What’s on the horizon for Podiobooks?
Good question. I’m sure some of you have noticed that, other than adding new chapters and books, the site has not changed much over the last few weeks. There are a couple reason for this:
- Evo, Tee, and I all have Day Jobs (TM). We love working on Podiobooks, but let’s face it, life happens at times.
- Changes are being made behind the scenes. We’ve added new functionality, like sampler feeds for listing our authors in iTunes and better reporting so we can understand how you are using the system and what problems you might be encountering. (No…not Big Brother stuff, just totals, like how many of each chapter has been downloaded in total, what are the peak traffic times, etc. Fear not…we don’t intrude on your privacy.)
- I’ve been writing new functionality to make subscriptions easier; a one-click unsubscribe, a button to release the next chapter regardless of your download date, and being able to downlad an OPML file of all your subscriptions to name but a few.
So, what’s coming? Well…we have a redesign of the site in store, thanks to Sean and Ray of IPodderX fame. We’re working out the kinks in that, and we’ll be rolling out all this new functionality once we are ready with the new design. Until then, it’s test, test, test, and update, update, update.
One big idea has been to put up forums. Now, I usually forget to check forums, and Evo has said much the same thing, but we’d like to know: do you want forums to discuss the books? The major issues for us are three-fold:
- None of the current staff has much time, so taking on the moderation of the forums would not be possible for us.
- There have been problems in the past with how boards like phpBB and such can get hacked. None of us have any desire to be dealing with security issues like that.
- Simple civility. People would need to obey the Rule of the Sandbox: Play nice or the other kids won’t want to play with you. This would require moderation. See #1.
Would people be willing to volunteer to moderate them? Please, let us know. If the idea turns out to be popular, we’ll see what we can do.
As usual, ping us if you have problems, questions, comments, etc.
Thanks!
Chris
October 31st, 2005 at 6:11 am
I just received the download “The End” for my morevi podcast. I assume that this is a message to tell me I had reached the end of the podiobook. I say “assume” because I couldn’t understand anything that was actually said. Actually, that’s not true, I caught “go to podiobooks.com” at one point.