PopCandy is a blog about popular culture that also publishes an audio podcast.  The podcast focuses on music and interviews and the podcasts are intermingled with blog posts.  I liked the content that was produced as a supplement to the blog.  However, there is lots of room for improvement in many aspects of the overall user experience and presentation of the PopCandy podcast.

 

 Pop Candy Podcast Review [6:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Podcast Homepage
Each episode is presented as a blog post describing the contents of the episode and links to “Download the free podcast via iTunes” and “Stream the podcast as a .wma file”.

There is no inline audio player for the wma file.

RSS Links
There is a link to an RSS feed but it’s not the same RSS feed that’s listed under the RSS directory.  The RSS on the blog home page validates, but does not contain any iTunes tags.

To find the podcast RSS, you have to find the link in a separate page dedicated to RSS feeds for all of USAToday.com.

Audience Interaction
The permalink page has links to Yahoo Buzz for sharing.  Comments are enabled for the show.

Publishing Schedule
The Pop Candy podcast schedule seems quite variable.

Playability
The file is in an mp3 format and should be playable on all mp3 enabled devices including iPods, Zunes, Mobile phones, and PSPs.

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 from the blog page validates at Feedvalidator.org, but does not include iTunes tags.  The podcast feed from the RSS directory page 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-popcandy.mp3.

Google Search Engine Optimization
Search for Pop Candy lists show in first result.

iTunes Search Optimization
Search for Pop Candy lists show in first result when the podcast filter is used on the search.

Availability in other Podcast Directories
I checked five leading podcast directories.  Pop Candy was not listed in any of them.

Monetization
The show I heard did not have embedded ads.  The web page has inline ads.

Media Player
No online media player.  The podcast is available for streaming via Windows Media player using a wma file.

Sharable Player
There is an embeddable widget available that lists blog posts and has a podcast player built into it.  I could not get the player to play any podcasts.  The player also has a link to the show on iTunes.  No evidence that the player is being used to carry advertisements.

Production Quality
Pop Candy’s audio quality could be improved significantly.  The podcast needs to be normalized and leveled.

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.

PopCandy – Top  Recommendations

1. Add a flash based player to the blog page
2. Fix and rationalize RSS feeds
3. Decide on a publishing schedule for the podcasts and stick to it
4. Fix id3 tags to add name, use comment field and add album art
5. Change Album Art to 600×600
6. Increase distribution by submitting podcast feed to directories other than iTunes