Written by Philip Roy | 27 March 2009
Posted in Site News

Earlier this week I was contacted by the host of MediaShift on PBS.org. He had spotted the article mentioning NZMac.com's podcast being featured in a section on iTunes and I answered a few questions for him about that event. He has now written an article that discusses the importance to site owners and those in web-related businesses, on being listed or promoted by other sites such as iTunes and Twitter, and NZMac.com is briefly mentioned.

Many of the questions were related to understanding how the iTunes selection process works, which I was unable to answer, but it is interesting to see the response he got from Apple. Unfortunately also I was doing some technical work related to the server location of the podcast files (they're not sitting on the NZMac.com server at all) and so I wasn't able to give him too much statistical information on the how being featured had impacted downloads. What I was able to indicate was that when a new episode is published there is always a spike in downloads, but that there was a dramatic spike when the last podcast was published (the same day as the podcast became "featured" on iTunes) that was 8 times the amount of downloads from the previous day, and that had certainly never happened before.

You can read the article on the MediaShift site at....

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/03/new-gatekeepers-twitter-apple-youtube-need-transparency-in-editorial-picks085.html