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A “Traditional Media” Experiment

April 17, 2007 By Adam

The Boston NOW paper I mentioned before was launched this morning, and I’m in it twice.

There’s a blurb about the Museum’s podcast and a callout box on the page of Boston Marathon coverage featuring the latest Boston Behind the Scenes.

I wanted to see if this would convince people to go to my website, but the early returns aren’t good. Boston Behind the Scenes hasÂ seen exactly one unaccounted-for hit from the Boston area today â€“ and that was from the servers of the Community Newspaper Company in Taunton. I’m pretty sure they were just thoroughly investigating the new competition.

Poor Marathoners

April 16, 2007 By Adam

The Boston Marathon is today, and the weather is not looking good!

It’s a hard race in a normal year, but I suspect this time will be really bad.

Last week, I put up an episode of Boston Behind the Scenes about the marathon. You can use the player below to hear about its history, and what it is like to run in a normal year.

MarathonWeather

I’m Carbon Neutral

April 15, 2007 By Adam

I watched An Inconvenient Truth for the first time today, then went to the NativeEnergy’s website to look into buying renewable energy credits. Using the money from credit purchases, NativeEnergy funds new renewable power projects like windfarms and a diary farm renewable methane project. According to their website:

With NativeEnergy, you can help finance and build new clean and renewable energy projects that help Native Americans and Alaska Natives create sustainable economic benefits, and that help Americaâ€™s family farmers compete with agribusiness. These projects will displace electricity from fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions on your behalf, making up for the CO₂ emissions you canâ€™t avoid.

When I did the calculations with their web tool, it turns out that I probably produce about three tons of CO₂ a year (as opposed to the national average of 7.5 tons/year). This wasn’t surprising, as I don’t own a car, walk to work every day, and only fly occasionally. What was surprising was the cost to offset those three tons: only $36.

So, for just $36, I’m now carbon neutral.

My Letter to Libsyn

April 14, 2007 By Adam

I’ve noticed a lot more people coming to the Boston Behind the Scenes site through the rss feed in the last day or two. I have also noticed a few weird searches bringing people to my site. So, when I looked at one of those search results and saw the listing below, I put on my email-writing face and set to work writing a letter to my podcast host, Liberated Syndication.

……….

From: Adam Weiss
To: [email protected]
Subject: “We are experiencing unusually heavy traffic…”

Apparently, Libsyn was having server issues when the GoogleBot came around recently. This resulted in the search listing for my podcast to turn into “Liberated Syndication // Podcasting Made Easy: We are experiencing unusually heavy traffic. Please try again in a moment.”

I have worked hard on a quality podcast that gets mentions on international travel websites and draws listeners from all over the world. I’m “above the fold” on Google’s first page for most searches related to my content.

After all of that work, there is no mention of the title of the show or any other details on Google when searching for the show, and I have seen a change in my site traffic in the last day as a result.

To make matters MUCH worse, my podcast is about to be featured prominently in a large-circulation newspaper. If readers see the paper and search for the show, they will not find it. Instead, they will find an apology and an ad from Libsyn.

I know that there are many ways to signal the GoogleBot, and there may be a way to say “ignore new stuff on this pass.” If there is, why isn’t it being used? If there isn’t, the error page needs to change significantly.

I have used libsyn for quite a while and recommend it to my consulting clients. I pay for this “reliable” hosting even though I have terabytes of monthly bandwidth that I am not using on another host. I can understand minor outages, but I never expected a service error to have repercussions that would change my virtual presence internet-wide.

This is unacceptable.

Adam Weiss

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