James is joined this week by Dave Jones of the Podcast Index. https://podcastindex.org/
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James is joined this week by Dave Jones of the Podcast Index. https://podcastindex.org/
Connect With Us:
It's Friday, the 9th of February 2024.
Speaker 2:The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.
James Cridland:Sam Sethi is away this week, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Dave Jones from the podcast index In the chapters. Today, spotify almost makes money and no more exclusives Podcast search optimization. It's a thing, and is all the money going into AI these days Plus?
Daryl Battaglia:hello. This is Darrell Pataglia from Triton Digital. Later we will be talking about the US podcast report that was just released.
Claire Waite Brown:And I'm Claire Wake-Brown, and later on I'll be talking about my experience at PodFest.
Dave Jones:They will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with easy and powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support.
James Cridland:And we're sponsored by a new show called why your Podcast Isn't Growing, a show made to help you get more new listeners. They've just posted three ways to increase the discoverability of your podcast for faster growth probably something that we'll talk about a little bit later. You can find why your Podcast Isn't Growing wherever you got this podcast. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review. Dave, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. What is the podcast index for people who don't know?
Dave Jones:first of all, oh goodness, the podcast index is primarily a podcast directory, but I guess the secondary function of it is to give podcast apps a back end when they don't have one. So back ends for podcasting are expensive, got to do a lot of aggregation, millions of feeds, you know all that kind of thing. And so we provide that for free and we run on donations, value for value model, and that's what we do.
James Cridland:Yeah, and you, so you run that, and you also I get the feeling by accident Are the head wrangler of podcasting 2.0, which we'll talk a little bit more about later.
Dave Jones:But it was a lot of things by accident?
James Cridland:Yeah, was that a kind of a thing of? I get the feeling that the podcast index was a thing that needed building and is a great thing, and we use it for the pod news, podcast pages and everything else, but I get the feeling that you weren't necessarily expecting to be also looking after a brand new feature set for new podcast apps.
Dave Jones:No, I would say that's fair. Yeah, we, we brought out the namespace because we needed a couple of features and then it just became sort of a happy accident that the namespace attracted all kinds of you know once, once you have ideas for features, then 10 other people also have ideas because things have been building up. So it became just sort of a you know campfire that everybody could gather around and throw their ideas in the pot and before we know it we had a burgeoning 2.0 namespace and all kinds of things. And you know, you, I don't, I don't simply maintain it. You all, you're also a maintainer on the, on the namespace, and you know it's, it's a party.
James Cridland:Yeah, it is and, yes, very much looking forward to. I don't know whether or not I can announce it yet, but Daniel J Lewis and I have been working on a thing, ideally to help people like LTSK bar understand a bit more about what podcasting 2.0 is all about, and if I can announce it, then I would be announcing that it's. There's a website that you can now go and see. It's a podcast toorg See what we did there. Yeah, what do you think of that?
Dave Jones:I like it. I also approve of this Todd Cochran based shadiness that you're using to hide whatever this is. Y'all are building. This is. This is wonderful.
James Cridland:Can't talk about it yet. Yes, so podcasting 2.0. And it's a, it's a, it's a website that anybody can edit, which is nice on the GitHub and yeah, and it's been really good fun working on that with Daniel. So, yes, if it's not, if it's not announced by now, then it, then this is me announcing it.
Dave Jones:I'm sure.
James Cridland:Daniel will be delighted about that.
Dave Jones:I'm looking forward to it. He's got great design chops. He's good, he does yeah he does.
James Cridland:So I think I think you know we're still working on it, but I think it should be a good thing. Shall we get to the stories for this week. Why not start with the heart of the podcast industrial complex, dave?
Dave Jones:Let's do it. I want to call you made a comment the other day that said that our use, our use of the phrase when I say our, I mean I'm minding Adam's use of the phrase podcast industrial complex is quote singularly unhelpful. Yes, and I would. I want to. I'm going to push back on this and say we actually say lots of unhelpful things.
James Cridland:This is not the only one, yeah, yeah, well, fair enough yeah.
Dave Jones:So, anyway, so it's all about Spotify. They announced Joe Rogan has renewed his agreement, but it's not exclusive anymore. Spotify released their latest financial results. Yes, they did.
James Cridland:Total revenue growing at 16% year on year to $3.9 billion. All the company's figures met or exceeded expectations. So, they said, the company only lost $81 million in the quarter, which apparently is rather better than what was flagged in December. I don't know about you. I'm not sure I could lose $81 million in a year alone, in a quarter, but still, there we go. Daniel Eck does, though, say that the podcast business almost broke even in the quarter and thinks it's good news for next year.
Daniel Ek:When we had our investor date last year, we outlined then podcasting was a drag to the business but something we were committed to turn around and I'm pleased to say in Q4, we were very close to break even on that business, which gives me a lot of confidence that as we get into 2024, we will achieve the full year profitability target on podcasting. On the top line side, we're still seeing healthy growth on engagement. That engagement in terms means there'll be more opportunities for us to monetize those engagement hours. On the bottom line, we have a double down on the deals that worked and we've gotten out of a lot of the deals that didn't work. And that's the result you're now seeing with the close to break even and that then will lead to a positive podcasting business in 2024.
James Cridland:I never really trust accountants.
Dave Jones:Dave, close to break even, yeah I mean there's so many ways to slice that yeah.
James Cridland:Whether it's that we're talking.
Dave Jones:EBITDA, or we're talking profit, or operational profit.
James Cridland:This is a new term that I've, yeah, and I think it might be operational profit, because I'll tell you what the amount of severance payments that Spotify has been making recently can't have been. I mean, that's why they lost $81 million in the quarter, wasn't it? It's that they've actually got rid of an awful lot of people. I learned yesterday, by the way, or I learned last week, that the word redundancy is not understood by Americans, so I have to use the word layoff, or firing, or something like that.
Dave Jones:It took me a while to figure out what you meant by redundancy. It makes sense in retrospect, but no, that is not an American term at all. Layoffs, or you just got fired. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
James Cridland:Yeah, that's pretty well it. Danny Alec also went into detail about the new deals that they've made with podcasters, why they don't do exclusives anymore not that they really did, anyway, he reckons.
Daniel Ek:Generally speaking, we had multiple strategies in podcasting. It wasn't just all about exclusivities, even if that got most of the press headlines, and what we've been able to see here is, as we've been learning over these past few years, is that while some of these exclusivity deals worked, generally it wasn't aligned with what the creator wanted. The creator wants to have broader audience and I feel like with these new deals that we've been making for most of 2023, we are in a position where we're actually better aligned with the creator. We can both deliver the growth rate and we are equally incentivized to drive audience growth and, of course, then also drive revenue growth, because we both share in that upside. Today, spotify is, in many cases, the number one podcasting player already, so exclusivity makes sense when you're the smaller playing trying to gain scale. When you're the bigger player, the additional value of the exclusivity is far smaller than it is about being aligned, and it feels also that, from a values point of view, this is better aligned with who we are at Spotify, too.
James Cridland:Now, if I had Adam Curry's little bell, I think I'd be ringing it a little bit in the middle of that, because there's quite a lot. I think there that makes a little bit of sense. Dave, I don't know what you think, dave Curry, yeah, I think we're seeing, as far as the exclusivity goes.
Dave Jones:I don't think this is unique to podcasting, I think this is across the board. I think we're seeing a breakdown of exclusivity as a business model. I think when the easy money dries up and funds are harder to raise, I think you do have to broaden your scope, because they just take video games, for instance and we were seeing Microsoft just announcing that they're going to bring all of their Bethesda games to the PlayStation Network, which is exactly opposite of what they said when they bought the company and I think just across the tech industry we're seeing a breakdown of exclusivity as a growth mechanic, because growth is not the primary factor anymore, now it's profitability, and so if it's all about hunkering down and making a profit, then exclusivity reducing your total audience size it's kind of hard to justify that. It doesn't make a lot of sense, dave.
James Cridland:Curry. Yeah, I mean, I guess from his point of view, he's basically saying you need exclusivity if you're a small player in the market, but you don't if you're the size of Spotify. Now, now he's saying that Spotify is, in many cases, the number one podcasting player already Posted by people, not by downloads. That much we can certainly say. But I thought it was interesting that literally as soon as Spotify released their figures, you saw Anil Dash posting a blog post in praise of OpenRSS and saying that OpenRSS is the best thing ever. Ani Smith at TDM writing that there should be something to be learned from RSS's podcast success by the rest of the media too. All of a sudden, everybody's going oh RSS, it's a fantastic thing. Where's this been for the last?
Daniel Ek:20 years, dave Curry. Yeah, it's been right here.
James Cridland:Ani Smith, you know it's just I don't know. I find it interesting that all of a sudden we're seeing a bunch of people saying no, rss is a good thing. Are you seeing that too?
Dave Jones:Dave Curry. Oh, yeah, for sure. There's this concurrent thing that's happening that's beyond just podcasting, which is so? Return to blogs. I'm sure you've noticed this as well. I think you yourself left medium right. You went back to your own self-hosted blog. There's Taylor Lawrence, the journalist. She was blasting out some stuff today about podcasting and RSS being an open system. There's this big.
Dave Jones:I think there's just a general consensus of it's time to leave some of these platforms. It's the platforms aren't the main driver. They don't need to be Because, again, you can exclude with exclusivity. You have to fuel that a lot of times by debt, because you can't. The creator is the one that is going to get hurt with an exclusive deal because you slash their audience in half, so you have to make up for that by promising them more money. If you can't get the money, you can't do the deal. It's one of those things where we've seen a lot of creators tell horror stories about going into an exclusive contract with Spotify, losing most of their audience, then being jettisoned about. The contract gets killed. Now all their subscribers are gone when they go back to open RSS and they have to start from scratch. So I think the whole thing is just very, very dicey, and people feel more comfortable when they can perhaps have a smaller listener or reader base but have broader reach.
James Cridland:There was talk and I tried to get the numbers but I couldn't find the numbers but there was talk that Brené Brown, when she moved as an exclusive to Spotify, all of a sudden loads of people stopped buying her books because she wasn't getting the influence that she used to get on open podcasting, and I think that there's definitely something there. And X saying there that creators want a broader audience, but also sounding as if he's fixed the deals so that unless you grow the audience, unless you as a podcaster deliver the revenue, then you don't get your share of the Spotify money either, and I think that's an interesting thing to end up per seing. So maybe they've rather redrawn how their deals work so that podcasters have to work rather harder.
Dave Jones:Well, you just reported today about Rogan coming to Anchor, not Megaphone. Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting.
James Cridland:I thought that was really interesting. Of course, it's called Spotify for podcasters. Now, that's right.
Daniel Ek:Yeah.
James Cridland:But I thought that was really interesting. I mean, I asked Spotify to comment and they haven't. But I think from my point of view I mean, megaphone is the enterprise podcast host right, they've got dynamic ad insertion, they've got attribution, they've got demos, they've got all of this kind of stuff. Spotify for podcasting or Anchor has none of that. None, you know, I mean, spotify for podcasters serves creators of all sizes, but yeah, Do you think Rogan had?
Dave Jones:do you think Joe had to download the Spotify for podcast app and do the registration process and all that stuff?
James Cridland:I'm sure that he's done that. I wonder whether that's because, do you think, that Megaphone deals with Spotify video and maybe Anchor doesn't deal with Spotify video and no, the other way around. So Anchor, I think is the only one that deals with Spotify video and Megaphone. Perhaps doesn't, I don't know.
Dave Jones:I don't really think that's an interesting take. That's an interesting take because, of course you know being running the index. I looked at the feed and I'm like, is this a special anchor feed? Is this something? I mean the biggest, you know the big, not just the biggest podcasts in the world, but the biggest you know sort of media thing in the world or one of them.
James Cridland:Yeah.
Dave Jones:As far as listeners, I mean it's huge. Is there some sort of special? I know it's just a normal anchor URL. It looks like you know, like you might be sandwiched between you know, a podcast of 30 second fart noises and somebody reading their high school term paper. I mean it's just like it's like he just got a random Spotify for podcasters URL, so it's just odd. And the other thing it tells me is, like first party data Is that whole concept kind of dead? Now Can we just say that downloads are good enough and the whole idea of streaming and first-party data as being just the treasure chest of advertising dollars is probably just not that true.
James Cridland:Well, I suppose that they're still getting first-party data from Spotify for podcasters, I guess Interestingly so. There's two interesting things, I think about the anchor thing. Firstly, they are so anchor hosts still on Amazon CloudFront and the URL of the enclosure still includes the actual URL of the MP3 itself.
Dave Jones:How big is that bill, by the way?
James Cridland:Yeah, how big is that bill Exactly? That must be a massive, great big thing. So that's one thing. But also, I thought the anchor used to make everything in AAC rather than MP3, but these files are most definitely in MP3 now, so clearly there's been a change there somewhere. But yeah, now I find it really interesting that they've gone to move to anchor rather than to megaphone. I'm really curious as to why that is.
Dave Jones:You know, it also tells me, james, that this whole move, the contract, everything, I feel like it tells me that they can't make money in podcasting without him. If it takes this deal to get to break even, then and he's clearly driving a huge portion of revenue of ad buys across all of Spotify that this tells me that they could not let him go, or else it would have been just a complete disaster.
James Cridland:Well, and they did say something to us the other day that the podcast saw a 45% increase in revenue last year. So it's making money, but it's making even more money now. So, yeah, so I find the whole thing fascinating, so really interesting to see.
Dave Jones:Well, moving on, Triton Digital released their US podcast report from 2023 with lots of data about podcasting last year.
James Cridland:Yes, and interestingly, given what we've just been talking about, they say that Apple podcasts gets 45% of all episode downloads and Spotify just gets 15%. I wonder how many of those are auto downloads, though Darrell Bataglia should know a thing or two about what they found. He's SVP of measurement products and strategy for Triton Digital.
Daryl Battaglia:Triton Digital has been in the digital audio and podcast space for over 15 years. We offer services across streaming audio as well as podcasting. In podcasting, we have a hosting platform called On Me Studio to help you manage and distribute your content. We have a full ad tech stack to help publishers monetize their advertising, and we have measurement and analytic services to better understand the audience for podcasts and that's where I come in is leading our measurement strategy in products.
James Cridland:So you released the US podcast report for 2023. That's got data from On Me Studio in it, from Triton Podcast Metrics, from Demos, plus Some really good data in there. What were the big findings from your point of view?
Daryl Battaglia:The biggest finding, I think always, is podcast growing and what we found is it's grown each of the last two years. We computed to a 12% growth in monthly podcast listeners over the last two years and what we saw was that came across all segments of the population, different age groups, male, female. We really saw a broadening of the audience while podcasting over indexes for a younger audience, for a little bit more male audience, we actually saw more growth from the over 55 group in the United States and more growth from females. So we're seeing a broadening of the audience and we're really seeing that podcasting appeals to everyone and it, I think, really is exciting for the future that the podcast audience can continue to grow and there's really no ceiling that it can. Obviously there's all different types of podcasts and it can appeal to all different types of people.
James Cridland:Indeed, it's super exciting. I wonder whether your report said anything about YouTube. It's certainly all of the talk of the podcast industry over the last year.
Daryl Battaglia:It did. We did a pretty in-depth comparison of YouTube and Apple podcasts and Spotify as well. What we saw is that YouTube is the number one platform that people say they use the most to consume podcasts. 33.5% of monthly podcast listeners said they use YouTube the most, and that has been growing. 47% of their listeners said they started consuming podcasts in the last year, so a lot of the new listeners are coming from them. But we also saw a lot of differences in the demographics of the audience for YouTube as compared to Apple podcasts and Spotify.
James Cridland:Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because and this is data from demos plus and some really interesting data about the demographics of the various platforms so Spotify listeners being younger, Apple listeners being richer, YouTube listeners being more male and a bit less money what should we learn from that for podcasting?
Daryl Battaglia:I think it helps with distribution strategies. I think it helps to understand who your audience is and help to inform your content strategies and help to inform your advertising strategies as well, to understand more about not only who your listeners are as a whole, which demos plus helps to do, but to understand some of the differences amongst platforms.
James Cridland:Yeah, and I guess it also shows some of the benefits of Triton podcast metrics in that the data that you get from Spotify is only data of Spotify listeners and similarly, the data that you get from Apple is only from Apple listeners and they're not necessarily the same types of people, are they?
Daryl Battaglia:No, they're not. So, as you mentioned YouTube, really all of those platforms are younger than the general population. However, we saw that Spotify was the youngest, whereas YouTube was a little bit older. We saw Apple podcasts was more female, while YouTube was more male. Differences in income as well. Apple podcast audience on average was at a higher income. So there are certainly differences amongst those platforms which were interesting to learn more about.
James Cridland:Yeah, so fascinating bits of data. The other two bits that I saw which I found interesting Firstly, the top shows by purchase intent. So, and again I'm getting that this is from demos plus as well. So if, for example, you want to reach shows listened to by people who are interested in switching their wireless provider, which seems very niche thing, then apparently Wow in the world, or fantasy football today are two big shows for that. This is really focused information. Isn't it really useful for for advertisers as well?
Daryl Battaglia:Right. With our podcast metrics demos plus solution, we're able to understand the profile of the audience across podcasts of all sizes. So aging gender, other demographic insights, their purchase behaviors and intent, their political affiliation, their other media usage, and so there's a wide variety of purchase intent data and different audience segments are important for different advertisers. So if you are a wireless provider, you definitely want to advertising shows that will do a good job of reaching people who are in the market to switch wireless providers. And in the report, first of all, we highlighted a few examples of different genres at the genre level, but within our our ranker of the top 100 shows for the year, we also highlighted for different audience segments and different purchase intents and demographics, what were the top three shows that over index the most for those segments or would reach that audience most efficiently?
James Cridland:Yeah, and I think particularly helpful for an election year, which of course it is. I wonder if anybody spotted this yet in the US. Particularly useful in terms of that, because being able to focus on specific age ranges and also what, which ways people are going to vote as well. Absolutely.
Daryl Battaglia:It's not surprising, of course, that different types of podcasts that have political content are going to be geared towards a certain political affiliation. That part's not surprising, but it provides that insight for podcasts of all genres and definitely helps with political candidates and their advertising campaigns and determining what podcasts could be a fit for them.
James Cridland:Yeah, and I particularly. You know it's always nice seeing data where you can go OK, that makes perfect sense. For example, the podcast listens to buy people with the most amount of household income. Podcasts like Planet Money, or how I built this with Guy Raz. I mean that that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? It's really nice seeing actually data that you go. Yeah, that that's absolutely right.
Daryl Battaglia:Right. I mean, even if they know that this is the case because of the subject matter of their podcast, have actual data with actual numbers. That is third party proof of the case and helps quantify. It is a big help for them as they try and find advertisers or partners for their shows.
James Cridland:So what do you think that the US podcast report tells the podcast industry? What should we take away from that?
Daryl Battaglia:Better insight into who the audience is and how that differs across genres, across shows, across platforms, with download measurement. That data doesn't you mentioned. Like sure, like Spotify can provide it for their audience to a certain extent maybe not to the same level of depth, but so I think that's been a gap in the past, for the industry is really understanding who the audience is and how it differs across the whole, the whole landscape, and so that's really a big part of it is to shed insight into that, share insights into that, and a lot of it is more at the aggregate level, but we provide this type of data to our clients at the individual show level or for any aggregation of shows as well.
James Cridland:So the report is free. Where can people get hold of it?
Daryl Battaglia:They can go to TraytonRankerscom. On there you can see our podcast rankers, which are monthly in every country. But there's a link below under the resource section to be able to download the report. It's about 30 plus pages of all different insights that hopefully people will find really useful, and I know the team here has put a lot of work into it, so we're excited to put it out there.
James Cridland:Yeah, super helpful stuff. It's really good to talk to my friends at TraytonDarrell. Thank you so much for your time today.
Dave Jones:Thank you, james, appreciate it. That was Darrell Bataglia from Trayton Digital.
James Cridland:There's some really interesting data in there, and interesting data both from Omni Studio and from their own enterprise podcasting host, but also from the Trayton Rankers as well around the world as well. I always find it really good when large podcast companies do that kind of thing.
Dave Jones:Dave, you know I read through some of the report and there's some just as usual, some of this stuff. I find it hard to reconcile some of the things in the report because they say in there that you've got that huge advantage that Apple has over Spotify, but then in the other section where they do the survey, it says Apple's at 15% when they say the question was which platform do you use most often to listen to podcasts? And the respondent said that Apple's 15%, Spotify 25.
James Cridland:Yeah, and YouTube even more.
Dave Jones:Yeah, I'm not sure I'm following. The survey says one thing, the downloads, I guess, or the trackers, say a different thing. I'm not sure how to reconcile those two.
James Cridland:I have never understood that and it's really difficult to report on it because you're there going. I mean, I guess you can turn around and say the podcast app that people are most using it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the app which is delivering the most amount of downloads. But I also wonder whether or not it's a deal about Apple's automated downloads as well, and I wonder what the story is there, and I would love to dive more deeply into what's actually automated and what isn't, and maybe that's something that OP3 can actually help us with.
Dave Jones:Yeah, and the other thing it talked about was the long tail of podcasting. That is, 76% of podcasts and that's a number that people have been just licking their chops to try to monetize for so long, and I'm just not sure it's doable. I'm sure you can break off some of that with programmatic type advertising, but when we see the huge margins of error, like when such a big drop when Apple downloads change their Apple podcast chains or download algorithm, it's just when that kind of swing can happen. If it happens on a million downloads, on a show with a million downloads, 20% is one thing, 20% on a show with 10,000 downloads is something completely different, and so I'm not sure that those that that long tail can can ever be, because it's just not nobody. It seems like nobody wants that.
James Cridland:Yeah.
Dave Jones:Yeah, as far as the ad buyers.
James Cridland:No, I'm fascinated to. You know, I'm really interested to find out how many more of the Apple downloads numbers are actually automated and what that means for the industry. Because I mean, you know, talking with some people in the podcast industrial complex about their downloads and things you can, you know, you can see that there's some fear in their eyes when, when they're saying you know how's it, how's it impacted you, and they're going, oh, it's fine. Really, you know, yeah, right, right.
James Cridland:They're really kind of. You know, I mean I've seen some, I've seen some of the numbers, and some of the numbers I mean there are some large, large podcast publishers which are down 30%, 40% and they'll be having to pay, make goods for that. They'll be having to, you know, go back to their advertisers and saying, well, yeah, but this isn't real numbers. And then you've got Todd saying, yeah, there's been no change at all. I'm not sure, I don't know it's, it's just a weird, a weird one. But then you see, you know numbers from Buzzsprout as an example, where Spotify has been down significantly, but that doesn't appear to be the case on some other podcast platforms. So I'm you know, it's just really hard to report on, I think.
Dave Jones:Yeah, the Spotify number being down, that that has been a weird one, because you know, I'm not, I'm not sure and you know we, we saw and you published the index of stats of of podcasts that publish new episodes and the count, the total count on that.
Dave Jones:You know we saw that going down, down, down, down, down through most of 2023. And then it sort of hit bottom around the early, around early January, and now it's just been on this slow march up and so we've had this nice, you know, every, it seems like every week it's one and a half percent, two percent up and these things are. Things are improving and shows are producing more episodes now and we've seen this nice little gradual recovery in the total overall number of shows that are producing new episodes. And I think you're right, the it is hard to make this, to translate these kinds of things into money, because I did. I did notice that that in the Trident Report they listed the top 20 podcasts overall in their in their rankings and NPR has six of the shows in the top 20, but they laid off like almost the entire podcast group so clearly these things don't mate you know?
James Cridland:No, no, exactly, and of course their numbers are. You know, depending on which numbers you look at, their numbers are participating publishers only, which is always a always a thing, isn't it? But yeah, no, some really interesting numbers coming out of that. And talking about really interesting numbers, lots of very large numbers to do with AI and fundraising.
Dave Jones:Yeah, Lots of AI companies are getting fun. Everybody's getting money. Podcastle got 13 and a half million. Last week we heard from Wondercraft who got three million. Dexa raised six million. Audio stack raised 3.2 million. I mean, everybody's just getting a piece of the action.
James Cridland:Yeah, it's just like so much money. It seems that in order for you to make a ton of cash in terms of funding, all you have to do is say AI. So I'm wondering, obviously, when, when podcast index is going to be doing some AI? You already use AI, right?
Dave Jones:Sure, yeah, yeah Never.
James Cridland:And machine learning as well, which was last year's catchphrase, wasn't it Right?
Dave Jones:Yeah, and blockchain the year before that, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, robotic process automation, this it just keeps going back and back and back. What an so the odd narrative of AI being able to fix podcast search and discovery and that kind of that's a new one on me. I don't see how that's possible. But people, now things have changed. It seems like people have gone from podcast, from AI as podcast improvement, to AI as podcast search and discovery, and I'm not sure how that. I don't know how to make that leap, but I guess we'll see what people come up with.
James Cridland:Yeah, I think you know. I mean AI is being used an awful lot. Our sponsor, buzzsprout, has AI that will generate, you know, entire titles and episode show notes and everything else. If I really wanted to, the Dexa one is interesting. So Dexa is essentially looking at the entire contents of your podcast back catalog and although they've just announced something with with Huberman lab I don't even know if that's how you pronounce it Huberman, huberman, I think so yeah, that's not right yeah.
James Cridland:Well, so they've just announced that, but they've actually had one with Jordan Harbinger for quite some time. If you want to take a peek at that, it's Jordan Dexa AI, and you know that's a fascinating thing in that you go into this thing. You can ask Jordan Harbinger anything you want, about anything that he might have spoken about, and it comes back with you know information on you know some of his guests, information on shows to go and have a listen to, but also information on you know on the advertisers you know you can go in and you can ask for an athletic greens.
James Cridland:You know discount code.
Dave Jones:That's the way you go. Now, this, this kind of thing I can see. You know there's there's a lot of AI, just hype cycle trash that's out there, but these that's that's actually a really cool thing and I can see that within. If you take a back catalog of a particular podcast and say, okay, look, I've, I've done 900 episodes of a podcast, I don't even remember what I said in all of these and I don't remember stories that we've gone over and clips that we've played and all these.
Dave Jones:If you can pump all those transcripts and all that data into a large language model and get out something that's easy to search and is pro, even proactive, and telling you when you're, as you're, prepping for the show, oh you've, you know, oh, you tie, you just typed this word into your show notes. Well, here you've talked about this six shows ago. I can see that now that's valuable, that I could some of these, and that's the complicated. I think that's the complex thing around AI in general is that it's hard right now because the hype cycle is just so fire that it's it's so difficult to figure out which which of these things is actually a useful product and which one is just somebody trying to jump on the bandwagon.
James Cridland:Yeah, it's just, it's just nonsense. Yeah, yeah. So Audio Stack raising 3.2 million. They are the people who do automated voices, and I think I used one of the automated voices a couple of weeks ago with and it was an, it was an Australian ad and you know, and the automated voice, to be honest, sounded pretty good. You know, if you, if you want to make automated ads that essentially promote you know that essentially promote, you know, news headlines and stuff like that, then that's quite a nice, that's quite a nice idea, I think. But you know, let me play, let me play a little clip of one here. Many Australian cities are bracing for their hottest days in years, including Western Sydney, as experts warn of dangerous conditions in some areas. Now, that's a completely automatic voice, but you wouldn't. I don't think I would have guessed that that was an automatic voice.
Dave Jones:No, I wouldn't have picked that out, I think, if I heard it long enough, if there was enough, if it kept going probably you'd start to get suspicious.
James Cridland:Yeah, but the ad is only a 30 second thing and it's basically that's the headline. I mean, if that was a headline, go and find out more at this website. So you know, I can see that there's something there, but still, but yes, whether or not that'll help with podcast discovery, who knows. But Oshah, our French friends have come up with something clever.
Dave Jones:Yeah, they've, let's see, they've launched a podcast search optimization control panel. The tools aimed at ensuring its podcasts reach the number one slot in Apple podcasts and Spotify search results.
James Cridland:Hmm, what do you think of that running a podcast index yourself?
Dave Jones:I think search within podcasting is incredibly difficult for so many reasons, and the number one reason with search and audio it doesn't matter if you have a transcript or not. Having the text really doesn't help you that much Really. So if we, if we look at it will depends on what you're trying to find. So sometimes having the text of all the episodes and everything can make makes the job even worse Because the the butte. So let's take search, sort of the pinnacle of search that we all think of, and that's Google. The magic of Google is the backlink, is measuring the number of inbound links to a page in order to rank the results.
Dave Jones:Searching doesn't have anything like that. You can't. There's no linkage between a podcast and another podcast or a podcast and some general topic. There's just not. There's no way to measure those because without page rank, google Google search is not what it is. That's the secret sauce. It says you don't have like anything that's sort of like an analogous to that within podcasting. You just have to go purely based on just text, and there's so much text out there that it just pollutes everything down to nothing. It's it's an odd narrative to say that you could boost, you know, boost search results into the number one slot in Apple and Spotify. That's, and I'm wondering what. I wonder what magic sauce they're using to make that happen.
James Cridland:I mean, I think quite a lot of. It is just that most podcasts are pretty bad at. They're the metadata that goes with them, you know, and the amount of I mean Joe Rogan, for example. Joe Rogan's entire Description in the in the the description field is the official Joe Rogan podcast. I think, I think that's it. I mean, it used to be. It used to be ramblings from a guy and minds, which made even less sense.
Dave Jones:But In fairness. In fairness, I'm not sure how you would explain this show like I got. It interviews other people. Yes, it's not a whole lot to say about it. It's pretty random, yeah no, exactly, exactly.
James Cridland:So, you know, and I I wonder whether, I wonder whether it's it's an issue of? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's an issue of just the, the metadata which is out there, the official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan, that's literally all it's. So yeah, so.
James Cridland:You know. So maybe you know, maybe there's something that I'd not thought about back links and things because of course, as you so rightly say, there isn't. There are no back links, because there's a back link, maybe, to the Apple podcasts page. Now there's a back link to the Spotify page, but there's a back link to the website and there's a back link to the other website, to his new anchor website, which looks, which looks, entertaining. So, yeah, so I find that's a really interesting, interesting point. Hence why you know, a discovery mechanism Like pod role and things like that are really interesting and useful and helpful. I was talking with the folks from RSS and they promised me pod role within the next couple of months.
Dave Jones:So yeah, I want to put it on our on our homepage, on the index it's it's time to move off the completely useless, not helpful to anybody, random, oh yeah.
James Cridland:The right which is usually, which is usually a sermon isn't it?
Dave Jones:It's always, always sermon audiocom. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, so is it is. Osha is. Are they? Are they just fixing show notes and description fields? Is that primarily what this is?
James Cridland:I think it is Making sure that you are using the right keywords in the right Description and show notes and everything else that I think it really is is purely, it's purely that my my, you know, talking with Maxime, as I did a while back, he he is, you know, he's looked at Rankings in Apple podcasts and in Spotify. He's got a ton of data behind him to show how how this works and how this works well. We should probably get him back on to talk about this specifically. But yeah, I mean it's, it's basically, it's SEO, just the same way as you would use SEO.
James Cridland:I mean, there is a reason why the, the pod news daily, that show now has in the description it mentions Joe Rogan, it mentions a few other, if you are the large shows, just just to get it in Exactly, you know. But yeah, that's really interesting, really interesting, and I do think that the pod role, particularly that, that is, your backlinks, isn't it, but it's your backlinks from, from the industry or from the, from the community. It's not necessarily backlinks from audiences. So perhaps there's something else that we need to build that right.
Dave Jones:Which I think you know, honestly, is probably better at this point in the game, or at least something that we can work with, because once you introduce Tens of millions of listeners, then you just have chaos on your hands. If it's, if it's just podcasters recommending other podcasts, that seems like a higher signal, you know, amongst the noise. For now, yeah so did you go to pod fest this this past week, james?
James Cridland:I did not go to pod fest for two reasons firstly, because it's a long, long, long, long, long way away and secondly, it's a bit too Florida for me, although I am going to Orlando in May, so I'm going to speak at a Christian radio conference there, so so that should be fun. I have a, I have a form which I was supposed to fill out two days ago. I'm telling them exactly what it, whatever he's, I'm going to be saying so I should probably, I should probably get to doing that. I guess you weren't a pod fest either, is.
Dave Jones:Movement in.
James Cridland:Dallas, the only big one that you've been to or have you been to others.
Dave Jones:Yeah, I've been to two part podcast movements. I don't Because of my day job Jane did from roughly January to May is is almost impossible to do any travel, so I am always miss pod fest and I miss podcast moving evolutions. So I've only been to the other podcast movement.
James Cridland:Yeah, the big one the big one, yes, yes, yes, because you know you. In your day job You'll be, you know, dealing with W9 forms. The amount of W9 forms I've had to fill in and sends to people I don't even know what they are.
Dave Jones:That's give us, that's give us all your per, all your highly personal numbers and social security and all this stuff, so that we can send you a 1099. Yeah, exactly Exactly, I guess you do get 1099 since you're an, since you're incorporated here in the US.
James Cridland:I'm sure that the person that deals with my accounts is, yes, absolutely, absolutely doing that. Yes, I've got no idea about any of this stuff. It used to be. I. I worked for a Canadian radio company about three or four years ago and I ended up paying more Canadian tax than I did, australian tax, which was, which was very strange, very strange. There I was, you know, helping the good people of British Columbia, what who knows. But anyway, talking about pod fest, which we were, and until we went off on one, I spoke. I spoke with Claire white Brown from the creativity found podcast. She did go to pod fest, so I asked her what it was like and I was interested in whether it was her first big event it was.
Claire Waite Brown:So I've been to a number of events in London and when I saw this one in Orlando Orlando is a bit easier for us Brits to get to and a bit more affordable, so, yeah, I decided to bite the bullet and go for it and go see what podcast conferences are like in the year US. I'm here, I hear a lot about US podcasting generally and I I have a number of US guests and listeners, so I wanted to go over and go to a big event and did you pay for the tickets or how did you get hold of those?
Claire Waite Brown:Well, you see, luckily and I was I was kind of a bit hopeful. So I booked my flights and I booked my hotel and I was hoping that my lovely host, buzz sprout because I'd heard them do this before Would have some tickets to give away. And yes, they did so. On the day they announced that on buzzcast, I was in the car and I rushed back home. They're right.
Daniel Ek:I've got to get on to customer support.
Claire Waite Brown:Speak with Brian. And yes, so my creator pass was Given to me by buzz sprout, which, you know, considering the costs going into a big trip like this was, was really very helpful and Much appreciated on my part.
James Cridland:Well, they are our sponsor as well. So you know, I can never say any bad things about buzz sprout.
Claire Waite Brown:Not that you would want to know is never a bad thing to say about no, indeed, and I noticed that you.
James Cridland:You met Brian from customer support while you were there. I did Jordan and Albin. I noticed not, not Kevin.
Claire Waite Brown:I didn't meet Kevin. No, I was hoping to meet Kevin at the party, but it was just too damn busy and he was just too damn popular.
James Cridland:Yeah, well, you know, there you go. So what did you think that pod fest would be like?
Claire Waite Brown:first of all, Well, I didn't really know, but I had had a little bit of a clue from you actually, james, which was quite nice because I wrote to you about it and you said About you felt it was grassroots, which is right up my street, because I'm an indie podcaster, you know. It was an idea I had. The wonderfulness about pod casting is you can just do it At little expense. You don't need to do as you're told. You can run the show how you want to put it out, how you want to it can have. It can be hours and hours or it can be 10 minutes, all of that kind of thing.
Claire Waite Brown:But I felt I do feel sometimes going to some of the events in the UK a bit lost in that area, in that there's a lot of big business around it. So I was quite happy to think that pod fest may be more indie podcasters like myself. I certainly know a lot of indie podcasters here in the UK, but not necessarily feel that going to event I'm going to meet lots of them. But then this was exactly what happened at pod fest. It was so lovely. Obviously I went completely on my own. I didn't know anyone when I got there, apart from Brian and Jordan, obviously Through digital communication, but it was a case of being able to say someone so what's your show? And more often than not, they did have a show and it was their idea and they were doing this show for this reason, or they were promoting it for this reason. So it did feel very much. I was very comfortable there. Oh, it's so cheesy, but I was amongst my people.
James Cridland:Yeah, well, that's a good thing I found from pod fest and I went a number of years ago, but I found it very American and certainly there was a thing called speed dating.
Claire Waite Brown:Which terrified me Was that, when you went, yes, yeah, I've been calling it speed dating since, but it's speed networking really, and I know what you mean, james, because I am very British. I did find I didn't find it very American at all. I didn't. There was one thing I videoed where a very lovely man was doing some singing and I was like, oh crikey, this is a bit, this is a bit American, sent that home to my family. But generally I didn't and I really just found it very friendly, very ordinary, if you know what I mean. It wasn't all whoop, whoop, you know big American stuff. The people, the individuals that I were meeting there was so friendly. They were so keen to explain things to me that I didn't know is a Brit and vice versa, to ask me about stuff that's different in the UK and the parties and things and talking to people. So I would be one to notice if something was a bit, as we would say, american, and I didn't find it overly that way at all.
James Cridland:Good Well, that's a good thing and lots of informal meetups. So obviously you must have been at the Buzzsprout party I'm imagining with the balloons. From what I understand, I was listening to Buzzcast and listening all about that, but there were lots of informal meetups as well, I think.
Claire Waite Brown:Yeah, and that was lovely as well. So we had the app and within the app, obviously you've got your agenda on there. You can try to fathom out what you want to go to when, because there's such a lot of talks going on. I mean, obviously you can buy recordings of it, but it's really good to be in the room with the speaker, but also with other people in the room that are interested in this topic and you can speak to them. But, yeah, definitely there's a really lovely, good sized space with round tables that was just always open and just always free from meeting up.
Claire Waite Brown:There were people meeting in the hallways. I mean, I went to an organised one which was arranged by Jen Hardy and it was aimed at podcasters over the age of 50. And that was really lovely to actually speak individually to some people there, find out about their shows and vice versa. And then during the rest of the conference, when you're wandering about and you're in the halls, you've got people that you've already met to say hello to. And I know there were lots of other groups like that. And I'm going to be a bit American here, james, in your niche or niche, as you say here, but there were lots of informal meetups that you could go to to meet other people like yourself doing the same kind of show as you or having the same interests, which I thought was really lovely as well.
James Cridland:Now you went to one of the talks that you went to was all about podcasting 2.0 with Todd and apparently he used one of Sam's slides, which Sam will be delighted about. He did, he did I'm delighted about, and was there lots of talk about podcasting 2.0, or was it still a bit sort of? We're not quite sure what it is.
Claire Waite Brown:Yeah, it is still a bit more. A bit we're not quite sure what it is. I forgot to take a photo of Todd with Sam's slide up, so I apologize for that, sam, I was too busy listening. But yeah, I think there was more because I'm you know I'm quite very keen on all of this stuff very interested in it.
James Cridland:You do the value for value, don't you?
Claire Waite Brown:Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm loving that and I loved not blowing smoke here, james, but I did love your description of the fairground tokens, because I do think people are a bit frightened of, like, what's a sat? Oh my God, do I have to? You know, put money over in my wallet and blah, blah, blah. And you described it as fairground tokens, which I think is perfect, because in my wallet at the moment I have, I think, a grand total of 16,000 sats, which I'm very pleased about, but yeah, I haven't put any money into my wallet myself.
Claire Waite Brown:I've been able to boost and connect with other podcasts by using the sats that I've earned just by listening. I met a chap in the queue for the bar you always meet the best people in queues for the bar who gave me 10,000 sats because we were talking about podcasting 2.0 and value for value. But I felt that more of the people I was speaking to were aware of it, knew the term and the point that they're then at is then really understanding what it means and, to my mind, how easy it is to take advantage of it, to use it. But I know you and Sam have been talking about it's kind of down to the apps to take on the mantle and include some of those.
James Cridland:Yeah, I mean the hard sort of education and all of that kind of stuff is always important.
Claire Waite Brown:Yeah, and just make it acceptable and just understandable and it's not scary.
James Cridland:So what was the most valuable thing you learned? I have a theory about conferences and events like podcast or evolutions from podcast movement, which I'm going to. I have a theory that actually you go away, it's three days of sort of fun and chatting to people, but you probably go away with two big things that you've learned, and those big things are actually worth enough, in my opinion, for you to have actually gone there. Were there some big things that you learned or was it just meeting lots of people, making lots of contacts and all that?
Claire Waite Brown:Yeah, I wouldn't say so. I came away and I'm going to be a really annoying guest and I'm not going to put it into two things that I've learned, because that's just I haven't got the brain space yet to actually hone that in, but I came away with notes, not loads and loads of notes. Another thing I like about these kind of events is sometimes they can help reiterate to yourself that you're on the right track, that you know things and you are doing things in a good way, that you want to do. So that I find very valuable. As you've already said, meeting people is very valuable. I've been. I think this is the first conference I've been to.
Claire Waite Brown:I've actually come back with contact details and got back in touch with those people, whether for friendly chat, whether to actually talk about guest swaps and just sharing information Certainly not a lot of sharing information.
Claire Waite Brown:For example, there was some you know, the inevitable chat about AI, and some of us have been chatting amongst ourselves and sharing our experiences of what we're trying within AI, for example, show notes etc.
Claire Waite Brown:So, yeah, the connecting with people. But I did come back with some notes and the plan in my head, which is good for me, because everything can be a bit fuddled up in there with all the information you've taken on, but a plan in my head to actually look at what I've taken from it, find the most important things that I want to actually implement. And there are a couple of things I want to implement, but to schedule those in a long, slow process. So I'm going to say, like, for this month I'm going to do this small thing and next month I'm going to do this small thing, so that I can actually do them all and they don't all get rushed together and then probably, you know, by the wayside or what have you. So a little bit of just slowing down, looking at it all and taking on the ones that I really want to do, giving myself the time to actually do them.
James Cridland:So what's your advice for people going to these types of events?
Claire Waite Brown:Well. So the other thing I wanted to say, actually, is that I am a very good networker. I am absolutely happy to go to events like these completely on my own and go and talk to people. I have no problem with that whatsoever. Not everybody does. Also, I think people often think that they're going to go to these events and it's going to be cringey, or there's going to be oh, we haven't talked about the speed dating oh yeah, which wasn't cringey, but you know it's going to be really difficult for them.
Claire Waite Brown:At this particular event, there was a table and it had some extra things you could stick onto your lanyard. For example, my pronouns are or I'm an introvert or I'm an extrovert, which I think possibly yeah is. I didn't use any of those. But if you felt you needed a bit of help when you're going to be talking to strangers, it's a bit American, isn't it? I was going to say that, and then I wasn't going to say that, yeah, yeah, I did think that, even if you don't feel that you're very confident in going to things on your own, we're often told we need to be selling ourselves and selling our products and blah, blah, blah, selling our show. Don't feel it has to be like that Just be human. Majority of people at these events are human, but you know what I mean. You know they're just ordinary humans, beings, and it is can be easier to just talk to people than you think, and I personally make better connections when I speak to a person in real life. Yeah, yeah.
James Cridland:Well, everybody is in the same boat as well, aren't they which?
James Cridland:is important, yeah. So another thing that I would add to that is plan, plan ahead, plan the different things that you're going to go and see. If you're coming to Evolutions or Podcast Movement, make sure you go and see Amy Poehler and the ridiculous English guy that will talk for 10 minutes prior to Amy Poehler. He's very good, you should go and see him. So, yeah, you know, planning is a good thing because otherwise, actually, you're not going to get the best out of some of the speakers that you end up seeing there. I think I don't know if you agree with that.
Claire Waite Brown:Yeah, I think it's going to save on your stress while you're there as well. I definitely went through the app, went through the agenda, ticked off the ones on the agenda I wanted to go to Didn't necessarily always go to that ones, you know, sometimes I change my mind but have a good understanding of what's there and then you're not going to be stressed rushing between rooms and you're not going to be stressed about changing your mind because you've got a good idea of what's going on. I think that's a very good, very good idea, james. Yeah, good point.
James Cridland:Yes, yes, especially the English guy before Amy Poehler. And the final question is what is the name of your podcast and why should we listen?
Claire Waite Brown:Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, so my podcast is called Creativity Found and it's born out of my own experience, although I didn't realise that until I'd been making the show for quite a few episodes. But basically I speak with people who have found or re-found their creativity later in life. So we talk a lot about the hiatus period, when, insensible, every day, normal all of those in bunny ears life, you know creativity is put to the bottom of a pile and how people have found their way back and how they benefit from that in their life now. So there's a lot of personal journal, there's a lot of wellbeing, there's a lot of good advice on trying things and not worrying if you're not perfect at them, and it's from all sorts of creative disciplines. So my guests are from all over the world, all sorts of creative disciplines, and have so many different stories.
James Cridland:Well, thank you, buzz Brown, for the tickets and thank you, claire, for your time today.
Claire Waite Brown:Thank you so much. It's been fabulous.
Dave Jones:Claire Waite-Brown from the Creativity Found podcast.
James Cridland:Yeah, it was nice to hear that she was given 10,000 sats by a man in the queue for the bar. This is how things work, isn't it?
Dave Jones:I think when you get into the weird underbelly of Bitcoin stuff, you never know who's going to just give you sats. It may be some random guy at a bar.
James Cridland:You know that's how that works.
Dave Jones:Show me your app and I'll show you mine, and you'll get 10,000 sats.
James Cridland:Say can I have a look at your QR code? That's right. Yeah, no, but it was good to hear that. You know she went to Todd. She went to hear Todd talking about that and value for value was something that Claire has been doing for a while on her show and everything else, and she liked Fairground Tokens, which I was very, very pleased about.
Dave Jones:Yes, congratulations.
James Cridland:I don't know quite what you think about Fairground Tokens. I'm sure that Adam disapproves, as he disapproves of most things that I say.
Dave Jones:I think all analogies are fair game. They all fall down in some way or another. It's very hard to make analogies to any of this stuff. I like how she throws in blah blah blah, because that's basically when you start talking about Bitcoin and podcasting and sats. There's always going to be a little bit of blah blah blah in there.
James Cridland:Yeah, put money over into my wallet and blah, blah, blah. Let's look at some other events. Podcasting is coming to South by Southwest, which is in. What I was going to say is in your neck of the woods, it's in Adam's neck of the woods, isn't it? Austin, kind of yes, early March. And then, of course, there's Evolutions, which I'm going to, sam's going to. There's PodFrance as well, which they're doing to put together podcasting's top publishers with brands, agencies and buyers. I'm not going to that bit, but I'm sure it's going to be very good.
James Cridland:The New Zealand Podcasting Summit 2024 has been announced on May the 11th in Auckland and the podcast show in London, which I am going to, as is Sam the 22nd and 23rd of May, looking forward to that. Such a good event and it should be very excellent. This year. There's a creators section, which they've not done before, so hopefully we'll find out more about that. And there are more events, both paid for and free, at PodNews virtual events or events in a place with people, and if you're organising something you can tell the world about, it's free to be listed. Podnewsnet slash events. The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.
James Cridland:Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where we do all of the tech talk, and I'm delighted that you're here, dave, because normally I am basically taking the posts that you have posted on MasterDom and then rewriting those, and then Sam and I talk about them. So cut out the middleman.
Dave Jones:Yeah, well, I basically did the same thing. I went and looked at my email and looked at the namespace and like, hey, here we go, what's going on? And the first thing that popped out was Eric Pee-Pee. So Helipad, that's the thing we all many of us use to see our booster grams and get those messages and that kind of thing. I've pretty much turned over the source code of Hellypad over to Eric Peepee. He's kind of running with that full, full steam. Now I just got so much going on that it was great to see him pick that up. And he's got a new release. He's got this lets you reply. So if somebody sends you a booster, you can reply back and send Sats back and a message. There's a.
Dave Jones:Scent tab to let you see all your Scent boost when you're replying. He's got password protection in there. You can see your automated boosts and if you run an Umbrella or Start9, you can run it on there or you can run it on any machine. He's got new app icons for podcast guru and true fans and LN beats Lots of great stuff.
James Cridland:Ah, and as I talk, I thought I'll go into Umbrella and I'll just check whether the update is available and it is. Oh really, yeah, there it is Added. Missing user agent header when calling the podcast index API. You'll be pleased about that. That will be, and various other entertaining things. Excellent, let's hit the update button on that then. What could possibly go wrong?
Dave Jones:I'm not going to do that because I'm podcasting from my Umbrella, so I'm not going to risk this at all. So I'm like terrible decision.
James Cridland:Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. So that is a very cool thing and it's nice to see Eric doing a ton of work with that, which is nice. Phase seven of the namespace. So the namespace is lots of additional functions and additional tools and things for podcasting in general. You have set a closing date, haven't you? Which is sometime in the future.
Dave Jones:It is, it is, it's. Why is that? June 1st we sort of intentionally slowed down things. We were going when the first first year and a half, two years of the namespace development, we were just going at a lightning speed and that's just not great for anybody to keep up a pace like that. And I think it was good to slow down the introduction of new tags and that kind of thing so that hosts could catch up, apps could catch up, and because these development cycles, I mean it takes a long time. So we intentionally kind of slowed everything down and just stopped the frantic pace and I feel like now, going forward, it probably makes sense to have roughly a six month cadence on bringing out new phases.
Dave Jones:So a phase is we sort of have an idea for a bunch of features and tags that we want, that the community has said, hey, I want this. And then we sort of try to hash them out and we discuss them, debate them, try to find problems with them all the normal things you do as you're developing new things and then at the end of the period when that phase closes, we just do a red, you know, say okay, where are we at? Is this tag good enough. Does it need more work? If it does, we'll just kick it to the next phase.
Dave Jones:If this other tag or this other feature enhancement maybe it's ready not on June 1st, maybe it's ready April 1st We'll go ahead and do it. It doesn't mean we have to wait, but it does mean that it's not a good time to do it. It does mean that it's nice to have sort of a, I think a six month expectation that we're going to have a new set of features to target for a specific date, and that, I think, helps everybody have sort of a goal in mind for what dates and they want to hit, so that we don't just sit around and not so we're not going too fast and we're also not going too slow.
James Cridland:What's your favorite new feature in this next phase? That's a nasty question to ask, isn't it?
Dave Jones:I don't know if I have a favorite. I would say that probably publisher feeds and the publisher medium make a lot of sense to me. But then I think, do you want to explain what those are how those work.
Dave Jones:Yeah, sure, so this is sort of again like a backlink type of situation or a pod roll, but it takes a little bit of a different approach.
Dave Jones:So if I'm a podcast network or even a podcaster that has four different podcasts, well then maybe I want to group my podcast together in a way where it's easier to discover all the shows that belong to me.
Dave Jones:You could think of this sort of like as an open version of Apple's channels feature in the Apple podcast. So you can say all right, I have four podcasts and I'm going to have a feed, and the feed is going to have a medium of publisher, and so the only four things in that feed are going to be links to the other feeds, and you can go in reverse as well. So each podcast feed has a link back up to the publisher feed. So it's sort of a two-way street. I can start at the publisher feed and find all the shows that that publisher creates, or I can find one of their feeds, go back up the chain to the publisher feed and then discover all the other ones. So it's sort of a two-way street and you get some verification there too. I'm not just saying that I'm part of this publisher. The publisher's feed also says yes, this is part of this publisher.
James Cridland:Right, yeah, so one links to one and the other links to the other, and that sort of helps you, and that's different from Podroll, because Podroll you can link to anything you like. So this show links to the BuzzCast show because of our sponsor and also because we like it, and so that's all fine, but that's very different from this, which is very much more focused on. Here are all of the shows that this publisher has produced.
Dave Jones:Yes, that's right. And on the medium front, we've also got a proposal for adding a new medium of course. So that would be like some kind of teaching course or an educational type course.
James Cridland:Right. So we've got mediums of audiobooks.
Dave Jones:I think We've got mediums of music, obviously podcasts and now courses, yeah, and I think these make sense to distinguish between, because we're about obviously, we've done tons of stuff with music over the last year, year and a half but I think audiobooks make a ton of sense. We're already talking I talked in an email today with somebody who's doing some audiobook work and they're looking to publish those in a podcast feed, and so, as we distinguish between these different medium types, I think it makes sense to go slow and pick, choose wisely and course. Course makes a lot of sense to me. I mean that it just seems sort of intuitive that that would be a thing that you would want to look for at a high level, yeah.
James Cridland:No, I think that that makes a bunch of sense. There's more details, of course, on that if you go in through now. How could people find more details on these new features, I wonder?
Dave Jones:It's super easy, Jay. You just Google for podcast namespace, click on the GitHub repo and then go to the discussions tab and then click on the phases tab.
James Cridland:It could not be simpler, so it's super easy to me. I have a feeling that podcasting2.org should have a link somewhere, yeah. I think, so too. Boostergram.
Dave Jones:Corner, corner.
Speaker 2:Corner On the Pod News Weekly Review. Yes, our favorite time of the week.
James Cridland:It's Boostergram Corner and, yes, lots of boosts. As ever. We get boosts for the Pod News Daily, as well as boosts for this very show. And yeah, and do you want to read the first one? The first one out is a bit weird isn't it?
Dave Jones:Yeah, it's 1,024 sets and it just says great show, great show.
James Cridland:Excellent. Well, thank you, Thanks. Thank you, random, anonymous person. The good news is now that with the new helipad I can hit reply on that one and I can, yeah, so I will do that and ask them who they are for the next time.
Claire Waite Brown:Who are?
James Cridland:you, who are you? Thanks, random person for your 1k boost, but yes, but who are you? 10,000 sets from Adam Curry, who is very grumpy at me again this time because I linked to a video of your board meeting from last week and how it shows on the new Apple Podcasts app and forgot, of course, that I'd left a variable speed on, so it was at 1.25% and he was there. He called it atrocious and triggering. Speed listening is not healthy people. Sorry, adam.
Dave Jones:Well, at least he paid you 10,000 sets for the privilege.
James Cridland:Yeah, at least he paid me 10,000 sets for that. And I have to say I didn't realize, because I've not been using an iPhone. I didn't realize that Apple iPhones don't have Skip Silence on them. Yeah, so all of the podcast apps that I've ever used has had Skip Silence and all of a sudden I discover that Apple Podcast is missing this obvious basic feature. And I'm there going. I really, really miss that, but still, there we are.
Dave Jones:That turned on. I used to have all of it. I used to have the increase, speed, the gap, skipper, all of that. I turned it all off a couple of years ago. It was baking my brain.
James Cridland:I couldn't handle it. Well, there is some podcast that I can only listen to if I turn all of the Skip.
Dave Jones:Silence off.
James Cridland:Including ours, evidently. I mean Pocketcast lets you choose them by show, so you can have a specific setting for I don't know the new media show and a specific setting for the podcasting 2.0 show, and those are different in Pocketcasts, but I'm being a good boy and I'm just using the Apple Podcast app for now, who do you listen to at a faster speed?
Dave Jones:us or new media show?
James Cridland:Oh, the new media show has all of the silent skipping 2X, 2X and everything else and it's yeah, I have to be.
James Cridland:I love that show when it's a normal show and I would completely agree, by the way, with what Adam was saying. It's just not the same without Todd. Just not the same. Don't leave me Todd, co-creators. Just not the same without Todd. So I'm hoping that Todd comes back on that show relatively soon, but yeah, no, it's good. A thousand cents from Andrew. Now, he did tell me how to pronounce his surname and I've completely forgotten. Do you want to have a go? Yeah, andrew Grummit.
Dave Jones:Andrew Grummit there you go. Yeah, one of Adam's employees at PodShow.
James Cridland:Oh wow, there you go.
Dave Jones:One of the first, I think. I think he was a very perhaps one of the foundational employees at Meavio.
James Cridland:I had no idea. I had no idea. Are you these newcomers in the industry?
Dave Jones:Whippersnappers, no idea. 2222 Sats from Gene Bean. He says welcome to the world of Apple phone users, James.
James Cridland:Yes, it's been an entertainment. There's another blog on the way, I'm sure 2222 Sats from Mea Mortals, from Kyren. He says here's some fresh goss. You might not know the swankiest, and then he uses a phrase that I have no idea bougiest, bougiest, bougie, bougiest, like bourgeois. Oh, okay, the swankiest, bougiest gym I've ever checked out is Total Fusion Newstead. Kyren has no Kyren and I. He talks about gyms and I'm no, no interest in gyms. But anyway, the reason, the reason why he says it is they have a podcast Studio on their ground floor. So that's nice. Sam is here next week and I have just booked a. I've just booked a proper podcast studio for next week.
Dave Jones:Oh, you sprung for the big boy yeah.
James Cridland:So I will not be. I will not be, I'll be in the pod in West End and I will not be in this slightly echoy room. So that's so. That's good news. So Sam is back next week.
Dave Jones:Sam is here in Brisbane next week In honor of Sam. I didn't mention it, but I'm doing the. I'm doing the show from the bubble bath with my red wine in. In honor of Sam, I'm holding down the Fort. Sam.
James Cridland:Yeah, cause that's that's what he always does. Yeah, and then 500 sats, inexplicable 500 sats from now. Is this Joe Rowey or Joe Rowey, but anyway, 500 sats from him through fountain. I like pickleball.
Dave Jones:Oh good. Oh that's, that's okay, great.
Daniel Ek:You get some interest this is.
Dave Jones:This is an interesting set of booster grams you get on this show.
James Cridland:Yeah, thank you for those boosts. And just to remind you, sam and I share these boosts. What we should have done is we should have had a split for you, dave. We don't have the technology to do that. I'm afraid we will have a look at splitting that. So so the pod, the pod news weekly review. What do I normally say here? The pod news weekly review is separate from pod news, sam, and I share everything. So please give us a boost in your new podcast apps. That would be lovely. Modern podcast appscom is, I believe, the place where you should be going these days, or you can slip us some fiat at weeklypodnewsnet. So what's happened for you this week then, dave?
Dave Jones:I'm going to be working on on trying to get back in the namespace and sort of getting that thing tidied up. I started out a little bit today.
Dave Jones:I think is I've been really focused on the activity, pub bridge and and I've got.
Dave Jones:I've got a little bit more to do on that, but I'm really trying to resist the urge to code that. And because what it's missing is search, you're doing it because it's fun. I am, I have, and you know this as a as a as a programmer, you know that when you get into something that's really fun and challenging it's, it's hard to break away from it and do the thing that you know you should the drudgery. So I'm I'm I'm resisting the urge to code more on that and I'm going to stay in the namespace for the most part. And also I got a little bit of a cleanup to do on on the index. We've we have some sweepers that go through and check for old feeds that are for a forward and we give them grace periods. And then we have some things that look for iTunes IDs or Apple podcast IDs that have changed and just a bunch of cleanup scripts. And there's been some bugs in those that have been squashing this week, so just stuff like that.
James Cridland:Well, I enjoyed your your talking in the the podcasting 2.0 podcast last week about avoiding burnout and stuff like that, and I was. I was taking notes all the way through there.
Dave Jones:It's a hard thing in the in, yeah, hard thing in open source, very, very common in open source, yeah. So what happened for you this week?
James Cridland:James, I have been cursing visual studio code, which is the, the, the, the, the programming editor that I use. I've been cursing that because they made a change. I foolishly pressed the oh yeah, update button for the latest version of visual studio code and then discovered that the, the SSH tool that it used basically, was no longer going to support older Linux distros or something. So I'm using Amazon Linux 2. I think on one of on on the main pod news box, or was using that, and all of a sudden it wouldn't connect to it anymore, and so I couldn't edit any code. But, more to the point, I couldn't do some of the editorial work that I do, which is still actually, you know, going in and editing.
Dave Jones:What kind of connection is this? Is this does? Does VS code? Does it SSH over to the box? Yeah, it is. It's so to speak.
James Cridland:Yeah, it SSH is over to the box, but then it installs some software on that box and uses that as a channel back and forth. Okay yeah, and all of a sudden it stopped working. Why Do you know? Why Do?
Dave Jones:you know why.
James Cridland:Yeah, it was just hidden away in the release notes. It was oh, we're no longer supporting this version of, I don't know, G-Lib C or something equally dull.
Dave Jones:Oh, and I and.
James Cridland:I, and so I ended up having to move the pod news box yesterday, which I didn't want to do, and that's now running Amazon Linux 2023. That's nice. And PHP eight, which means that, of course, that quite a lot of my dodgy PHP isn't working at the moment. I'm literally as, as we speak, I'm looking at the terminal window and I'm looking at the errors coming up and seeing another fatal error and that's oh dear. That's something else that I need to go and fix this kind of stuff. Oh, so anyway. So it's been a it's been a great week of, you know, fiddling around with that sort of thing. And, of course, google and Yahoo both made a big change about bulk email, which means that you have to do certain things if you want your email to actually get to people.
Dave Jones:Yes, this is the long awaited changes that, yeah, have been hearing about this. What, what exactly did they change?
James Cridland:Yeah. So there's, you know, you have to have de-kim and you have to have, you know, signing for mail and all this kind of stuff, and it's just so. I mean, yes, they're doing the right thing, it's a bit like Apple podcasts yes, they're doing the right thing, but it's so annoying.
Dave Jones:Yeah, yeah, I feel yeah, dmark, and all that yeah.
James Cridland:Yeah, yeah, dmark, and then, and then there's, and then there's some headers that you also need to include as well, and the person that runs the, the not quite open source but nearly piece of mailing list software that I use, has misread what they've said. And oh, it's just yeah, so that's been a bundle of fun, but still. But there we are, but apart from that, it's been lovely.
Dave Jones:You will survive.
James Cridland:You will survive. Yeah, and looking forward to Sam being here in Brisbane for the first time next week, so that should be good. We're all going out for a beer on Thursday night. If anybody else wants to join, then find the Brisbane podcasters list on Facebook and you can come along as well, or just send me an email Then. That's cool and that's it for this week. Thank you to both of our guests, darrell and to Claire. You can also listen to the pod news daily and subscribe to the pod news newsletter for more of these stories and other things too.
Dave Jones:You can give feedback to James and Sam by sending this show a boostergram. If your podcast app doesn't support boost, then grab a new app from pod newsnet slash new podcast apps.
James Cridland:Our music is from studio dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila D. We use clean feed from main audio and we're sponsored by why your podcast isn't growing? A new podcast for podcasters and hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout podcast hosting. Made easy, Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.
Daniel Ek:Tell your friends and grow the show and support us, and support us.
Speaker 2:The pod news weekly review will return next week. Keep listening.
James Cridland:And by popular demand.
Daryl Battaglia:That's horrible.