SONR: Switching hosts…

SONR is currently in the process of moving to a new host. Any accounts or podcasts added after 10:00 AM EST on 2/27/06 are not guaranteed to be available after the switch. I will update this blog once the switch is completed.

SONR: advertising, portable devices, and the web based player

First, I wanted to give everyone a quick update on what’s going on with SONR.

Right now, I’m in the middle of setting up a hosting account that I will be more dependable for the site and I’ll be moving the service over (so expect some down time in the next week or so). Once that is done, we’ll go live with the service. Oh, and the live version will have a bunch of updates. I’ve added some very cool things based on how people have been talking about SONR. I’ll post here when the switch begins, so that those of you will be aware of any outages.

Speaking of how people have been talking about SONR, I want to give some feedback on some of the things I’ve been hearing lately. Almost every time I hear the mention of SONR, advertising is in the same sentence. Now, maybe a bad move on my part, but I never intended SONR to be a tool that allows podcasters to get advertisers to sponsor their podcasts. That could be a side effect, but I always intended this to be a tool that helps you, the podcaster, better understand how people are using your podcasts. What segments of your podcast are most listened to, which episodes have the highest rate of full listens, which of your other podcasts did my IP address listen to, things that help you to understand what you can do to create a better, more appealing, podcast.

The reason why is that we can’t track stats when played through anything but the SONR player. Yes, that would be a very nice problem to solve, but that is kind of out of my hands so I’d rather focus on ways to make the web listening experience (An experience that is in our hands, you and I, and we can control) something incredible. The web right now is so alive with great people creating great, organic, social tools that I simply am overwhelmed with ideas on how their services could fit into, or inspire other ideas, on social listening of your podcast.

Simply put, we are going to be doing some really cool things that allow you to interact with your listener, and listeners to interact with other listeners, around your podcast, and that’s not something you can do on a portable device. The portable device has its advantages, but there is no reason we can’t create advantages away from it, while we figure out how to talk to it.

SONR: System updates…

I’ve updated a few things:

- Fixed a bug in the playhead location (when viewing your reports). Previously, it was displaying 00:01 for a few entries until it kicked in correctly (I believe, it was off until the complete MP3 file was fully loaded), now it appears to be behaving correctly.

- Made sure the file location of media added points to an mp3 file. Unfortunately, this is the only format we are supporting right now.

- When viewing your stats, you can click on a listeners IP address to see what else that user has been listening to, as well as if they downloaded the file, listened to it completely, etc.

SONR: Initial response very positive!

Yesterday I emailed a few people about SONR, in hopes that they would (A) Reply with some great feedback, and (B) spread the word a bit. Richard MacManus was the first to respond and I am extremely grateful for what he had to say. He passed the word on to Marc Canter who said he thought the service was cool… how COOL is that?! Thanks to both of you and everyone else that responded.

My next step is now to look for adequate hosting. I was waiting to hear back from people on if this service was something to continue to sink my personal time and money into and as of now, I’m thinking it is. This service will not be valuable to customers (or me) if it goes down with any moderate amount of activity, so if anyone knows of some great, cheap dedicated hosting plans, please let me know in the comments.

SONR: Analytic tool for podcasters

Statistics for your Podcasts

SONR (Sonar) is a media tracking tool for content providers. Specifically geared towards podcasters (and later, publishers of video content), SONR’s goal is to provide detailed information on how listeners interact with your content. Currently, most podcasters only know when a listener has downloaded their content, but with SONR’s media player, providers can now track how much of their podcast was listened to and what the user did while listening.

The SONR media player also gives listeners a playlist of your content so they can easily find other work you’ve published. There is also the ability to add flags to your podcasts so that users can immediately jump to sections of your file that they find most interests in, a table of contents of sorts for your podcast.

The bottom line is that SONR wants to help you better understand how people use your content.

For more information, you may want to review this demo.

Preview Information

SONR is almost ready for public use. For those eager to try the system out, you can find it here. Any data/accounts/etc. you create now will be available when we go live, however, links you use will have to be updated to remove the “beta” directory in the url.

You may log in as “guest” (for all login fields) to see the content providers tools and stat tracking without creating an account.