To use a dice would be more honest.

14.04.2005 - 01:23 / filled under default

Dave Winer has introduced a new 'feature': click-tracking. While this at first looks good, let's take a deeper look:

This morning we have a new feature on audio.weblogs.com, a way of measuring the popularity of an individual podcast.

The popularity of one entry of an podcast, represented in a list of the latest 100 podcast, (the list scrolling very fast at some times).

Question: Will you click on any show you have subscribed in your ipodder? Probably not. You will see it perhaps in this list, and fire up your ipodder to get it, but surely not click on the link.

Now, when a user clicks on a link to a podcast to listen to it, we add 1 to a counter. The counter is displayed in a column to the right of the link to the MP3, as illustrated in this screen shot.

Only if clicked on the right link, which represents the mp3. If you click on the more prominent left link, nothing happens.

Every time the link is clicked the count goes up by one, so this is an easy way for you or your listeners to "vote" for your cast.

Yeeah! Another debacel with voting like at Podcast Alley is surely what we need. As I am only able to see the latest 100 ones, let's just flush them with some new podcasts ...

Of couse it would be great if people only click when they're actually listening to something, and (important) we may implement ways to make sure people only vote once for any individual show.

It would be great also, if people would not click on it and burn bandwith just because they want to vote.

Since popularity is an important part of the community, it seemed that audio.weblogs.com should get in on the fun!

Yes. You managed to get into the 'fun' of unusable votings.

In contrast to this, Pocast Alley does have a more working voting system ... I don't have the big working solution myself, but this is broken by design ...

This is like the joke about Arnold Schwarzeneger "Arnie enjoys it, when people tell him to stop going for govenour, because he is an actor and not a politician - it is the first time, they called him actor!".

Nice try, but a random number behing that link could be a more precise count. I don't mind the effort in providing this little service, which is quite nice, etc.

What I do mind is saying "a way of measuring the popularity of an individual podcast". Be honest and say 'a way of measuring the popularity of an individual podcast as seen on this webpage". Because that is what it is.