Lost and Not Found

Why is it that technology seems to conspire to frustrate us at the most inconvenient time?  I wasted an inordinate amount of time this evening when trying to put together a new podcast for the Overnightscape Underground after my phone, on which I was recording the various segments, decided to lose every one of my audio files, including the three I hadn't yet backed up to my laptop.  No, I didn't inadvertently delete them - one minute they were there, the next they were gone.  Despite having a 'recycling bin' feature, the audio recorder app unhelpfully claimed that it was empty.  I tried using a file recovery app - all it 'found' were the older audio files stored in another directory, rather than the lost ones it was meant to locate.  The current audio files I'd been working on seem to have vanished without a trace. So, after arseing around trying to recover them with no success, I was forced to re-record the three I hadn't managed to back up, wasting yet more time.  It was all very frustrating.  Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the podcast was finally completed and is currently up here.   As ever, it is closely based on posts from this blog, with a few media extras.  

I often joke about it being the 'least listened to podcast on the web'.  In reality, I have no idea how many people listen to my podcasts as they aren't posted on my site.  I suspect, however, that even if only a handful of people listened to each one, they'd actually rate pretty highly on the globally 'most listened to' charts (if such a thing existed).  I'm basing this on some information I gleaned from Facebook regarding The Sleaze's page there - according to them, it is a page with 'high interaction'.  Which was news to me as the number of visits registered for each post is lucky to climb into double figures.  Yet, apparently, in the scheme of things, this rates it highly among the thousands of similar pages.  (This, it seems, was why they made me jump through hoops last year forcing me to increase the security on my account).  Consequently, I figure that despite the fact that there are various high profile, professionally produced, podcasts out there getting huge listening figures, the reality is that there are simply so many podcasts produced globally every day (hundreds of thousands, at least), that statistically, these are only a tiny minority of podcasts and that most of them are barely listened to, depressing the overall average number of listeners per podcast.  Meaning that getting even a handful of listeners will put you up above the average engagement level.  So, I'm quietly confident that every podcast published on the Overnightscape Underground counts as above average in listener engagement terms.