Archive for June, 2010

Assuming all goes well, the Gitmo Nation Roundtable will soon be available for subscription in the Zune Marketplace. This is of course, if you live in the USA, and if Microsoft can get it’s act together. The show’s feed was submitted earlier today for approval by the approval goons. Who knows how long it will take, but zune enough, we will be in the marketplace.

In the meantime, I’d like to remark on my experiences submitting the show. First, I’d like to preface my remarks by stating that I could generally be considered an Apple fanboy. I own several Apple products and plan to continue purchasing Apple computers indefinitely. However, I am not adverse to Microsoft or Windows. I always liked Windows XP and I am a true fan of Windows 7.

But, that apologizing aside, let’s hit some key points from the experience:

• The Zune software is not available on the Mac.
• The Zune Marketplace is not available outside of the USA, so Senor Cardgage, my windows using colleague could not submit the show. So I booted up my work laptop to try to get it done.
• On the signup page to download the software, entering my desired email in the signup box simply refreshed the page and dropped the email into the adjacent login box. This happened three times before it took.
• After filling out my information I had to agree to two Terms of Service agreements.
• On the download page it listed only XP and Vista and Vista 64-bit as supported operating systems. Not an issue because Microsoft makes painstaking efforts to include a slew of backwards compatibility features, but for the ‘average’ user, this could be a bit confusing. I’m sure the Zune software is designed to work on W7, but just the fact that Microsoft couldn’t be bothered to update the download page for their own software made me laugh.
• The first thing that the software did was download updates after I launched the installer.
• During the install process I had to agree to a third ToS.
• The installer finished and quit, no option to launch the software.
• Once I was in I had to login to ZMP to submit the podcast. When I attempted, I was told my email address (from step 1) didn’t exist in their database. I had to sign up anew. In the process, agreeing to the first two ToS agreements again. Then, of couse, the username I had chosen the first time around was now taken, but my email wasn’t. Hm.
• I received an email to verify my email address. Clicking or pasting the provided link brought back an error message. Looks like I won’t be verifying anytime soon.

All of that and all I had to do once I was in was click a button, paste the podcast’s feed URL, and click submit. Couldn’t there have been a web form to accomplish that? Now, to be fair, I believe iTunes works in a very similar way for podcast submission. And of course, I already had an iTunes ID so there was no pain when I first submitted the show to the iTS.

Anyway, hopefully any Zune users will be able to subscribe to the show very zoon. That is, if, the ZMP takes podcast submissions from unverified users.

If it doesn’t show up soon, you too can submit the show from within the ZMP. All you need is our feed url: http://mevio.com/feeds/gitmonationroundtable.xml

Thanks!

-Brian