I think I was successful in the task that has consumed way too much of November. After moving this blog from one web hosting company to another I tackled the more delicate task of moving the podictionary podcast blog.

More delicate because the podictionary blog has far more listeners and readers, and also because it is many more interconnections with other parts of the internet.

The fact that there are more listeners and readers doesn’t just mean that it’s more likely someone will notice if the site is down for an hour or so; the type of audience matters also. Podictionary has thousands of followers who use iTunes or some other tool that tracks the site via an RSS feed. You don’t need to know what that means, but the implication is that many of them automatically ping the podictionary website as often as every 15 minutes.

Just as delicate are all the internet interconnections. The Apple iTunes store pulls its info on podictionary from the RSS feed, as now does the Microsoft Zune Marketplace. Podictionary uses the services of a website called Feedburner to help track audience size. If the pipe breaks in any of these places podictionary could lose many subscribers.

And for a while there it did. Late Sunday night I checked to see that the switchover still looked like it had worked, only to break out in a sweat at the sight of my subscriber numbers at about one third of what they should have been. I managed to find the broken part and patch it up so that by yesterday I had rebounded to about 90% of my peak subscriber level. Phew!

But during my numerous sessions dealing with the technical support people at my new hosting company I had another shock. I remember the precise moment when I was a teenager and I was stopped and asked a question on Severn Avenue and called sir for the first time.

Excuse me sir.

or

Thank you sir.

I’d never been called sir before and it was a bit of a jarring experience.

This past weekend when I told the support technician which address to look at for my website and then asked him what he was seeing, he replied:

There’s a picture of an older dude…

That older dude is me!

First the blip. You may have experienced a mystery message from the Carnal Knowledge website if you have subscribed to this blog. If so, my apologies. I have just finished moving the site from some slow to some faster servers. This caused a little blip in website availability as well as sending out an unwanted message.

I believe that the site is now healthy and happy but if you knock up against anything that looks broken please do let me know. I’ll be trying to make similar changes to my podictionary website this coming week. It’s much more complicated so I hope I’ve learned something from this transition experience.

And now the news. Since my last post I’ve had some flattering exposure for both the book and the podcast.

Podictionary was featured on iTunes for a third time bringing in a new wave of listeners and podictionary appears now to be a permanent fixture on the iTunes “English Language Learning” under “Topics In Focus.” iTunes (the software that goes with the iPod) has over the past two years been the single most important source of listeners for podcasters.

This past week Microsoft included podcasts in its iPod competitor Zune.

There has been an ongoing hum among internet broadcasters as to whether the word podcast was really the right word for this new medium. My view has been that once Oxford Dictionaries adopted podcast as word of the year in 2005, and then major broadcasters such as ABC, BBC, CBC, CBS, CNN, NPR and all sorts of other TLAs (three letter acronyms) produced things they called podcasts, there was really no going back. If anyone was going to put up a fight it would be Microsoft and since in their new Zune software they call a podcast a podcast, I guess that’s the final word.

In establishing the first iTunes catalogue of podcasts Apple gathered about 3000 podcasts in 2005. Podictionary was lucky enough to be among those 3000. iTunes podcast directory is now said to contain something like 25,000 podcasts (that’s series, not episodes).

Zune opened its doors with something over 1000 podcasts and again podictionary was privileged to be among those in the initial listing. I have not yet seen any explosive increase in podictionary listenership, but if iTunes has any worthy competitor at all in this, Microsoft Zune is likely to be it.

Ottawa Magazine included a fair sized piece on Carnal Knowledge and the book was also mentioned extensively in a full four page article in Podcast User Magazine. I also just learned from a listener that the podcast has been recommended in a magazine in China aimed at English learners.