Image by Harvest Marketing
Show notes are cliff note versions of the podcast world. It provides a quick summary of a podcast along with links to download episodes and to guide listeners to the main website. If the relevant keywords are used, show notes help organically promote episodes through search engines, making it easier for people to search for your podcast.
Spare your lazy podcast listeners (like me), so they can skim through a relevant summary before listening to an entire podcast. Here are “The Good, Bad, and the Ugly” examples.
The Good: Brain Science Podcast
The Brain Science Podcast definitely knew how to use their brain when creating their show notes. Their site provide rich content (listed below), while keeping the design simple and easy to navigate. This show notes deserve a two thumbs up.
- Organized Title – Episode number + Topic
- Simple data – Time length + file size + date + author
- Podcast is embedded into show note for easy listening
- Links to download using external podcast directories (iTunes, Zune)
- Quick summary first, then click to read more
- Useful links
- Keyword Categorization
- User comments
- References
- Bonus Feature: Ability to Tweet the episode!
The Bad: The Web 2.0 Show
This website is very well designed, both from a creative and usability perspective. However, their show notes can use a little TLC. They’ve done a great job of including the basics (download link, time length), but I’m not digging the “bulleted” version of the podcast summary. You have to click the drop down for show notes, then it provides a weird list of third person sentences. To improve their show notes, this website could easily stitch up these sentences and create a summarized paragraph, then tag or list related keywords.
The Ugly (just thought I’d throw this one here): The Digital Story
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The irony of these show notes is that the links actually take you to nice version of the show notes. Love at first sight, FAIL.
Share and Enjoy:
Oh man, yea you are right. I hated the way that we did show notes before.
I’ve since pushed out a new site that’s been in place for a few months. Take a peek at this recent episode and tell me if this is better or worse: http://web20show.com/2009/12/episode-63-twilio/
Thanks for this feedback. We always strive to deliver our content is the best possible way.