I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with various people, and I figured I’d get it written down. I don’t like podcasts. This is not because I have some concealed Luddite tendencies, nor because I’m looking for something popular to dislike and be controversial over.

Putting it simply, podcasts are slow, irritating, and inconvenient - a step backward from the efficiency of text. No, I don’t like radio either.

Slow: I can read way faster than anyone can talk. I can read the transcript of a podcast in less than a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it, and that assumes the speakers aren’t stopping to hem, haw and um their way through a conversation. My time is valuable to me - give me the transcript.

Irritating: With at least one podcast I listened to a while back - and this was a twenty-something Irish male - if you removed the word “like” from the stream, it would have been about half as long. Other accents can be difficult to understand, or just plain unpleasant, and people who are perfectly well able to express themselves in text end up incomprehensible in speech. Sound quality isn’t always what it might be, and having to listen very carefully to make out what someone is saying is, well, an irritation.

Inconvenient: First, I have to get the podcasts onto some piece of equipment where I can hear them. Since listening to voice takes a huge amount of my attention, I can’t do that in work, and I usually have better things to do at home, so it has to be something portable. I have a small MP3 player, but the rigmarole of downloading the file and transferring it to the player and so on is tiresome. Then, unless I actually am concentrating all the time, I miss bits. I can’t just look back up the page; I have to rewind a bit, and hope I got the right spot. Neither can I easily flick forward through the bits I’m not interested in. “45 minutes in” is no use unless I can see a timer, and my MP3 player doesn’t have one. For that matter, finding 45 minutes in on Winamp involves messing with a slider.

So, in essence: give me writing, dammit. Sound is for conversation and music.

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I’ve been working with sites on both sides of advertising for years now, and I’m still stunned by the things that advertisers do. There are now, literally, millions of niche sites in almost any given area of interest, and you can, with a very small amount of research, and a very small budget, place hyper-targeted ads.

In most parts of the Western world, there are local “free papers”; weekly, monthly or quarterly publications that carry mostly local advertising along with a few articles to entice you to read the adverts. People are paying $20, $50, sometimes hundreds of dollars to have an ad in these things. What then happens is that someone picks up the paper as it drops through the letterbox, or from a stand in a shopping mall, or whatever, glances at it, and then uses it to line the catbox. The response rate from any ad in these has to be abysmal.

So if I were an advertiser today, I’d tell those paper guys that I’ve found better places to spend my money, and go looking at websites. Chances are that you can find a blog, a forum, or a news site about your specific business, be it anything from beekeeping to stationery. More usefully, you can find sites that are run by people near you geographically, or that are frequented by exactly the people you need to sell to.

And if you contact the site owner, the chances are very good that you can put an ad on their site - text, banner, or whatever - for far less than you’re paying the local free paper, and with far more effect. Anyone who sees that ad is going to be interested. Most amateur site owners will be happy to get $20 a month for an advertisement, and for most businesses, if you get four potential customers, that’s money well spent.

If I were an advertiser, I’d dedicate a couple of hundred bucks, and a few hours a month, to finding niche sites in my area, and contacting the owners.

(Post topic thanks to Chris Brogan!)

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I’ve had a few conversations lately about my various websites, and how much traffic they get, and so on. So I figured I’d do up a post discussing that.

The two sites that get the majority of traffic are dukestreet.org, and inranelagh.com. Most of the traffic for both comes from search engines.

Dukestreet first, then. In the month of August, there were 15,052 visitors, who looked at 18,873 pages. 96.3% of that was from search engines, the remaining being between site referrals and direct URL entry. I suspect that links from within email, IM, or the like may look to Google Analytics like direct entry.

The top ten search terms were “torchwood season 2″ (2,287 visits), “torchwood series 2″ (937), “doctor who series 4″ (919), “world of starcraft” (435), “lotro music” (335), “freema agyeman” (312), “doctor who season 4″ (291), “time and chips” (275), “dr who series 4″ (256) and “japanese monsters” (161). As you can see, there’s a definite slant in the interests there.

The referring sites are less than 2% of overall traffic, and most of them consist of search engines that analytics wasn’t able to identify properly, or links from discussion boards. Essentially, referral traffic could go away tomorrow, and I wouldn’t miss it at all.

Inranelagh.com doesn’t have the same weight of traffic, by any manner of means. 1,226 visitors in August, viewing 2,273 pages. Just under 78% of that was from search engines, 9.79% from referrals, and 12.23% from direct traffic.

The search terms are an odd assortment, divided between the main part of the site and this blog. “ranelagh” comes in first (91 visits), followed by: “ranelagh dublin” (64), “dvi vs vga” (30), “superquinn ranelagh” (21), “ranelagh ireland” (15), “better than myspace” (14), “steampunk parts” (14), “ranelagh, dublin” (13), “kelli ranelagh” (11), and “facebook better than myspace” (9).

The referring sites are obviously much more important here than for dukestreet. Again, some of these are search engines, but wikipedia tops the list, sending me 31 visitors from the entry on Ranelagh.

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There’s a story on SEOmoz at the moment, detailing how an “upper member of regional management” in a radio company told employees that:

if you want your page to show up in Google, you need to pay, say, $30 to be listed on maybe the 200th page, but you can increase your bid and show up on the 7th or 8th page, and you can pay even more to show up on the first page of results.

Good gods. And this guy’s company have a “partnership with Google”. Now, chances are, given this guy’s comprehension of how search engines work, that the partnership consists of carrying Adsense ads on the company website, but even so… the level of sheer misunderstanding that’s in there is unbelievable.

I know, at some level, that this is one more manifestation of the news-reporters-know-nothing-about-my-area phenomenon. This is the one where, when there’s a news report on your area of expertise, you cringe and shout at the TV, “that’s not how it is, you idiots!”, but then in the next report, they’re talking about someone else’s area, and you’re going, “well, it’s on the news, it must be true”.

The thing that bugs me is that if this guy - and the newsreader - can get things so utterly wrong about areas they’re not familiar enough with, it follows that I must be, on a near daily basis, producing statements that are so far from being accurate that they’re out of sight. And I don’t know. I try hard to be accurate in everything I say. So, uh, if I’m spouting bullshit on something (aside from the times I’m winding someone up, mind, in which case you’ll just spoil the joke), could you do me a favour and call me on it?

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There’s a BBC report about the Amazon Mechanical Turk effort to find Steve Fosset’s missing plane from satellite imagery. One of the bits of information in it is a bit mind-boggling:

The search in Nevada by the Civil Air Patrol and many private pilots has discovered six previously unknown wrecks - some of which were decades old.

This is a part of one of the most completely mapped, intensively satellite-covered countries in the world. Further, a lot of it’s desert - rock and mountain, not much in the way of trees to conceal a crash, or water to crash into and sink. One plane taking days to locate is bizarre enough, but to find six others that nobody knew about in the process? Were they ones that were searched for before and not found, or are there planes falling from interdimensional rifts over Nevada?

EDIT: A bit more information on the other wrecks.