Libsyn - the podcast hosting service - has a great new stats service.

(Full pic size on Flickr.)

Welcome to my office. It’s the lounge bar of the Metropole on Edgware Road. I come here to escape builders, 2-year-old son, and domestic mayhem. Quite frankly, some days it’s the only way I can get anything done at all.

The hotel wifi costs £40 a month, and that’s on top of all the coffees, pots of green tea, and occasional lunches that I need to keep me going. So I don’t pay it .

Instead, I have a mobile USB dongle from 3. It costs me £10 a month for a gig of transfer. The real limitation is that it drains the battery on my laptop. So I just use it for quick forays onto the net. The connection here isn’t quite as stable as a good WiFi signal, but it will do.

And now I see that Mobile Broadband is coming to Russia (Option who make dongles for Vodafone are to provide them to Russian telecom VimpleCom ).   Essentially this means that the internet can now reach into the furthest corners of the earth - even where traditional phone lines are far and few between.

I began the year with a TV appearance on behalf of Storynory, our podcast that offers free children’s stories. Funnily enough I wasn’t on CBBC - the kids’ Channel - but CNBC - the Financial News Channel. I was there to talk about the ‘The Trend to Free” in 08.

The Free Economy is something that Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, is working on for his next book.

I wasn’t their everyday sort of guest. In the Green Room there was a little box to leave your business card. It was full cards left by analysts, venture capitalist, and economists. I dropped in mine with picture of a story-telling frog on it.

I was supposed to have 5 minutes on the Power Lunch Europe show, but the guy before me over-ran his rant about the NYMEX. So I had 4 minutes to explain the trend to free. The interviewer was great, but there wasn’t time to say a lot of the things I had planned. There’s stuff going on that isn’t just about cash flow, and it’s about a lot more than advertising moving online.

But a good thing about a blog is that you can say what ever you like. Here are some of the points I wanted to make about Free on the Web:

The web is a very idealistic place - and some organisations like the Wikipedia and Mozila give away their products out of sheer altruism. The commercial companies have to contend with this free-for-all ethos. Who cares about Encarta or Encylopedia Britannica any more?

If you want to build a big website, your content has to be free. If your content hides behind a credit card form, the search engines can’t see it. The reason the BBC and the Wiki are big on the web is because they have thousands of high quality pages that come up in searches.

Given the altruistic and cooperative nature of the web, people tend to link to free resources, rather than overtly commercial ones.

In the old days free led to the question “where’s the catch?” but the web is a voting machine that rewards integrity - so free has to really mean free.

Google launches a free product practically every week. Some of these are amazingly high value - take SketchUp the 3D, modeling software, or Google Earth that has detailed satellite pictures of the globe previously available only to defense departments.

Most of Google’s products don’t make them money - but they do earn it love and good will. These are vital to a company that is so dominant because a regulator making his or her career is more likely to start an anti-trust suit against an unpopular company - such as Microsoft. The free products, such as gmail, help Google worm its way into your life and become an essential part of it. They also niggle Microsoft, which it is always happy to do..

Many people build their reputation by giving their time to the web free of charge. Some build software - occasionally with enormous impact - and they do well out of it. Linus Torvalds is hardly unemployable, although he gave his youth to Linux. Others write or record media content. For a professional, a high reputation is the key to their success - so they don’t really need advertising. Quite frankly, most authors and musicians could also benefit from giving away their material. The great majority aren’t making any money from selling their works - only the top few do that. They had better face up to that, and start working on giving away their material, and building a following. It’s a long hard slog, but it’s the way the world works now.

If you are traditional business all the above is annoying. But if your product can be reproduced at minimal marginal cost you had better face up to the facts. Newspaper publishers are now coming round to giving away their content online - and even on the train in the form of free papers. And oddly enough, the ones who have seen that free is the future are doing rather well.

Alleluia ! Microsoft has seen the light ! The marketplace for its Zune Podcast player will list 1000 podcasts from November 13th. Podcasters will be able to submit their feeds from then on too.

Talking of the jump in visitor stats at Storynory, I also wonder if the latest version of WordPress has helped the site’s search optimisation.

WordPress 3.0 has better enforcement of content generation on the fly, so that you don’t get the same content on numerous different URLs. Some of it, we were doing already, like diverting www.storynory.com to storynory.com. But I also understand that the old WordPress was capable of creating pages with a whole load of different variations in the address. As is well known, Google does not like duplicate content. Eliminating it might have helped our search results.

Something that upgrading WordPress forced me to do, sort of by accident, was to change our archives. Storynory’s Archive Page is the second most visited page after the home page. I was using the very nice looking Ajax archives generated by Extended Live Archive, but because it was in JavaScript, Google couldn’t see the links it generated. ELA doesn’t work in WordPress 3.0, so now I have an HTML page, divided up into categories. This is generated using the WordPress tag ‘get_posts’. Effectively, it’s a site map, and I think that might have cheered up Google too.

I don’t know for sure if upgrading WordPress has helped Storynory’s SEO, but it certainly didn’t do any harm, and it has been a good month for visitor stats.

Hope you had a good Halloween, and weren’t caught by too many spells, or kids pestering you for treats.

Our kids podcast, Storynory, enjoyed a nice treat : a good jump in its visitor stats. A lot of it was search traffic coming into two Halloween stories, last year’s, and one we put out a couple of week’s before Halloween this year. I also added a Halloween tag for good measure, and made sure that the festival was highlighted on the front page.

It’s natural to think around holidays for children, but I would have thought that many blogs and podcasts could also benefit from a quick look in the diary to see what’s coming up. It’s important to be a bit early, so the search engines have time to find you.

Roll on Christmas…

There’s a big release of the WordPress Blogging software today - 2.3. A summary of new features can be found on the WordPress Codex.

It seems that it will break some plugins, including Extended Live Archives which is a very cool way of displaying your past posts. It seems odd to me that WordPress doesn’t make it easy for you to pull out a list of posts from individual categories.

It introduces tagging, and I’m waiting to see whether this makes a great difference to life online, or not very much at all. It’s been around for a while with various plugins.

I’l just select an example of one new feature, which should help SEO.
WWW or no-WWW? Based on your Blog Address, WordPress automatically redirects the other to your blog address.

Partial post URLs should find and redirect to the full URL.

Also, if you change the Post Slug, the old URL will redirect to the new one.

I’m a big fan of Google Documents, which has just added presentations. It seems to me that Google docs are ideal not only for sharing projects with others, but for keeping all your work in one place that can easily be found, even when you change computers. The Google Blog is right when it says that more than anyother type of document, presentations are meant to be shared.

This rather breathless Google video explains the rational of keeping your documents online.

A while ago I asked the world if anyone could suggest a good sound editor for the mac. I received quite a few helpful comments, but only recently did I get round to trying out Sound Studio 3. I wish I had tried it before. It’s the sound editor for me.

Like all the best applications, it has a nice clean interface but keeps lots of features tucked away under the menu. There are a load of high quality compressors and expanders, and access to all the ones that are on the Mac too. But I really like it just for the simple editing that is very similar to Sony’s Sound Forge (for Windows).

You can simply drop in markers at the beginning and end of the section you want to cut, click inbetween the markers to block it, and then snip. This is the only way I know of sound editing where you don’t constantly loose the beginning and end of what you want to cut.

It comes with some extra goodies, the most useful of which for me is the stitcher. If your audio is spread out over several files, you can drag them into an window and it just stitches them together end to end.

It supports just about every type of audio you might need, including Wave, AIFF, and MP3 (but you must install lame for MP3s making).

And for podcasters, you can add the id 3 tags directly from Sound Studio - another time saver. Fab !

Allow me to stray a little off topic, as I am apt to do : I’m troubled by the the number one suspect in the case of missing Madeleine - her mother Mrs. McCann.

It’s reported that Maddie’s DNA was found in a car that the McCanns hired 25 days after their little girl went missing. It’s implied that it got there because the dastardly duo had dug up the body and were taking it somewhere else to hide again.

Ok, I’m no scientist - but I do think it’s all too easy to be blinded by technology which has the aura of being infallible. Experts have caused many miscarriage of justice, particularly where children are involved. Cold science seems to the antidote to the emotions we all feel in such cases. But often it’s very misleading.

The Plod, Portugese or otherwise, will have you believe that the odds are millions against a chance DNA match. But no doubt while they had Mrs. McCann under the harsh angle poise light of interrogation for 11 hours, telling her that they knew she done it, so she had better fess up, they forgot to mention that the odds of a match from a sibling are rather high. In fact, they are one in four. As the McCanns have two other children, that makes a 50% chance of there being an exact DNA match for Maddie in their hire car.

The British Plod have taken an awfully long time to supply their Portuguese friends with this flimsy evidence, but you can get a paternity test done in five days for $260., or over night if you are prepared to stump up $860. The website of the service helpfully explains that everyone has two sets of chromosomes. You inherit one from your father and one from your mother. So there’s a 50% chance that you will inherit the same set from your dad as your brother or sister receives. There’s a further 50% chance that you will inherit the same set from your mother as they do - ergo a 1 in 4 chance of an exact match.

Don’t they have DNA labs in Portugal? Of course they do. I’m pretty sure the British police were called in to convince the British media that the McCanns are guilty, and to get our lovely tabloids off the backs of the Portuguese police. Even if they don’t get Mrs. McCann to confess, they will have achieved a PR coup, and the cloud of suspicion will aways hang over the parents, thanks to the scientific “proof”. There will be no need to continue the investigation with its embarrassing lack of progress.

I’m not saying their police are anymore useless than ours - after all, ours go round shooting innocent people on the tube, and the head cop doesn’t even know about it for days. But I do think they have been worse than useless in this case, and it would perhaps be better if they just gave up trying to solve it.

I briefly caught sight of Libsyn today, just for long enough to read that they had a DNS problem, and that some people could access their site, and others couldn’t. Well I can’t see them now. I’ve switched our latest stories over to our own server.

This comes on top a torrid summer of  stats all over the place, and older “archived” files getting stuck on download due to “capacity issues”.

I suppose the truth about Libsyn is that they are bit ropy, but then they do offer unlimited bandwidth at a great price. They have made podcasting possible. This takes the edge off my frustration.