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Matt May is a Web accessibility specialist, and has written on the interaction of people and technology since 1995. He keeps his own weblog at bestkungfu.com, and produces a podcast called Staccato, which features Creative Commons-licensed music.

Alex Williamsblogs, consults and produces unconference style events, where people immerse in DIY media. These are fun occasions, designed for people who want to get together with authors, artists, technologists and leading thinkers to converse, eat, listen to music, write, shoot photos and post podcasts and videoblogs. Alex also works with companies to establish DIY approaches, where writing, photography, voice and video come together to create new conversations and communities. Alex is currently fascinated with digital photography. His girlfriend calls him a Flickrholic. Send Alex a nice message: alexhwilliams at gmail.com.

Nicole Simon loves blogging and podcasting, dashed with an European view. As consultant she helps to facilitate such tools for business purposes or personal publishing empires. She can be found at cruel to be kind and on her private blog Useful Sounds.

Roland Tanglao is a well known podcasting enthusiast and a passionate advocate of blogs, RSS, and social software as a means of online expression for people, organizations and businesses. He is a prominent participant in the blogosphere and online communities and one of the founders of Bryght and as Bryght's Chief Blogging Officer reads hundreds of blogs daily. He graduated from the University of Waterloo, worked at Nortel Networks where he ran its first internal corporate blog, has has been blogging since 1999, and was the first business blogging consultant in Canada.

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Podcasting

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February 8, 2006

Guinness Record: Rick Garvais most downloaded podcast?

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Posted by Nicole Simon

The Guardian reports:

But now Ricky Gervais has a world record after his podcast became the most downloaded ever.

Gervais' weekly show on Guardian Unlimited, featuring writing partner Stephen Merchant and sidekick Karl Pilkington, averaged 261,670 downloads a week during its first month.

[...]

The podcast debuted on Guardian Unlimited in December 2005 and regularly tops the iTunes podcasting chart, beating the likes of Radio 1 breakfast host Chris Moyles.

While it is nice to see podcasting in the Guinness Book of World Records and Rick Gervais show surely being a success - how can something be the most downloaded one if there are no agreed upon statistics in this area?

Many people for example mistake hits for downloads on a podcast, an error many people make also with RSS Feeds. "My feed was accessed 24 times today!" can mean 24 actual subscribers or just a service checking every minute. With podcast, some software downloads chunks (generating several hits in the servers' log files) or access one and the same file over and over again.

The mentioning of iTunes in this article indicates to me that there is perhaps an interest of Apple to have their download numbers be the standard for such a world record - but they don't publish those and they are only per store basis, also not a reliable number. And, do we count numbers in average, numbers per episode?

But, if you are in doubt and you have a better download rate, you still have a chance to enter yourself in the Guinness Book:

The Ricky Gervais Show will be included in the 2007 edition of the Guinness World Records' book - as long as no other podcast tops it before it is published in the autumn.
I would assume Podshow and other high traffic podcasters will start making phone calls - both to the Guineas World Records' Book and to their webhosters.

Comments (3) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: News and Commentary


COMMENTS

1. P.ALAGUPANDI on March 30, 2006 5:19 AM writes...

Very nice I like somuch in your style also

GOOD LUCK

Permalink to Comment

2. Mary Box on June 22, 2006 11:25 PM writes...

You can't be 22615 serious?!?

Permalink to Comment

3. Kevin Prewitt on October 9, 2006 10:27 AM writes...

How are these downloaded podcast counted? What software is used? What is the process being used?

Permalink to Comment

TRACKBACKS

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Guinness Record: Rick Garvais most downloaded podcast?:

Un podcast dans le Livre Guinness des records 2007 from Oh My Pod : Le blog des actualités du podcast
Le podcast de Ricky Gervais va faire son entrée dans l'édition 2007 du Livre Guinness des records pour avoir été le podcast le plus téléchargé jusqu'à présent. Depuis la date de création de l'émission en décembre 2005, le podcast été... [Read More]

Tracked on February 8, 2006 6:40 AM

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