood and Vine, we’re going to give you The Latest At those sites, every weekday,” explained Lawrence.

TheLatest.AT currently tracks the most popular Search, Social Networking, Video, News, Games and Entertainment sites. Listeners can choose from any and all of these sites for daily coverage, delivered to them automatically:

• Yahoo
• MySpace
• YouTube
• Amazon
• PerezHilton
• Hollywood and Vine
• Ebay
• FaceBook
• Second Life

Welcome aboard, David!

Sarah West at Westminster College sent over this interesting article on podcasting in higher education.  The article reads a little like a whitepaper but the content is interesting. Podcasting is changing the face of education. In the next year, Westminster will be introducing an interesting podcast initiative in the online education space. Stay tuned for more details.

Speaking of education, Podango is sponsoring the 2007 TechED event being held on March 25th through 28th at the Ontario Conference Center. We’ll have more details on this show as it approaches.  

We want to thank the guys at Culture Catch for their hospitality and for allowing us to exhibit at the Culture Catch Salon in San Francisco. We had a great time and met a lot of great people.

Culture Catch will be exhibiting at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Podango will be there with Culture Catch as well (more info to come on that). We’re excited to hang out with you guys again.

Click here for pictures of Mac World and the Culture Catch Salon.

by Lee Gibbons, CEO

With the coming of a new year, there invariably comes introspection and self assessment. Did the passing year hold in it the fulfillment of what was hoped and anticipated at the beginning of the prior year? As I look back over this past year, I marvel at the things that have transpired. This post will, while striving for brevity, enumerate a few of the things accomplished in ‘06 and look ahead to ‘07.

In ‘06, Doug and I quit our day jobs and formed Podango. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the many top podcasters who coached and taught us so much about what Podango need to be and not be in order to succeed.

We formed a remarkable team of professionals who are visionary and scrappy enough to be called top flight entrepreneurs and who also possess the business savvy and execution of seasoned information and entertainment industry professionals. I feel so fortunate to be surrounded by such excellence.

The early part of the year was all about figuring out who and what we wanted Podango to be. By mid summer, we had a solid nucleus of developers and plans for a September launch at The Podcasting and Portable Media Expo. The build out of version 1 of the site was adequate for a successful launch, and the Podcasting Unconference launch event could not have gone better. We got “crunched” by Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch guys twice and picked up by some bloggers and podcasters who have become true and honest friends, whose voices, both spoken and written, have continued to spur us on and challenge us to improve.

The measurable result is that by year end, we have signed far more stations than our initial forecasts called for, and continue to get requests from leading podcasters to learn more and sign up as station directors. We look forward to seeing some of them come on board in the new year. Stay tuned for these announcements on the News tab and highlighting of them here in this Blog.

The recent formal establishment of a strategic advisor relationship with Scott Bourne is a great example of the type of quality alliances we began to put in place toward the end of the year and that we will continue to foster in the new year.

Looking forward, ‘07 will be the year of our adolescence and growth. We will add new, maturing features that put us in the hunt as far as the podcasting industry having good reason to consider Podango as a key resource in the delivery of their content. You will see new and unique podcasting models and revenue generation opportunities that we look forward to extending to the thousands of capable and exciting podcasters who may benefit from these new tools and capabilities.

We will also continue to be aggressive in our business development efforts. Most importantly, the Podango family will continue to grow: We will add more exciting, entertaining, and educational stations, driven by passionate thought leaders within niche markets. We will also continue to grow our terrific team. As of the first week of January, we are adding Lisa Johnson and Dave Brady, two proven players, who will help us on the marketing and software development fronts. We welcome them and feel like they continue the standard of excellence we have insisted upon in every hire we have made to date.

Finally, you will also see a change to this blog. We are going to invite any of our employees who wish to blog to post here.They will post about their particular view point on Podango, new media, podcasting, vidcasting, advertising, etc. It should be fun. We have some really interesting people whose voices, we expect, will add significantly to the authenticity, quality and volume of usefule information you will continue to receive when you follow our blog. We love what Dave Sifrey and the team at Technorati have done with their blog, and we will gradually be adjusting our blog to be that cool and functional with our own twist. Any suggestings you have for how to make it better, please post comments.

Well, I don’t want to get too longe winded here. I hope you sense the excitement Doug and I feel as this new year begins.

And, with that bit of grateful swagger and humble hope, we set off on 2007, and we wish you a very…

Happy New Year!

from Doug and Lee (Founders) 

Podango is excited to bring you a complimentary ticket ($97 value) to the first ever Virtual Seminar Week.  The first 5000 people to register with the Podango code receive a free ticket. Go to www.podango.com/vsw for information on how to get your complimentary ticket. 
Virtual Seminar Week is next week, November 10-17 and includes over 49 top business leaders, trainers and inspirational luminaries that you can listen to all from the comfort of your living room.
Experts include:

• Jay Abraham –> Legendary $5000/hour marketing mastermind
• Carlos Marin –> Recruited & managed sales force of 600,000
• Dr. Joe Mercola –> Founder of the #1 natural-health site in the world
• Bill Bartmann –> Billionaire to bankruptcy & back again
• Bob Proctor –> Modern-day Napolean Hill (Discover The Secret)
• Bill Romanowski –> Secrets to peak performance (4 Superbowl wins)
• Tellman Knudson & Stephanie Frank –> Overcoming ADHD at home & work
• Miriam Adler-MacWilliams –> Discover the truth about options trading
• Paul Colligan –> How to use podcasts for profit (One of our own Station Directors: Internet Marketing Podcast Network)
• Gay & Katie Hendricks –> Creating love & harmony in relationships

We are excited to bring you this unique opportunity.

by Lee Gibbons, Podango CEOÂ

Continuing our quest to blog about all ten of the rules that govern Podango’s culture, this post is about Rule #6: “Get Listeners!”

We have talked to dozens of podcasters about what we might offer to be of greatest benefit to them, and with rare exception, the thing they would value most from Podango is getting more listeners. It comes well ahead of monetizing their podcasting efforts, podcasting tools, or our nifty go!Station infrastructure.

Podango has found that the best ways to get more listeners all have one thing in common: making it easy to find the podcast. We have also found that the growth of Podango go!Stations mostly comes from people who first simply wish to find out more about a given topic. They Google it, they ask their friends, and they listen to key influencers within their fields of endeavor and communities of interest. In other words, they are looking for you already. Or, at least, they are looking for what you know that can help them.

Another way to look at it is, “Getting listeners” is really a misnomer. It is 180 degrees out of phase of your real goal. Your real goal is to give to listeners. The more abundantly you achieve this goal, the more quickly your listenership will grow. Here are six steps that will lead to increasing your listening audience.

Step One: “Don’t just do something, stand there!” In other words, before jumping in and randomly praddling on about your own musings on the universe and its contents, put some thought into your podcast and figure out what you have to talk about that is sustainable, interesting, and worth invesing a consistent effort to produce. In their book Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, Rob Walch (PodCast411) and Mur Lafferty (www.geekfuactiongrip.com) suggest that you first “make sure you create a show that you would want to listen to.” Tim and Emile Borquin (The Podcast Brothers Podcast) suggest that in their podcast they simply, “Have something to say, or don’t say anything.”

Step Two: Truly connect with your audience. Again, quoting Rob and Mur, “A key reason we have heard from listeners about why they enjoy podcasting so much is the interactive nature of podcasting, Many podcasters go out of their way to communicate with their listeners, to include listeners in the show and to build a community around their show.” (Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, Chapter 12, page 199)

Step Three: Serve a Community. The reality is that a community already exists that your podcast serves. If that seems a strange notion, you might want to consider another theme for your podcast. Our most successful station owners (Station Directors) are those who come to us with very ready answers about the community they serve. Often, they have already been integral parts of their communities of interest and have simply elected to grab a Podango go!Station as a better means of serving their community of interest. So, your job is to really to tap into your community and serve them with the information you provide. Are you a fanatic pet owner? How do you normally connect with the other pet owners out there? How do you find more information about your particular breed? Who are the experts, service providers, and vendors who participate in the value network already? How are they reaching you? The same methods may be available to you. Along with that, these people and organizations make great advocates. Enlist them as sponsors, partners, and interviewees. You may be able to help them produce their own podcast, and they may have wide coat-tales you can ride on as you help them meet their unique–and probably compatible–objectives in serving your community.

Step Four: Serve the Underserved. As you think about the content for your podcast, consider the relative importance of your podcast to those whom you aim to serve. Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger created MommyCast out of their awareness that moms are an underserved market as regards their ability to communicate with other moms in a massive conversation about all things of concern and interest to moms. They recognized that moms are often on the go, with their eyes and hands busy, or waiting, perhaps for a child to finish a ballet class, and that a podcast to fulfill their need was a perfect fit for their lifestyles. Similary, Tim Borquin of Endurance Planet and TNC New Media produce programming for endurance atheletes, having recognized that these folks have a pattern of being out, running and training and are hungry for more information about increasing their performance and endurance. They have created a variety of podcasts as extensions of that need that are delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Step Five: Be Easy to Find. Registering on the major podcasting directories is an obvious first step. Tools like PodSubmitter.com allow you to submit your podcast to 55 podcast directories from a single form. Additionally, providing detailed show notes and even transcriptions will drive up your natural search engine trafic. Podango employs every method we know to promote the actual content of the podcast, as well as providing blogging, forums, wikis, etc. All of these information sources are designed to get more natural search trafic to the content provided in podcasts. And while these methods are automated and convenient within the Podango infrastructure, they are by no means exclusive to Podango and can be employed by nearly anyone.

Step Six: Particpate in the conversation, wherever it is taking place. Woody Allen once said “Ninety percent of success is showing up.â€� On its face that sounds simple, but to really show up within your community of interest, you have to “Care, Be There, Be Aware, and Share!” meaning you have to be where the community is. Are they having weekly meetings? Do they have a common website in which they have a community forum such as the kind you can form at Yahoo Groups, or something dedicated to a particular niche such as Deviant Art? Are there leading blogs with open commenting where great information is exchanged? Your presence in these venues will lend credibility to your offering both because you will be known by key players in your community of interest and because you will have access to key information and a working knowledge of the art or science that will help you better serve the community at large.

This is not an exhaustive list of all you can do, but these are key elements of growing your listener base. What else have you found useful or helpful? Leave your comments!

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by Lee Gibbons, Podango CEO

As a “Podango podcaster” your life is different than your solo channel counterparts. Because, when they produce podcasts with the traditional model, they are on the hook to produce every episode on their own.

But as a podcaster who distributes your podcasts via a Podango Station you are part of a team of podcasters, serving the market you love. The concept of a Podango station means that there are many contributors to the content under the direction of a station owner (also know as a Station Director.) You still have your own podcast or show, you just have the luxury of knowing that a Station Owner is helping you to grow your audence as he helps grow the audience of the entire station. You also have Podango working to bring you ad revenues and leading edge technologies enhance Listeners’ experiences consuming podcasts.

The Station Director may contract with as many podcasters as she wishes and include their podcast episodes in the mix of podcasts she organizes fot the audience. Her primary mission is to organize the best podcasts in her area of interest into a great set of content for the cummunity she serves. In the course of doing so, she may consistently include in her station’s programming “Anchor Podcasts” that occur with regularity from particular podcasters. She may also contract with some other podcasters to include particular episodes of their shows in “Spotlights” within her station. This gives her listeners a chance to hear something new and different, while also providing a great place for new or rising star podcasters to get a boost in their audience size. This also opens the door for some podcasters to produce shows less frequently, or to produce one-off podcasts and have a chance to monetize their show. Celebrities, as well as highly successful business people, who are interested in podcasting especially like this model because they can ocassionally produce a lucrative show and have a ready audience in the context of a station, with no obligation to continue to produce podcasts.

Finally, as a Podango Podcaster you have the enginering and marketing resources of Podango who are constantly working to provide unique and innovative ways to produce, distribute, and build communities around your podcast content. Podango enables the richest set of end user listening and community features, and the station model shifts the burden of providing technologies and know-how to Podango and the Station Directors.

So, podcaster friend, give some thought to putting your podcast into the context of a Podango Station. You will find that you can do more and go further in your efforts to serve your community than you can do on your own. And, you will have the chance to share with others the burdens and benefits of consistent, high-quality podcasts. Or, think about becoming a Station owner in your area of interest and building a station to serve your niche maret!

How many blogs have I read recently discussing the issues with podcasting? There are numerous. One example is from Roland Piquepaille of ZDNet, who posted the following on his blog describing the roadblocks to podcast adoption. I have summarized some of his insights:

• First, you need to locate a podcast. … there are more than 50,000 different sources available today.
• And even if the title of a podcast looks interesting to you, what about the contents?
• Too few textual transcriptions of their audio files (podcasts), …
• You have to listen to the whole podcast before a real gem appears.
• You read several times faster than you listen to words.

Here is the link to the full article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=222
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Because podcasts are easy to record and deliver, there are a lot of them and it is a jungle finding what you want. These problems listed by Roland are real. It might be easy for the podcasters, but it is not easy for the listeners. We like to describe these jungle effect problems as follows:

1. “It takes too much time to find great podcasts that I am interested in.�
2. “I never know when a new podcast series is available that I might like.�
3. “I can’t get to all the podcasts I have subscribed to.�

I am Doug Smith, the president of Podango. I relate to these problems. I am living with them and Lee, my partner and I, are aiming to help solve them.  These problems are classic of “information overloadâ€�. Having served as an Executive Vice President for FranklinCovey for several years, I was thoroughly entrenched in the concepts of “Time Managementâ€�, “First Things Firstâ€�, “What Matters Mostâ€�, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Peopleâ€� and other training focused on helping improve personal productivity and effectiveness. Learning how to get to the important priorities, the meat of the issues and the key information in a timely and effective manner is one of the elements to a productive life. Life isn’t only about being productive, but when we want to stay on top of the key information in our fields of passion and employment, it sure helps if we don’t have to wade through a mass of “not so goodâ€� to get to the “I really want to knowâ€� stuff. Â

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Podango’s Station model is built to solve these key listener issues. Foremost, it solves the problem of “information overload� by having a trusted station director sift, sort and prioritize the podcasts in specific niche markets, so the listener can listen instead of hunt. These directors continue to monitor the space of their expertise and passion to refine their station programming, so you don’t have to worry about missing new entrants or key announcements.  We will also provide transcripts for each podcast on Podango’s go!Surf pages. Transcripts have many advantages to both users and podcasters. I will discuss these advantages in a future blog. In this introductory blog, I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know of our commitment to help solve listener issues in the podcast market.

Today, Doug Smith (Podango President, and my business partner) and I worked on a couple of pieces of collateral for the upcoming People’s Choice Podcasting awards. We are Silver Level Sponsors for the event, which will take place in September in concert with the Mobile Media & Podcasting Expo (more on our involvement there in coming posts). The ad copy for this series of ads reflect what Podango is and aspires to be, so I thought I would post them while we are in our sneak peek phase…

I would love feedback on them.