We’ve been pretty pleased lately to be one of the American Museum of Natural History’s top MySpace friends. Even if they’ve got a Top 40 instead of a Top 8, we’re still sharing space with prestigious (yet highly unlikely) MySpacers Sir David Attenborough, Scientific American, and Margret Mead.
I also learned through this that under “Favorite Book” on Charles Darwin’s MySpace profile he listed a bunch of his own works. LAME!!
The other day I was trolling MySpace loooking for potential InsectaPod Cast listeners. Anna, who has a clearer sense of the distinction between online and physical worlds, expressed a general distrust of site (truthfully, she called it trashy).
MySpace has come under a lot of fire for a website that’s only been around a few years. So of that is just do to little misunderstandings: lots of people express contempt for the concept of “friending” someone, but I think that’s just a matter of a piece of nomenclature that doesn’t translate well between users and non-users (non-users being typified by the old guy in this parody video). More alarming is the Delete Online Predators Act, a reactionary and piece of legislation that fails to make a distinction between pedophiles and the spaces in which youth congregate.
I’ve had good success using MySpace to gain new InsectaPod Cast listeners, though. It allows me to parse more than 100 million users into two disparate groups- those who dig bugs and those who don’t- and then let those who dig bugs know that InsectaPod Cast exists. Further, when we release a new episode of InsectaPod Cast, I can send an update notification to all of our friends on MySpace letting them know.
Our site statistics indicate that the InsectaPod Cast MySpace profile drives users to the website, which I think means it’s successful tool for us. I don’t think a presence on social networking sites is required for a successful podcast, but if the target audience is like ours- young and wired- it becomes pretty important.
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.
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.
