I am delighted to report that the first episode of the Travels in a Mathematical World podcast was released a week ago and has been downloaded 120 times by 78 unique IP addresses in the first week (one of which was me). Turning web hit logs into number of real people is a black art – two people on the same modem might register as the same IP address, while one person at work and home will register as two. One person might download it and pass it around, which won’t register at the server. Web crawlers count at a visitor even though nobody’s watching. I noticed if you share the mp3 on Facebook, Facebook seems to cache it so you only get one hit no matter how many people play it. And the problems don’t stop there. So the real number is likely to be somewhere between 78 and 120, or, frankly, any other number whatsoever. Still the numbers suggest an encouraging start for my little endeavour. Yey!