Scott here. Been busy. It has been impossible to find 90 continuous minutes during the waking hours to put together a podcast. I’ve stolen scattered moments to prepare some show notes and return some e-mails, but that is all.
Just before I left for summer vacation to Montana for July 4th (see pictures here), my employer spun off my division into an entirely new company, and I’ve been a bit distracted with “those things that we must do.” In between the flurries of work activity, I’ve been watching my kids, preventing visits to the Emergency Room, and indulging in only the most simple of mental activities.
One of my new favorite brain-dead actvities is DOODLING! YOu need to take a look at Scott Johnson’s projects is www.MyDrawings.com Even though the doodle universe is massive over at MyDrawings.com, you can zero in and see MY DOODLES entitled “Bar Napkin Warfare Designs ” by clicking here.

I hope to get a show out to you soon, and I hope to resync with Jeff. I have confirmed my travel arrangements for the Expo, so I will definitely see you there again this year.

Controversial statement suitable for quoting: The 2006 Podcast Awards are now even less meaningful than the Miss America Pageant. 

The 2006 Podcast Awards illustrates why popularity contests will not be meaningfull for podcasts, or video casts, or blogs, and I don’t envy the Todd and the Podcast Connect folks.  Last year’s Podcast Awards was more like a Peer-Review Awards because you (as a listener) had at least heard of nearly all of the nominees!  After last year’s awards show, no self-respecting podcaster could really argue against any of the winners.

Now in 2006, there are too many podcasts and too few objective voters to even pretend that “number of votes” for a podcast correlates to “how much I should care” about a podcast.  I don’t mean that there should be fewer podcasts, or that the “podcasting space” is getting too crowded - I mean that the 2006 Podcast Awards contest is now meaningless.

How many of the nominated shows do I recognize this year?  Oh, maybe five or six.  Even though I like two or three the shows that I recognized, I doubt I’ll even vote this year.  Not because the rest of the nominated shows are bad shows, but because of the same reason YOU would find it difficult to vote for one of seven foreign films you’ve never seen, nor heard of, nor know any of the actors, nor really know what the show is about.  You can’t force yourself to care about choosing one show from a seemingly arbitrary collection of shows in a category.

The Miss America Pageant is a more valid contest than the Podcast Awards.  At least the Miss America contestants passed through a multitude of elimination rounds before the final contest, judged at each stage by ‘impartial’ judges who reviewed all of the contestants’ merits.  When I watch the next Miss America Pageant, at least I can pretend (as I witness the “health and fitness” competition) that the ladies on display represent a filtered subset of hundreds (or thousands) of women, and that the ladies on display are not there just because they received the most cellphone text messages promted by an advertisement on the Howard Stern Show.

Here’s another thing that bends my spoon:  I also know that many of the nominated podcasts have far fewer listeners than some of MY favorite podcasts, and that result smells to me of hucksterism and “marketing.”  If you’re of the same mind as me (and would like to assume certain things without being hindered by actually researching anything), you can see right through some of these podcasts’ strategies for getting nomiated: contests, e-mail campaigns, shouting, repeating, promotions… many of the things from which I am seeking refuge.

These popularity contests are becoming more difficult for Hollywood to justify, too, with the decreasing number of blockbusters and the increasing number of independent producers and distribution channels.  WE KNOW THIS.  WE PODCASTERS SHOUT THIS AT THE MOON EVERY NIGHT.  So why are we interested in the Podcast Awards contest?  Why are we still drinking the popularity Kool-Aide?

Granted, another reason for getting nominated is that a show’s audience might consist of highly motivated, rabid fans willing to do anything to please their host master.  (I’m talking to you, Tim Henson!  You and your damn rabid fans!  …and your damn zesty joi de vivre!) 

In summary, I suppose that congratulations are in order for all of the nominees.  I’ll be interested to see if the nominated shows get any more votes than they did nominations.  My suspicion is that many of the categories will see the same number or fewer votes than they received nominations.  I suspect that the only people that will vote for the shows will be the people that nominated the shows.

Voting for the 2006 Podcast Awards opens July 28th, 2006 and closes August 28th, 2006. Fans can vote once daily for their favorite shows in each category.  Sometime after the polls are closed, Todd Cochrane and crew will then very anti-climatically announce the winners weeks before the Podcast Expo, and everyone will *sigh*. 

I don’t care how/why the shows got nominated.  I feel no personal connection with the contest this year.

(A note to the listeners of Podcheck Review: I decided to post a text entry ahead of my audio commentary.  I was preparing the shownotes for the next Podcheck Review and felt that this topic deserved a separate text post. )

This is totally cool, and totally unrelated to podcasting! I received a nice letter from Mark Z, with a photo proving the existence of a street named after my family:

 I was being driven to San Diego in South California from Sacramento, Ca, when all of a sudden I saw a freeway exit sign for Fletcher Ave. Within seconds I turned on my camera and quickly took some shots.

(Click the image to see a bigger version if you wish.)

My “Fletcher” relatives have roots in the entertainment industry, with my Grandfather Chris as a big-band musician, and another relative as a well-known scenic backdrop artist, and one of my aunts as a former finance employee at Disney Animation and California performance organizations.  This street could be named after one of my clan.

As for the next Podcheck show, I (Scott) am still digging out from underneath the work that was waiting for me when I returned from vacation.  Jeff and I are itching to weigh in on the over-hyped Amanda Congdon/RocketBoom thing, the Podshow “Feed Highjacking” pile-on, the launch of Blubrry and the absence of vowels in all of these names, etc.

Hope to talk with you soon! — Scott

I (Scott) am still on vacation in “Big Sky Country” (Montana, USA), but thought I’d pop in to say hello and that I’m thinking about you. 

Bill Mackiewicz sent me a cool flowchart/diagram of how he discovered Podcheck Review.  Could this be the first diagram that illustrates the importance of podcast affinities and cross promotion?  Probably not. Good to see that Blubrry had the right idea.  I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll check it out when I get a high-speed connection.  Can you beleive that I’m using a dial-up account right now?(Click the image to see the big version.)

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