InsectaPod Blog

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about ways to measure site usage. Last month we wrote an article about InsectaPod Cast for an entomology publication and found ourselves wanting to make very specific claims about who has been listening to the podcast. this same info will be valuable as we near the end of the fiscal year and argue for funds to continue the podcast, and good user stats play a role in accessibility and usability.

Thus far, we’ve been relying on the visitor statistics offered by our web host. For the most part, this has been acceptable. I’ve also read some posts that suggest using multiple trackers is valuable, and that page views, which I tend to focus on, are less valuable than user sessions, which my current host doesn’t give me much insight into. As we really dug into the process of using this metric to see if InsectaPod Cast was meeting its goals, though, I realized that the log provided by my web host just wasn’t cutting it.

I’d used statcounter in the past, which offers some tracking for free and then charges for data storage beyond the most recent 100 visitors. Anna suggested we use google analytics this time, though, after hearing it discussed in a presentation at National Extension Technology Conference. Google Analytics has also been used in some projects at the Writing in Digital Environments Center at MSU, where I am a researcher. So I activated that today, and we’ll see what happens.
Up to this point, we’ve seen visitors, unique visitors, and page views increase nearly every month since we posted episode one in July 2007 (the only month there was a decrease was December 2007, a month in which we didn’t post an update). Popular keywords include bedbugs, pinned insect collections, insect gentalia, and ludifisk. The most commonly viewed pages are the most recent episode, the rss feed, and this blog. It’ll be interesting to see what new information we can glean from google analytics, and compare it with what we’re getting from the web host.

Viewing the InsectaPod search keyphrase data (the phrases people type into the engines before heading to InsectaPod Cast through the results) is depressing, because the numbers just aren’t very big. But I got a big kick out of this one, which indicates someone planning ludifisk for dinner wound up on the transcript of episode 2, in which Anna compares insects as food to “a regional dish, like ludifisk, or tripe.”

After the semi-success with feedburner last week I decided to try to employ some more tools to boost the functionality of Insectapod Cast. Most of these were social networking kind of tools. Namely, del.icio.us, technorati, and digg. I placed code for each in a line at the bottom of the podcast page and waited.

A few hours later I got an email from my partner Anna, who was at the Ecological Society of America meeting in San Jose last week. She said she didn’t know what technorati was, but assumed it was something I thought would get us more listeners and, as such, she was excited about it.

In the event she’s not the only one in the dark on these tools, here’s a run down:

• Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows users to manage all of their bookmarks in one web-based place. User’s also tag bookmarks with short descriptive words and develop a network, so friends can view each others bookmarks. I added a button on insectapodcast.com that allows del.icio.us users to bookmark the podcast page quickly and easily.
• Technorati is a search engine devoted to blogs and, more recently, podcasts. With a link to our technorati profile on the insectapod page, users can vote for us (more votes means better presentation in search results), or put us in their list of favorites.
• Digg is a community-based popularity web site. The more people that claim to “digg” insectapodcast by clicking through the button on our page, the more exposure we’ll have to other digg community members.

I may add more items to this list, like a link to comment on a facebook profile. I think most of our listeners won’t be interested in these features, and I doubt the digg or technorati systems will yield great numbers of potential listeners for a niche podcast like ours, but I figure there’s little danger in having these links waiting for people who might expect them.

When I started InsectaPod Cast I had decided I wanted to do nearly everything on my own. I wanted to learn how to record and edit through the process. I wanted to design the web page rather than just using a wordpress (like this blog) and I even did it all in code, without a WYSIWYG editor, so I really understood how the whole thing went together. I also wrote the RSS feed and distributed it on my own, even though I knew a service like feedburner could do that for me for free.

Today, though, a decided to start using feedburner. Mainly, because I need more statistics about users and downloads and things of this nature. iTunes doesn’t provide any statistics whatsoever, but if I run my feed through feedburner, I can get the kind of info I need. InsectaPod Cast is partially grant funded, so it’s important to be able to demonstrate reach and impact. I’m excited to see how this changes my understanding of our listeners.

Without question, the most annoying part of this project so far has been dealing with iTunes. I wrote the rss feed for insectapod cast, used feed validator to check my work, and submitted it to iTunes. At first I thought things were great, because I could download the podcast and subscribe to it successfully. But then the issue of a logo came up.

ITunes features podcast, which would be great because that’s how you gain listeners (although the itunes community at large might be a broad demographic for InsectaPod Cast). But not having a decent logo is one way to ruin the already remote chances of InsectaPod Cast being featured. So I made a logo and updated the feed to include. Two days later, iTunes still hasn’t updated the logo. Itunes is supposed to check the feed for changes once every 24 hours. So it should have happened twice by now. Plus I pinged them twice to check it immediately. Nothing’s changed, and the default iTunes logo is still the one associated with InsectaPod Cast. Which is annoying.

I’ve done some checking around and it looks like complaints with iTunes are pretty common in the podcasting community. It seems to be viewed by many as villian too powerful to be ignored. I’m certainly not endeared to Steve Jobs’s beast at this point.