Todd Cochrane shakes his head in dismay following his analysis of nomination submissions for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards:

[…] I have never been so utterly blown away by the sad state of affairs when it comes to Podcasters RSS feeds, and some of the crap we have been sorting through.

[…] With website reviews done on nearly 500 shows. 42% did not have an RSS feed button on there home page, 99% had a iTunes link. 26% did not have a link to the file in there show notes, 21% had less than 2 lines of show notes and 3% of the sites the reviewers could not even find the podcast section.

Among the detailed figures Todd quotes are these:

[…] Even more amazing we found of the 3200 plus shows 200 shows that were calling themselves a podcast had no RSS feed, was not listed in any directory, and only provided direct link downloads not surprisingly these shows had low double digit nominations.

For Immediate Release, the podcast Shel and I do, is among those nominations. As we do all of the things podcasters ought to, maybe our chances just improved!

The easier podcasting becomes for anyone to do – the barriers to entry really are extremely low – the greater the likelihood that many new podcasters will make the kinds of mistakes Todd writes about.

I imagine much of it is ignorance combined with aspects that are not as easy as pie. Writing the RSS feed code, for instance, and getting those iTunes tags correct.

Yet missing fundamentals like show notes and getting listed in directories suggests a clear need for some education in the basics.

A good book might help :)