As some of you probably know, Feedburner offers a full range of services to help you build awareness, track circulation, and implement revenue-generating programs in your RSS and ATOM feeds.

Tonight I started reading Michael Geoghegan’s blog where he blogs about the issues Leo port had with This Week in Tech podcast numbers getting published in Friday’ s Information Week article about podcasting

Leo Laporte decided to stop using Feedburner to serve feeds for all of his projects, including the popular TWIT (This Week In Tech) podcast. Apparently Leo had been experimenting with his Feed burner settings and had inadvertently activated a Feedburner Awareness API. (The API is off by default) It allows the Feedbrner Subscriber numbers for a feed to be available to third party apps, such as sites like Podfeed and PodNova, for publicity and ranking purposes. Leo didn’t fully realize this and was irritated when Rick Klau from Feedburner publicly announced TWIT’s Feedburner subscriber numbers in an Interview with Information Weekly. Eventually fences were mended but the end result is that Feedburner has lost a pretty high profile customer in a very public way and lots of folks have weighed in on one side or the other.

You can read the whole story by read this to post by Leo, Boy Was I Dumb and It’s Not Their Fault

The Feedburner blog clarifies this API - worth reading for publishers. Again, the API is off by default

Leo on the This Week in Tech blog post the following comment under his own post of It’s Not Their Fault

I get hard numbers from AOL on exactly how many downloads they’ve served. Each show is downloaded aroun 100,000 times from their site.

I don’t get counts from the mirrors, BitTorrents, and other sources, so I don’t really have a total number of downloads.

FeedBurner offers a “circulation” number which is somewhere around 40,000 for each 24 hour period. I don’t know what this means because they don’t really explain it. That’s the number that the Awareness API exposes. Is it the number of downloads per day? Is it the number of different people who get my feed each day? Do I multiply by 7 to get our weekly listenership? I don’t really know. I do know it doesn’t really correlate to any of my other numbers. I don’t think it’s a fair representation of our listenership either. That’s why I was unhappy about that number being public. Frankly I had no idea it was public until this brouhaha. That’s my fault for not reading the fine print and for forgetting that I’d even turned it on. But that’s another reason I don’t want to go through a third party - I don’t like surprises. If I do it myself then I have only myself to blame.

The fact is we don’t know exactly how many listen. And we don’t really care. We don’t have to give these numbers to advertisers, so they’re only for bragging rights.

Leo raises some good questions about Feedburner’s numbers. Feedburner needs to be able to show how they get to the numbers they do and jusify that system.

But unlike Leo, many who want or have advertisers, need to to have hard numbers to get ads and/or the rates they want. For Podcasting to go to the next level, it needs a system to be able to audit listenership. I don’t know if that is the business that Feedburner wants to be in, but they have been a place that people have been looking to for that.

There are many techincal challenges in getting an auditing system like Audit Bureau of Circulations. Bit Torrent, iTunes, what Microsoft may do with media player in the future all may cloud what the real downloads are for a podcast. Plus, people’s right to privacy may never allow us to know the real numbers when it comes to how many people listen to a podcast, so “circulation” may be as good as it gets.

Michael Geoghegan is right, the stats of your RSS feed are argueably one of your most valuable podcasting assets. But part that value is being able to be fairly solid about the numbers of your “circulation” base.

Rick Klau, VP of Business Development for Feedburner, has done a good job posting on blogs giving his side ot the story and it was great to see him engage the issue in a productive manner.

I respect Leo for admitting where he was wrong and his decision to move his podcasts off Feedburner. So up talk your RSS feeds if you listen any of Leo’s shows.

Technorati Tags: Feedburner, Leo Laporte, Rick Klau, Michael Geoghegan, Geoghegan, TWiT, Apple, iTunes

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In the “The Art of Project Management” Scott Berkun gives a comprehensive overview of managing a project from start to finish. While Scott’s experience is in software development (mostly at Microsoft), the lessons can be effectively applied to any project. This is a must read for anyone who manages a project who wants give the people involved in the project clear priorities which can be easily tied to the mission, goals, features, resources, and tasks of not only the project but your company as a whole.

Scott has managed to distill a huge amount of information and guidance into a very readable work, his style is lively and witty therefore avoiding the pitfall of being dry and dull that many tech books don’t. I do fault the book on the fact that references to figures are sometimes pointing to the wrong one, and occasionally the legends are mislabeled. A reader can easily over come this issue during the read.

Scott provides examples from real world experiences so you don’t have to make the same mistakes to learn what you should and shouldn’t do. Since I drank from same fire hose, by working on IE thru version 5.0, his brutal honesty makes the book a greater value. Most books give you how to start and finish but forget to address what to do during the middle phase of a project, not only does he address the middle, this is where Scott shines and shows in “The Art of Project Management.”

The book is split into three sections: Plans, Skills and Management. Each section is further broken down in to the core skills and approaches. Here is the chapter list:

• Part 1 - Plans: The Truth About Schedules; How To Figure Out What To Do; Writing The Good Vision; Where Ideas Come From; What To Do With Ideas Once You Have Them
• Part 2 - Skills: Writing Good Specifications; How To Make Good Decisions; Communication And Relationships; How Not To Annoy People - Process, Email, And Meetings; What To Do When Things Go Wrong
• Part 3 - Management: Why Leadership Is Based On Trust; How To Make Things Happen; Middle-game Strategy; End-game Strategy; Power And Politics

By clicking the flowwing link you read a sample chapter from Berkun’s web site in PDF format. On May 10, 2205 Scoot gave a speach to the the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction called What To Do When Things Go Wrong: Saving Design Train Wrecks. By clicking this link you can hear the audio and get a copy of the slide notes from that talk.

Technorati Tags: Project Management, Microsoft, Scott Berkun

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On August 24, 1995, thousands of people were standing in line to buy the first copies of Windows 95. Darn I still know people who still just use it.

Technorati Tags: Windows, Microsoft

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Google Talk = Google’s new IM service that they’re announcing tomorrow.

It is based on or is compatable with Jabber protocol, so all you need is a Gmail account and a Jabber-compatible instant messaging client such as Apple’s iChat.

Go over to smashsworld to get the full 411 on how to setup your client.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Talk, Apple, iChat, Jabber

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Well it looks like Microsoft will be showing more than Acrylic- their Photoshop and Illustrator Killer at the PDC. Expect Sparkle to be shown, as well. So Microsoft’s dreams of a Flash killer are not dead. Heck isn’t this try number 3 or 4 now but at least this time the code name has stayed the same. These products will form the core of the Microsoft Expression Studio too package. I wonder if they will put FrontPage in that box, as well.

With Adobe buying Macromedia, they can match Microsoft on every front with products, which already lead the pack in their respective categories. After all, MS is going to take on PDF soon, which I think is a foolish since the legal and business world are already too invested in that format and have too many business processes and in house tools that would need to be changed. Plus Adobe has a good track record at being cross platform, Microsoft does not. Especially once it feels it has a safe market share in a category. Take IE for the Mac and Unix as exhibit one and two.

Apple has a great opportunity to mend fences with Abode right now. Apple uses PDF as a core part of it’s OS and has a strong past with Abode. Yes, Final Cut Pro and Express caused Adobe to pull further development of Adobe Premiere Pro for OS X, but I think Apple should work with Adobe to have them return to the Mac. It is in Adobe and Apple’s best interest to have all Adobe products on the Mac. At the same time Apple will need to understand the next version of Flash will be take on Quicktime for some uses. Right now these two need to kiss and make-up and practice coopertition (a combination of cooperation and competition), not doing so will only help the kids in Redmond.

Technorati Tags: Expression Studio, Acrylic, Sparkle, FrontPage, Microsoft, Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF, Acrobat, Adobe, Flash, Macromedia, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Quicktime, Apple

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