Overall Impression
I liked USAToday.com’s presentation of Celeb Watch the best.  It is the one micro-site that is well done.  There is significant room for improving off a good start, particularly in the areas of audience interaction and technical issues like feed and tag quality.

 

 Digital Podcast 55: USA Today's Celeb Watch Review [9:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (465)

Podcast Homepage
Upon visiting Celeb Watch’s page you are presented with a clean looking video player in the center of the page with an attractive photo of the celebrity being interviewed.

The page has links to download the media, download a widget and sharing via email.  The download link is actually a link to iTunes, not the video file.  I’m not sure what would happen if you tried the link without iTunes installed.

The page also has a nice short brief on what the next show will be about and links to the show’s archive.

The video is complemented by a good article providing background on the celebrity and a summary of the interview.

RSS Links
There is a link to an RSS feed but it’s not the feed for the Celeb Watch.  You have to find the link in a separate page dedicated to RSS feeds for all of USAToday.com.  There are no RSS feeds for alternative file types for devices other than iPod/IPhone.

Audience Interaction
The page has lots of links to social media sites for sharing.  Comments have been enable on the page, but seem to lack participation.

Publishing Schedule
Celeb Watch is billed as being a weekly show, but the schedule seems quite variable.

Playability
The online flash player started immediately.  The iTunes version of the show also played well in iTunes.  The file was formatted using H.264 with dimensions of 640×480 which works well with iPods.  Unfortunately, the video will not play on most cell phones which need dimensions of 320×240.

ID3 tags
ID3 tags were present and used.  However, the show description was put in the show name field, the comment field went unused and no album art was included with the tags.

Feed quality
The feed would not validate for me at Feedvalidator.org.  The feed was missing a channel description tag.  The item tags were also missing image links and media RSS tags.  The enclosure length tag was also missing.

File Naming
File naming protocols were mostly consistent using a format of date-cw-celebrity-name.m4v.  Replacing cw with celeb_watch would improve search engines ability to index the file.

Google Search Engine Optimization
Search for Celeb Watch lists show in first result.

iTunes Search Optimization
Search for Celeb Watch lists show in second result.

Availability in other Podcast Directories
I checked five leading podcast directories and could not find the show listed.

Monetization
The show I saw had a 4 second pre-roll commercial for TV Guide Broadband.  The web page has inline ads and some popup advertising.

Media Player
Plain video player - not use of borders for advertising or advertising bugs on the video.

Sharable Player
The show offers a player that can be embedded in blogs or social networking sites.  No advertising on the player itself.

Production Quality
Celeb Watch’s video was good quality video.

Album Art
The RSS has links to a 300×300 image for the show.  The 300×300 size image was originally recommended by Apple.  Apple is now recommending square .jpg images that are at least 600 x 600 pixels. No album art was included with the downloaded file tags.

Celeb Watch - Top Recommendations

1. Open up the micro-site to viewer comments and improve audience interaction
2. Fix and rationalize RSS feeds
3. Provide content formats and feeds for phone(3gp), HD and wmv
4. Clearly label subscribe link as subscribe in iTunes and add options for subscribing via Google, My Yahoo,  Zune and provide link to RSS.
5. Develop and implement more advanced video player with capability for overlay  advertising
6. Set up channels at YouTube and other video sites and syndicate content
7. Decide on a publishing schedule for the podcasts and stick to it
8. Fix id3 tags to add name, use comment field and add album art
9. Change Album Art to 600×600
10. Increase distribution by submitting podcast feed to directories other than iTunes