iTunes in America
One of the few annoying things about iTunes for a podcast publisher (in general it’s wonderful because it’s levelled the playing field between indies and mainstream programme makers) is that it’s regional. Even when I bring my laptop to America, I can still only see the UK iTunes rankings. Here in Seattle, where I’m in the Exbiblio office this week, I’m using one of their beautiful Macs and I’ve logged onto the US iTunes for the first time.  I can see that our Storynory podcast is at number 8 in Kids and Family (It’s Numero Uno over in the UK most of the time). Ahead of us are a couple of Disney podcasts and various Old Time Radio streams which make use of out-of-copy-right archives. I can also see 10 very nice comments from users, all of which give us 5 stars out of 5. Several mention how much they like the voice of Natasha, our story reader. This is very satisfying.  We are also big in New Zealand this weekend! A flood of visitors. We are not quite sure why - perhaps a publication has written up Storynory. We often notice that Australia is often our second-biggest download region. There must be a lot of podcast listeners down-under. My guess is that being further away from most of the English-Speaking world encourages the use of technology to stay in touch.
