I'm awfully quiet over here and if you don't recognize me, well I'm not surprised. I'm P.C. Haring, the accounting money monkey for EA as well as the publisher. I work a lot on that pesky business side of things in the proverbial front office.
Hi Paul! I know who you are. Admittedly, the fact that I've always been paid on time for EA sales is a plus. And you've bought me a Guinness, which also helps.
When I link to a story on facebook (or other social media of choice) I want an image to pop up with that podcast. The closest PseudoPod has is a PodDisc picture. Also probably not linking to PodDisc would be worthwhile.
Thanks for the money wrangling, P.C.!
I second this. All it would take would be a small image of the magazine's logo in the sidebar. Escape Pod already has a pretty decent one that works with Facebook. But Pseudopod and Podcastle don't. Podcastle actually has a nice perfect-sized logo of the OTHER TWO but not of itself.
I don't like the way Escapepod's front page mixes content, with some entries being podcasts and some of them being, essentially, Josh Roseman's review blog. I actually really like Josh's reviews, but for me there is a real confusion of branding here. I really think the Escapepod.org site should be limited to the podcast - and maybe there should be a spinoff site for reviews and blog entries. As it is, I feel that this setup does a disservice the podcast (since it's harder to find old episodes), and it probably does a disservice to Josh, because I don't know that anyone has any reason to expect to find his material there.
And I strongly second this as well. It doesn't bother me that Escape Pod sponsor's josh's reviews, though I think they'd be more fitting on a blog or a nonfiction magazine. But I don't like them on the main page, because (oh no, a numbered list, you all knew this was coming):
1. The podcast episodes of the EA casts contain almost no audio nonfiction. There is the occasional exception, with an interview, or the Podcastle spotlights, or the movie reviews that Alasdair used to do, and etc, but those are very occasional features. The EA publications are audio publications primarily and having one of the sites heavily covered in text-only nonfiction just really doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the site's aesthetic.
2. There have been times when, due to a particularly heavy flow of nonfiction, there wasn't even a single audio fiction episode on the front page of Escape Pod, which is the premier SF podcast. I think this happened, if I recall correctly, when there was a big nonfiction series of Star Trek TNG.
3. I don't know about anyone else, but personally I don't read the nonfiction. I listen to podcasts so heavily because if I have the time to sit in place in front of a computer long enough to read a lengthy nonfiction article, I'd rather be writing. Podcasts are great for playing in the background when I don't have free eyes for reading.
Other than that, I'm generally pretty happy with the sites. A little more dynamic content wouldn't be amiss. I like word clouds. Having something that's different each time the page's loaded would be snazzy, like if each story had an author headshot with a link to their website and it would load one of them up at random each time the page is loaded. But these are all little flashbang things that are far from vital but might be kind of neat.