Speaker 1: 0:00

It's Friday, the 21st of February 2025.

Speaker 2: 0:04

The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

Speaker 1: 0:13

I'm James.

Speaker 3: 0:13

Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of True Fans.

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Our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity in this industry right now is measurement.

Speaker 1: 0:22

Later, rocky Thomas on what podcasting needs to do to grow. Also in the chapters today, the Pod News report card have you filled it in? Are we closer to cross app comments and Joe Rogan dethroned? This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community to ensure you keep podcasting.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Start podcasting, keep podcasting with buzzsproutcom From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 3: 0:50

Now, James, I want to start off with the most important story of the week. Have you filled in your report card?

Speaker 1: 0:57

Well, I actually haven't filled in the Pod News report card. I'm not sure I'm allowed to fill it in but, dear listener, you should. Podnewsnet slash report card. I'm not sure I'm allowed to fill it in but, dear listener, you should. Podnewsnet slash report card. What's in the report?

Speaker 3: 1:08

card. Why are we doing it?

Speaker 1: 1:09

So we do it because every single year, we ask exactly the same questions about what we think about Apple Podcasts, what we think about Spotify, what we think about Amazon Music and YouTube. Are they good for us in terms of monetisation? Are they good for us in terms of promoting our show, are they good for open standards and everything else? And that then gives us scores where we can follow the trending views of people who are using those particular platforms, but that also gives those platforms themselves enough opportunity to get some, you know, potentially some more engineering resource or some more marketing resource or whatever it is that they need, and I know that they found it really really useful. So I go through the results of the Pod News report card every year at Evolutions, which I'll be doing this year in Chicago. But, yes, it's a really really useful thing for the entire industry. So if you haven't filled it out yet, please do podnewsnet slash report card.

Speaker 2: 2:14

Excellent Right, the Pod News Weekly Review with Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Speaker 3: 2:21

A company that I know very little about is called Soundstack, and that's not because I'm very lazy, it just doesn't hit my radar very often. But it started to pique my interest probably back in December when Rocky Thomas was appointed chief strategy officer, because we know Rocky she's one of our power supporters I thought I'd reach out and ask Rocky who or what is Soundstack?

Speaker 4: 2:43

Soundstack is what we call a full stack audio and service provider. We really focus on everything from linear streaming to podcast creators. We provide hosting, analytics, ad tech, distribution. We even have our own content management solution for podcasters. We love all audio, so we do everything from end to end spectrum. How?

Speaker 3: 3:06

long have you been with Soundstack?

Speaker 4: 3:07

So I started out with Soundstack in 2018. Prior to that, I was one of the first employees at AdsWiz, and then I've been in this industry since streaming since 1998. And I always like to joke I was 10 when I started doing this and actually my first, I guess my experience with streaming was streaming some local radio stations on Mark Cuban's company back in the day. Oh yeah, broadcastcom made me learn how to hate the real media server, kodak. And so, through my entire career, I started doing ad insertion client side in 2000 with a company on Silicon Valley and really have been in the tech side of the audio business, did a stint in TV for four years during the recession, realized I'm not quite pretty enough or speak slow enough for that industry, so I came back over to audio. So it's been a great career.

Speaker 4: 4:01

What I love about digital audio is I have a music degree. It just really speaks to me. So it's great when one of your passions is also a career for you, and I love how much it changes. I know it drives a lot of people crazy, but it is constantly iterating, which makes it really exciting.

Speaker 3: 4:17

One thing that you and James, when you were in Venice, were talking about was the problem with the way that podcasting and buying of media is probably talking Swahili. The two parts are not talking right. So what do we need to do in podcasting to make media buying easier? Because it was the media leader that said that podcasts have a $74 billion opportunity in advertising, but we're only getting about 0.2% of all ad spend. What can we do to change Rocky?

Speaker 4: 4:50

You're right, it's so shocking I like to say. You know, podcasting is the most popular and one of the most consumed, underbought modern medias I've ever run across and it's really frustrating. And I said that in Venice. I'm like it's just it's too hard to buy, and some people took a little bit of bristle to that. I'm like, well, let me rephrase it, it's too hard to buy at scale for large brands and I think one of the challenges is consistent measurement across the side.

Speaker 4: 5:15

So today we're getting bought, basically because you know, we're getting the extra 10% buys that are happening at the buy level and we're not actually part of what we call sales planning right now. And that's not just. That's just not podcasting, that's actually digital audio as well, if you look at it from a streaming standpoint, and we're never going to get more than our five or 10% afterthought until we are actually part of the media plant's initial planning time, like when they're looking at their year-long strategy. We're talking millions upon millions of dollars and right now it's getting in. What we're focused on and we are working with partnerships which will probably be coming out in the next couple of months, of how to get measurement into those platforms so then those buyers can actually identify. All right, how many like old school stuff, like gross rating points, which some of them still use.

Speaker 4: 6:05

If I have 10 GRPs in New York, how can I bring podcasts in there to basically target those listeners within New York and how can we basically keep on expanding it? Because, at the end of the day, I don't blame the demand or the advertising side. It's really hard to be swivel-chairing. I call between a whole bunch of different platforms to buy a very large media spend and so I think really gosh, I sound like a broken record. But it comes back to measurement.

Speaker 4: 6:31

I mean, I would say that our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity in this industry right now is measurement and also making sure we're consistently passing the correct signals to those buyers. And that can mean everything from you know the type of, you know the type of content it is. I would say brand safety is not so much of an issue, and I say that just because you know. I think that I would say that most of the podcasts out there are pretty brand safe and if a podcast user is going to go listen to that certain type of podcast, it's a user-initiated action. So I kind of look at it. As you know, that's what if you want, if an advertiser wants to target that, that's what they're going to get, and also dynamic ad insertion plays into that as well. So really our goal, my goal this year is to figure out how we can get measurement of podcasts into the planning tools that buyers are using today.

Speaker 3: 7:26

So, given your radio background and radio, I think, has 15 minutes in the hour of ads you know saturation, we're not there with podcasting. Now do you see, in 2025, people upping that to five, six and competing with the saturation of radio?

Speaker 4: 7:47

I do and I wish they wouldn't, and I am a hobby economist because I'm not trained. I think we're kind of doing a slight disservice when you keep on adding more spots to an ad break. The problem is that you're adding more supply into a. If you're talking especially well, we can talk about just in January adding more supply. You know my old, my, my old. You know local sales managers in the back of my head saying increase rate. You know, hold. You know. Basically constrict the supply so you can increase the rate on the demand side of it.

Speaker 4: 8:19

I know that's easier said than done. When everybody else is opening up all their spot sets and they're getting more money, it is going to impact how people are going to want to listen and when they know that you have a two-minute spot break, they're going to take out their phone and they're going to skip versus having a 30 or a 60-second spot break. I'm a big fan of a 15-second ad. I know that's really tight, but I find that we really have an ADHD transactional brain nowadays and I think that people really like to have concise messaging and I think we have to be about that.

Speaker 4: 8:51

That's one of my biggest challenges with a personal endorsement or live reads is the guys don't hold, or the people women too they don't hold tight to like a clock when they're doing their reads. And I've heard like two minute Casper ads. Sometimes I'm like, oh my gosh, guys, you've got to keep it tight. And then also hearing the same bullet point creatives going over and over. The beautiful thing about live reads is they're not supposed to burn out on creative and they're starting to burn out, and that's where I think it's an opportunity to mix up the creative, have a different challenge. Find out the first demo, the second demo, the tertiary demo. Make sure you're making a message towards that, just because, at the end of the day, it increases your outcome, which is going to increase the ability for you to get bought again.

Speaker 3: 9:32

Given you talked about open. Given, you talked about what you're doing with chapters. Where are you with podcasting to the O? There was a podcast out today from Mark Asquith which was podcasting to the O has failed, right, and he openly admits that was clickbait, but it was also a very interesting. Okay, let's throw the conversation back open. Has it succeeded? Has it failed? Has Soundstack adopted it? And if they have, great, and if they haven't, why not? I mean, where do you sit as strategy director on this?

Speaker 4: 10:12

I love a lot of the elements within Podcast 2.0. I think the challenge with Podcast 2.0 is there are so many options that you can do in there. I mean really it is and the way that we approach it at Soundstack, we definitely adopt some of the podcast elements and tags. It really comes down to what our publishers are asking us to implement. And because I mean Sam, I think you, you've heard the, you and I think Alberto, there's a couple of guys you literally have implemented almost all of them, which is incredibly impressive, I have to say it's incredibly impressive. I would say you know, obviously the transcripts, the person, the location ones, because that makes a lot of sense. A lot of our broadcasters, a lot of our publishers also tend to be broadcasters or they tend to be podcast networks. And then also I wouldn't say it's a secret, but actually kind of is we actually provide a lot of the delivery for some people who would be considered competitive to Soundstack. That I can't talk about, because that's how we have grown as a company. We actually provide delivery and hosting for other companies. But the one I'm excited about is, you know, the live item tag. I mean that's the, because I see that as really like the cool thing about merging possibilities between the linear as well as the on-demand and doing live events, and I mean this is like. This is where it gets really cool for, like local sports and just it's just. This is like a kind of a geek audio girl's dream come true.

Speaker 4: 11:31

And so, to answer your question, do I think that podcast 2.0 has failed? No, I would say that it has failed in its focus, and when I say that is that I think we'd be better served if we find a couple of the tags that are really going to help. Either one's going to drive monetization, maybe for more transparency within what I call programmatic signals. One's going to help, you know, maybe merge like the lit tag between linear and on demand, Maybe one that helps out with metrics, I think, really kind of focusing, you know, taking elements of it, the value for value.

Speaker 4: 12:04

One, or you know all the and I know that recently changed and I'm still trying to follow you guys on how because we don't do too much of that type Most of our clients are enterprise clients. I understand that like the concept tip jar and trying to get that in there, but I'll be honest with you, I still do five, you know, I still do the credit cards with you guys, just because it's I, I'm not. I'm on pocket cast, which is, I feel, like a newer two, oh, but it's definitely not like the true fans app or some other stuff that we have out there.

Speaker 3: 12:31

I'm equally giddy and excited about lit, as you are. One of my predictions for 2025 was that it will go big. Finally, adam and Dave do a live show every Friday night. Todd Cochran and Rob Greenlee do a live show. There are many that are doing it, so I'm really hoping hosts will start to provide their clients, the podcasters, with that one-click access to live, and then I think you'll see more people adopting it.

Speaker 4: 13:01

Well, and that's why I think that Soundstack is really. This is why we get real excited about it, because this is really in our sweet spot. We know the Icecast Showcast. We just launched our own, you know our own stream server with HLS and this we could really help out the industry, because we are those people who are independent, who want to help out creators, who actually have incredible deep knowledge on streaming protocols. And I was listening to I think it was maybe a podcast 2.0 or one of them with those guys and I could feel their frustration of figuring out metadata within Icecast or Shoutcast.

Speaker 4: 13:35

And how can we at Soundstack help bridge that gap a little bit is something that I'm really excited about and where I'm working on, because I've been on revenue forever and I love making revenue and I love making publishers successful. That's really kind of what I like. Paying publishers, I like seeing them continue to grow because, I'll be honest with you, they're the heroes. If we don't support publishers, we don't really have an industry anymore and I don't think people kind of think about that. We can have an industry that's basically driven by the mega companies and we'll be back to where radio was circa 1996. And I don't think we really want that. I think we want to keep independent voices thriving, and that's something that we're excited about too, because we want to help out the industry with our knowledge. We actually really understand that, and I would say we probably need a little bit more Podcast 2.0 people to kind of work with us so we can figure out how we can help make it easier, Cause you're right, it is deep geeky, deep geeky.

Speaker 3: 14:29

Awesome, I could talk to you all day with Rocky. Now, look, um, we're going to. We'll geek out after this show. Um, now, rocky, if somebody wants to find out more about Soundstack, where would they go?

Speaker 4: 14:40

Um, soundstackcom. Um, we're obviously on LinkedIn and all the other you know social places. Um, anyone can reach out to me at Rocky or C-K-I-E, like the mountains, Rocky, at soundstackcom, and um, love collaboration, love talking about the industry. Um, I believe there's really um not any one answer. I think it's all about, you know, making sure that we're all kind of figuring out the best way, path forward, and I'm excited about it. It's a great time to be in this industry right now.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Rocky Thomas from Soundstack. On Monday, more from Rocky Thomas in this feed with the full length interview. Really interesting chat with Rocky. She knows the stuff and she's very good in terms of understanding the opportunities of selling audio all in one, making sure that people understand the difference between host read ads and, you know, dynamically inserted ones and all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, super good. One of the other things.

Speaker 3: 15:38

This week was SiriusXM. What have they been up to?

Speaker 1: 15:42

So they have a thing called Sirius XM Podcasts Plus, and it's a premium subscription that you can get in Apple Podcasts by pressing the button and giving Apple some of your lovely money. Interestingly, they have just done a deal with Supporting Cast, which has allowed them to now offer Sirius XM Podcasts Plus to other places as well everywhere from Spotify, pocket Casts, overcast, all of those other podcasts apps, as well, of course, as YouTube Music, which also plays RSS feeds as well. So I think it makes a bunch of sense to remember that, of course, apple Podcasts premium subscriptions are only available for people who are using Apple Podcasts, and there are a lot of people out there who don't, and so therefore, anything that makes it easier and simpler to also get money out of everybody who's listening in other platforms makes a ton of sense. And SiriusXM going for supporting cast. You could also use Memberful, and there are a couple of other services as well there.

Speaker 3: 16:51

We have to have a show in the future to talk about secure RSS, james, because, as a podcasting 2.0 community, we need to understand what secure RSS is and why it's much more efficient because you stay within the app and you make the purchase in the app. But that's why I think we need this discussion, but I think we'll do that another day, if you don't mind. Milestones there's been a few milestones this week, james. What's been happening? Who's been getting across the line?

Speaker 1: 17:17

Yes. So a number of nice different milestones, including Rusty Quill, which is an audio drama company based in the UK. We've had Rusty Quill on the show before. They have a show called the Magnus Archives and really unusually, I think, for an audio drama, it has surpassed 100 million downloads, and so that means that they were eligible for one of Spotify's new Creator Milestone Awards, which actually meant for the first time we could actually see one of these things physically, which was nice. They picked up the award from Spotify in London last week, so that's nice. There's a picture of that on the Pod News website.

Speaker 1: 18:00

Also, a couple of shows doing well in terms of their milestone numbers of episodes. There's a podcast out of Winnipeg called Humans on Rights which has just published its 100th episode. They've been going, I think, for four years or so, I guess. In terms of long podcasts which are still going, 1,800 episodes for Geek News Central. So congratulations to Todd Cochran, the CEO of Blueberry, who has been doing that show pretty well ever since 2004. So he's done very well. Pod News also. By the way, the Pod News Daily hit episode 2000,. I think last week You're over your 2000. Yes, yes, so you know. So there's always that too. But many congratulations to those. And there will be a major milestone, we understand from Podimo next week. There's an embargo until Monday, so I can't tell you what that is, but we will have Morten Strunger from Podimo, who will be on next week, telling us all about that too.

Speaker 3: 19:12

Indeed. Now whizzing around the world, James, back to your homeland. Now that you've officially announced yourself as an Australian on stage, what's going back there?

Speaker 1: 19:22

Oh well, the Australian podcast ranker came out for January.

Speaker 3: 19:25

Oh, that's irrelevant. Now Move on.

Speaker 1: 19:28

Well, the interesting thing about the podcast ranker is that normally there's a number one of Hamish and Andy and they are pretty well always number one, apart from, I think, australian True Crime jumps up there, or maybe it's Case File. One of those, anyway, jumps up there, or maybe it's Casefile one of those, anyway. What is interesting is that for the first time there is a brand new number one, the Mel Robbins podcast. Now, the Mel Robbins podcast it's a SiriusXM podcast. It's represented in Australia by Southern Cross Austereo, one of the big radio companies, which is why it appears in the Australian podcast ranker.

Speaker 1: 20:04

But I thought it was interesting to see, you know, a foreign in inverted commas podcast being number one in the Australian podcast ranker. That show is doing incredibly well. Everybody still talks about Joe Rogan as being the number one show. By the looks of it, the Mel Robbins podcast is pretty well beating Joe Rogan quite consistently. Now, if you take a look at Spotify, if you take a look at Apple Podcasts, you will notice that number one more often than not is the Mel Robbins podcast. I have no idea who she is. I have no idea why it's all of a sudden a number one show, but it seems to be doing incredibly well.

Speaker 3: 20:42

What else is going on down there? There's a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 20:46

There's a little bit more in terms of ARN's iHeart, which they own the brand in Australia and it's their fifth birthday, so happy birthday to them. A very nice man called Corey looks after a lot of that. Anyway, they have, quote, celebrated their fifth birthday with a number of agreement extensions. There's how to celebrate re-signing Audioboom and Sony Music Entertainment for another couple of years. Never to be called that again please, yes, true crime in the UK.

Speaker 3: 21:20

Yes, we've got enough of that. What's going on? We've got enough crime here, well actually We've got enough crime here.

Speaker 1: 21:25

According to the Americans, this is kind of true crime all over the place, and I think this is quite an exciting thing. So there's a UK company called Chalk and Blade. There's an Australian company called Clockwork Films. They are working together with the US company iHeart producing a true crime show which will be released later on in the year called Crying Wolf. I heart producing a true crime show which will be released later on in the year called Crying Wolf. I think it's really exciting to see three different companies in three different continents working together on a big show, so I think that's a very good thing. Also, going on in true crime how do you fancy Sam getting on a boat and going on a cruise? A true crime cruise On the cruise will be a number of podcast stars, crime experts and crime-related activities, like a murder mystery game. That sounds fun, doesn't it no?

Speaker 4: 22:24

It sounds fun for about an hour and then after that you're like get me off.

Speaker 3: 22:27

Oh no, we're out in the sea.

Speaker 1: 22:30

It's going from Miami to the Bahamas next year. It's from Wondery. Wondery's Exhibit C True Crime Cruise is now available, and the mystery to me is who gave me COVID? So yes, gosh, not my thing. But if true crime is your thing and cruises are your thing, then my goodness, you'll be happy with Wondery Exhibit C's true crime cruise. More details on that at exhibitcruisecom.

Speaker 4: 23:01

No exhibitccruisecom.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Let's be clear and accurate.

Speaker 3: 23:06

We should ask Evo Terra, agent for Pod News, to go on that one. He'll love it. Yes.

Speaker 1: 23:14

Or Lauren Purcell, who always goes on Disney cruises, yes, so perhaps this could be something that she would do.

Speaker 3: 23:22

Who knows Now? We said at the top of the show that Joe Rogan has been dethroned. Who's he been dethroned by?

Speaker 1: 23:29

Well, if he's not being dethroned by the Mel Robbins podcast, which is happening more often than not. Also, there's another show out there called the Midas Touch podcast, which appears to have beaten Joe Rogan in a number of charts. So that's interesting seeing. I'm thinking that you know more and more now we're seeing the Joe Rogan still being a very popular podcast, of course, but just being pipped at the top by some of these other new shows coming up from behind. So, coming up from behind, so that's interesting to see, but the numbers are still relatively close. So I think this is the PodSites data here Joe Rogan experienced 50 million downloads per month, quite a substantial drop according to PodSites, down by 25%, whereas the Midas Touch podcast, up by 120%, yikes with 57 million downloads a month. And at number three, candace Again never heard of it 44 million downloads per month up 110%.

Speaker 3: 24:40

She's an ex-right-wing US presenter who got fired for her views on Palestine, so yes and she started a podcast. So there you go, Well there you go. I've got a reason for Joe Rogan falling down, James. Oh yeah, Adam Curry was on the show last week, so that was it.

Speaker 1: 25:02

That's it. Everybody went no, not Batman again, not that bad, again right.

Speaker 3: 25:07

Unsubscribe no did he say podcasting 2.0? God, I can't stand that stuff right. V for v, I'm off, I'm not doing it um.

Speaker 1: 25:17

While we're on, uh, adam curry. By the way, congratulations to adam and to dave um for launching godcaster uh, their brand new project. It's a tool which allows Christian podcasts hosted anywhere to benefit from live streaming, from tools and other podcasting 2.0 features. Funding tools I'm just reading my notes for Pod News and it says finding tools in there. And I was thinking finding tools, what on earth have I written here? Anyway, funding tools and other features as well. So Godcaster is the place to take a peek at that. It's just quite an interesting player, and PWA seems to be something which you know other people might want to take a peek at. Godcasterfm is where to go for that.

Speaker 3: 26:07

Well, I have already reached out to Adam and Dave to come on the show, so hopefully next week we might have them on.

Speaker 1: 26:12

Who knows? Well, there you go. It's going to be an action-packed show next week, because we've also got somebody on from Coleman Insights talking about how they test new podcast ideas. So, yes, it's going to be one where you need the chapters.

Speaker 3: 26:27

Now, james, moving on to people and jobs. There was a job that stood out that I found, so if I'm not here next, week.

Speaker 1: 26:36

Thanks, now wait a second. Wait a second Before we go on. Do I have to play a jingle for this? Yes, please, yes, first.

Speaker 2: 26:46

We're sorry, but now it's time for more news about spotify on the pod news weekly review.

Speaker 1: 26:52

Oh good, oh good, why have you brought them up?

Speaker 3: 26:56

sam, well, I I wasn't hunting for a job. I promise um, but I was looking at spotify's press releases and what they're up to and turns out they're looking for a VP for AI and one of the prerequisites, obviously, is that they want more DJ shows. That's what they're looking at. That was one of the examples of how they use AI. It was like no, no more DJ shows, please. No more, no more. But there is a job, if you want it, for Spotify's VP for.

Speaker 1: 27:24

AI. You will earn somewhere between 416 000 and 595 000 us dollars, um, and you get a. You get a whole uh 23 paid days off a year. Can't be in america, then, gosh. Who knows what's going on there. But yes, if you, if you want to apply for that, then it's on the Spotify website, although I'll probably link to it from podnewsnet slash jobs as well, it'll be in Sweden.

Speaker 3: 27:52

It'll be in Sweden.

Speaker 1: 27:53

It might be in Sweden. I mean, it does say actually no, it says the location's in New York or Boston.

Speaker 3: 28:01

Oh right, I was going to say because that salary is needed in Sweden for just buying a beer. I mean, it's just ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 28:06

Yes, my goodness, there's an expensive place. Awards and events. Looking forward to the AMBIS which, if you are a Podcast Academy member, you can now cast your vote for. Just log into the Podcast Academy website and it'll take you there. I think it's mostly US podcasts. I think we've called it the US Podcast Awards before now, but anyway, you're more than welcome to go and vote for lots of American podcasts.

Speaker 3: 28:37

I did look last night. I couldn't find any international podcasts, I agree.

Speaker 1: 28:43

So that show will be on Monday, March 31st in Chicago I will be there making sure that I don't go in and it's being hosted by comedian and podcaster Tig Notaro, who is very good. So there's a thing. And talking about academies, in the UK, the Radio Academy is seeking new trustees to join its board from February.

Speaker 3: 29:09

When are you joining James? Come on, they've got to have asked you.

Speaker 1: 29:11

I used to be a trustee of the Radio Academy. I'll have you know. I was a trustee for a couple of years Got the t-shirt.

Speaker 3: 29:18

okay, lovely yes been there.

Speaker 1: 29:20

Got the t-shirt. Don't need to be getting that particular t-shirt anymore. Got the t-shirt. Don't need to be getting that particular t-shirt, uh, anymore. Uh, one more thing just for you to um take a peek at, which is the wickers podcast pitch award 2025. If you are making documentaries so original and innovative documentaries, uh, in terms of podcasting, um, then you can pitch your show to the wickers um and um awards are. Well, you've got until February the 28th, so you've got another week to enter those. It's part of the legacy from Alan Wicker, who was a big UK broadcaster. So, yes, there's a thing too.

Speaker 2: 29:57

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 1: 30:02

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. I have a feeling that we're going to talk about cross-app comments, yay.

Speaker 3: 30:14

We are, but I don't think they're quite here yet. No, so I think we talked about Justin from Transistor actually supporting the social interact tag as a host and the first host to do it, which was amazing.

Speaker 1: 30:30

Yes. So essentially the way that Transistor works is that they have got a little script that every time you post a new show, a new episode, it posts something on Blue Sky on that social media platform and says, hey, so-and-so has just posted a new show. Isn't that brilliant. But any comments that you make to that post go back and appear on the Transistor podcast website. So I thought to myself well, that's interesting because that's relatively easy to implement, because Blue Sky has a little JSON field which you know anybody can get hold of, and so it shouldn't be too hard to code. And hey presto, it's not too hard to code because I've coded exactly the same thing, and so messages can appear on the Pod News website and all of that. So that's all fine, and that essentially means that all of the complicated stuff goes away in terms of having to run a full activity pub stack, having, indeed to run any sort of OAuth into Blue Sky. It's just super easy, super straightforward and away.

Speaker 1: 31:42

You go for a listener to leave a comment, as long as they're subscribed, you know, as long as they're registered on the Blue Sky platform.

Speaker 1: 31:52

So, theoretically at least, that makes it very easy to integrate comments into any particular app. As long as we don't mind the fact that the comments are all hosted on the Blue Sky platform, then that's easy. Now you could do the same sort of thing on Mastodon as well, and I think this is where it begins to get a little bit complicated, because you can do the same sort of thing. It gets a little bit more complicated because of the way that Mastodon works, but you can still do roughly the same sort of thing. You can integrate it properly in a podcast app if you want to, in the same way as you could with Blue Sky, or you can just have a link to somebody's app that they already have installed anyway. So I suppose we're back to the problem of well, do we go with Blue Sky for everybody? Do we go go for mastodon with everybody? Um, or should we have five different social media networks, and in which case this is where it all gets.

Speaker 3: 32:50

It all gets hugely complicated no, no, no, no, no, it's not. It's not a problem, right? So the first thing was um, copying you, and justin uh, with my true fans hat on, we implemented blue sky into the comments. So we read the social interact tag, we follow the comments and then we present those in the episode so that all works now and that's live and it works for pod news daily and it works for a show called the panel, which is justin's show. So that's that. That was easy.

Speaker 3: 33:21

Like you said, took us about an hour or so to get that done, so hopefully all the other apps will do it as well. We already have an ActivityPub stack built into TrueFan, so we will have this week later on the Mastodon comments coming in from a social interact tag. And the thing with the social interact tag that's quite nice is you can add more than one URL to that tag, so you can put one, two, three or four tags and you can put what's called priority one, which is your look here first, then go here, then go here. So again, it just needs a little tweak from our side, but we could support multiple social interact tags and pull comments in from multiple places like X, linkedin, whatever. That is not cross-app comments, that is cross-social comments, a word we've never probably used before, but that is basically one app going out to multiple social media endpoints and pulling in based around the RSS creator sorry, the RSS feed and the creator saying where they want comments to be posted.

Speaker 3: 34:25

Now cross app comments. The next bit is can I get comments that are posted in Podverse, podcast Guru, castomatic, fountain and then bring those into TrueFans and vice versa? That is still a little bit more tricky. Now. We've not applied a lot of work has done something, which is they use the Olby API in Fountain to go and use Fountain comments next to Olby comments that are posted from all the other apps. So they've actually got a quite nice integrated comments section where they're pulling in app comments from others like TrueFans and Podverseverse and mixing it with Fountain. We need to go and do the same for Podverse, podcast, guru, the old B1s, but we have a whole different challenge with Fountain and I have spoken to Oscar already and he's pointed me in the right direction. So maybe in a couple of weeks time we will be able to do cross app comments, but at the moment we're trying to focus on cross-social comments, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 35:32

Right, right, there you go. Yeah, no, it's, and you know. All I'm hearing now is that, in order to display comments, we now need to hit three different endpoints rather than one, which is not going to be a fantastic thing.

Speaker 3: 35:48

When you say that, I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, so can you explain that to me?

Speaker 1: 35:51

Well, so if I want to show comments for example, if the Pod News Daily has a social interact tag for Blue Sky and then another one for Mastodon, like you say, which I can very easily do then that means in order to show the comments as one, I need to go and get the comments from Blue Sky and I need to then go and get more comments from Mastodon and munge them together in some way so that I can actually show them. If we're then adding, you know, fountain stuff in there and adding more things in there, then all of a sudden we seem to be hitting a number of different endpoints just to display comments, which is kind of you know. I mean, that's fine if we're all up for that.

Speaker 3: 36:40

I think you need to separate the two. I think where they are on social media is the choice of the podcaster, right, and in your case, podcasting news daily has chosen to put them on blue sky. That's your social interact tag. If you had a second one, then that's your choice. To add that level of extra complexity? You don't have to. You can stick with one place, the. That challenge is not hard and that will be done pretty quickly. Of aggregating comments from social media end points, that's not a big problem. There's APIs out there. The problem is the cross-app comments getting comments from Fountain and TrueFans and Podverse to mix together, and that's the bigger challenge. And so it's always been something that's been parked by all of us because it's like, oh, that is so difficult to do. I don't know how we're going to do it, and I thank Justin for doing what he did, and I hope other hosts now follow suit and do it as well, because it won't work unless self-hosting people like yourself, james, put it in, or hosts give it as an option to their users.

Speaker 1: 37:42

It needs to be big hosts, like you know, transistor and others. And, yes, I mean, you know the blue sky approach is pretty easy and simple and the APIs are out there, the code, you know, bases out there for you to be able to do all of this. So hopefully it's a relatively easy and simple thing. I think it just does get a little bit more complicated. If you know, if we're expecting podcast apps to have to deal with, well, let's, we need to have the code to pull from Mastodon and the code to pull from Blue Sky and the code to pull from Fountain and the code to pull from, you know, x, y and Z. Then all of a sudden it gets complicated again and I suppose that's what it would be nice to try and avoid. You know, for it to be as complicated as that.

Speaker 1: 38:33

The benefit of being able just to pull in blue sky comments is that that's something that you can do on the client side, because it's one JSON call and it's very easy to write a piece of JavaScript to just pull that in, you know, on the fly, which is the way that I'm doing it, so that the rest of the page that you see is beautifully cached and has been cached for a long, long time. But just that little bit in my case goes through a proxy on my server because I don't want Blue Sky to have all of the IP addresses of my users. But that's certainly you know, but that's certainly a doable thing. I think once you start having to do that for multiple services and then have JavaScript to try and fathom out how to bring them all in, that all of a sudden gets a little bit complicated again.

Speaker 3: 39:21

Yeah, well, you'll be glad to know. I've taken on that challenge. So we will have, as I said, the Mastodon comments coming in with the Blue Sky comments to the same page, if they exist, along with native comments within the app. So you won't be able to. You'll see them all in the same comment section and they'll be chronologically ordered.

Speaker 1: 39:45

But by making it three times more complicated, we are making it 30 times less likely for other podcast apps to implement it. That's the concern that I've got, and I know that you know. Truefans is very good and very quick at implementing this kind of stuff Antenapod, for example. How long are they going to be playing around getting their code ready to incorporate something which is three times more complicated than it frankly needs to be?

Speaker 3: 40:17

Sure, so if I just said to you how long did it take you to put the blue sky in again, you said how long.

Speaker 1: 40:23

Well, yes, it was an hour or so.

Speaker 3: 40:26

No, excuse then for any of the other apps to not do it. Right? That's an hour's work, right? Let's be clear on that. If they want to then go further and want to differentiate between themselves and other apps, then crack on or not. You know you can't say let's not do it because someone might not be able to keep up. I'm sorry. We've got to that point where everyone keeps saying they want cross app comments and I think now we've got a chink of light that might lead us to that. I think it's worth trying to get done.

Speaker 1: 40:57

Yes, and to play devil's advocate, podcasters have been saying, yes, we want cross app comments. I'm not hearing any podcast apps saying that they want cross app comments and in fact, cross-app comments. Surely you know? One would argue. The benefit of you using Fountain is that you get that whole social experience. What Fountain doesn't necessarily want to do is to give away all of that social goodness to other podcast apps as well. I used to think that way.

Speaker 3: 41:28

No, james, I used to think that way and I don't think comments are of high value in terms of what's going to differentiate us right. I used to think, oh my god, why would I want to send dates to another app? It's my data, I'm going to keep it in the club. You know all of that sort of thinking. Comments don't actually. They're great for the podcast and they're great for interactivity, but they're not going to be the thing that says, oh, as an advertiser, you know what I must, I must go on that platform because the comments are amazing. That's not going to be. I think we've got a bigger problem with comments, by the way, coming down the track, which I think we're going to get spam in them, and I think we're going to get um well, that that's number one is spam.

Speaker 1: 42:07

And the other thing, of course, is the new UK social something law, whatever that one's called, which essentially I mean, who would make you know? Does that make Blue Sky responsible for that law? Does that make the podcaster responsible? Does it make it the podcast app responsible? And then you'll have you know, have stupid governments like Australia copying the UK because it was an idea that the UK came up with. So therefore we'll do it. Yes, it's going to be interesting to see all of that stuff, too Good to see the colony still following along, good chat.

Speaker 1: 42:43

Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 42:45

The other thing we are doing is we're reversing it. So today we will launch the capability for the TrueFans user to verify their BlueSky account, and then what they can do is write a comment in TrueFans and we will publish it to the social interact tag from TrueFans, so you'll be able to take comments out of TrueFans into your social interact tag.

Speaker 1: 43:07

Yeah, which is nice, which is a good thing.

Speaker 3: 43:09

Now we were talking of Fountain. Fountain's been busy on some other things. One of the things they've been working on is something called LN Address and LN URLP. Yeah, you can fast forward if you're not interested in this, but it is very important. It's the ability for micropayments to be sent to podcasters using the Strike wallet and using the Nosta platform. Again, it's still very early days. I don't have a lot of details, but I was listening to the podcasting 2.0 show last week and Adam and Dave were talking about how Fountain have got examples of it, and so we actually have tested it. We actually have tested it. So the podcasting 2.0 podcast itself is configured to use the new LNURLP and LN address. So if you send sats to that podcast and Adam gets them, then it works, and if you send sats to Adam and Dave and they don't get them, I'm afraid you need to go back and recode.

Speaker 1: 44:08

I'm afraid you need to go back and recode. Well, you can also test that by sending sats to the Pod News Daily podcast, which also has an LN address in there. So yes, so that's a good thing.

Speaker 1: 44:22

And by the way so the difference between where we've been in the past, which is having to quote node addresses and all sorts of complicated things, and where we are now, where you just type in something that looks a bit like an email address, is it's kind of the difference between the internet before, domain names. So we were typing in the equivalent of an IP address, you know 192.168.0.1. And now we're just typing in a DNS, you know a domain name, so examplecom, so easy and simple, and that's where we should be going. So hurrah for that NOSTA. So they're supporting Nostr payments, obviously, but they're also supporting Nostr live streams. What is a Nostr live stream?

Speaker 3: 45:17

So I think what Oscar and the team over there at Fountain Dunn have done is very cool. What they've done is if you've got a show and you want to broadcast it live on Nostr a bit like a YouTube live then you can do. And now if you want to watch those shows in Fountain, you can do that as well. So you might want to watch the show Rabbit Hole Recap or the Bitcoin podcast and watch it directly in Fountain and then give them some sats, or you might be in Nostra and giving those shows sats a bit like super chats, I guess in YouTube equivalent. You can do that and you'll get a stream of chat going on as well at the same time. So I think what Fountain have done is basically replicated the YouTube live function with super chats and chats, but they've done it with with the Nosta platform and I think it looks really cool.

Speaker 1: 46:12

So so technically um, is it just a a normal stream on a normal streaming platform.

Speaker 3: 46:19

It's a normal stream on a Nosta platform.

Speaker 1: 46:23

On a Nosta platform. Okay, yeah, so you have to have a Nosta. Really, who's paying the bandwidth then?

Speaker 3: 46:29

Uh, I assume it will be whoever is setting it up on the Nostra platform. So there must be a payment to broadcast live on Nostra. I don't know, I don't use Nostra.

Speaker 1: 46:39

Yeah, yeah, no.

Speaker 3: 46:46

I'm just curious as to does it use the Nostra you know system to?

Speaker 3: 46:48

Well, I think it's something like TuneStar, you know, when you look at what they've done in Nashville in the past with Ainsley Costello and Phantom Power Media when they broadcast those shows live, they've done that through the Nostra, they've done it through the live item tag, but they've fundamentally been using TuneStar, which is a Nostra live platform.

Speaker 3: 47:07

Right, and I think that's what they probably use on Nostr live platform and I think that's what they probably use on Nostr to create those live streams. But I think what Fountain has done is created a way for you to pull those in and then be able to watch the video of those live streams within Fountain. So, again, you don't have to go to a Nostr relay, and I think that's really nice. I mean, look, you know, we've said it before Nostr sorry, fountain and TrueFounds are going slightly different directions. We might be podcasting apps, but we have slightly different directions in where we're going with live. But, yeah, I think it's very cool what Fountain have done and you should try it out. It's in beta, though, still, so I don't know if you can get a hold of it if you're not on the beta program.

Speaker 1: 47:49

Yeah, very cool. Yes, so it's. There is a thing just sort of taking a look. There is a thing called NIP53, which is part of the way that NOSTA works. It's a live activity thing and it does look as if you are pointing people towards a stream. You know, just a fairly typical normal stream available on the internet, but you then send, you know, a message, a bit like a pod ping, via the Nosta platform, to basically say, yep, this is the activity that we're doing, we're doing a live activity and here we go, but the stream here looks to be just a normal m3, you know, m3 u8, um playlist, um, which kind of makes a bunch of sense. So, um, yeah, very smart, uh, very nice.

Speaker 3: 48:39

Yeah, I mean, I want to do it slightly different. I want to do it with the lit tag and I want to use xmpp um and go down that road with super chats. But you know, we'll see when we get there.

Speaker 1: 48:48

Yes, best of luck with XMPP, your brother, I'm calling him.

Speaker 3: 48:53

I'm calling him Mr Cridland.

Speaker 1: 48:55

Yes, now Spotify is doing something called Go To An Artist's Concert, so they've got some sort of concert button that they're adding to their um app apparently. Uh, which is um, which is a thing. If you've got the data, then why not, I suppose.

Speaker 3: 49:17

Yeah, I think they've been promoting events and allowing you to click on a link to go to Ticketmaster in the past. I think this may be a step where they start to do it themselves, and I think we've talked about it on this show. How long before you buy virtual tickets and watch live online? I mean, it seems the most natural extension of what Spotify will do.

Speaker 1: 49:39

Yeah, yeah, no interesting.

Speaker 3: 49:42

Now, related to that, there was a report out that, although Spotify is very profitable and doing very well, that their ad revenue growth slowed from 15% in the first half of the year to 6.4%. I don't know if you saw this report, james.

Speaker 1: 49:58

Yes, that's interesting. Now this is a report in the Information, which is a paid for website which costs $749 in order for you to sign up to $749,. I'll repeat that again. So therefore I can't read it, and so I'm not quite sure what the story says, other than apparently it has managed to get some ad revenue data out of Spotify's information. But yeah, according to this story, advertisers have complained that their ads are no longer reaching enough of Spotify's audience and that some advertisers aren't satisfied with the results of the advertising, and Spotify isn't doing very much to improve it, according to the information. But I'm not going to spend 700 and X US dollars in order to actually get that whole report.

Speaker 3: 51:01

But didn't we talk about Spotify putting in non-skippable ads into Joe Rogan? And I talked last week about having three ads played before I could watch the video last week.

Speaker 1: 51:12

Now we did and um on that. Um, uh, my contact at Spotify contacted me and said that should not be happening. Um, well, it was. I know it was.

Speaker 1: 51:24

Um but, uh, she said, no, that shouldn't be happening. Please tell us where that was happening so that our team can actually get on the case. So I've done that. There was a report last week in a few of the Android trades that basically said that Spotify was giving people advertising even if they were a Spotify premium user. So it does sound as if there was a wider bug that may have been at play here.

Speaker 1: 51:54

I've not heard back from my contact at Spotify, so I can't tell you for sure which way it's all gone, but yeah, it was an interesting one, and that took a few people by surprise. What was, though, interesting is all of the wording that Spotify has released. All talk about uninterrupted videos. Ie, no mid-roll showed an ad that interrupts a video. I am still, um, and and I've had a few people contact me saying this is really sneaky of Spotify because they late, they led us to believe that everything would be ad free if you were a Spotify premium user, but actually what, um, uh, what you're actually getting here't that, but they've never actually said that in the first place. So, yeah, I think it's just sort of kicked off. A few comments, and I'm just busy waiting for Spotify to come back and confirm, or you know, or whatever, what's actually going on there.

Speaker 3: 53:06

It's fake news, move on.

Speaker 1: 53:09

Maybe that's it. That's all it is. Yes, it's fake news, move on.

Speaker 3: 53:11

Maybe that's it. That's all it is. Yes, nothing to see here Moving along. Now Podpage we like Podpage. They put out a little post that I picked up on. It says I'm starting a big design sprint to add a lot of customisation and template options to Podpage.

Speaker 3: 53:27

To get inspiration, I'd like to know what your favourite podcast or website is besides your own. It's interesting because I think creator portals, or fandoms as I'm calling them, are going to be fairly big in 2025. And I think Podpage is doing a great job of allowing that customisation. I think Buzzsprout's done a great job with the pages that they offer us weeklypodnewsnet, and I think many of the other podcast hosts have got them. I probably shouldn't do this as a CEO of True Fans, but a great idea I'd like to give out to the hosts is why don't they create an aggregated page of all of their best websites so that when you land, you can see other websites right? So, for example, we might promote weeklypodnewsnet, but they must have bigger and nicer and better or different websites. Why don't they create a landing page that is a aggregated page of here's the best of our web pages for these podcasts? Have a look and go and discover new stuff.

Speaker 1: 54:31

That would be cool. Yes, I am always surprised at most of the podcast hosts who don't seem to promote any of the shows on their podcast hosts. And you're there thinking, well, why would you not? You know, occasionally I will forward through an email that I've had, launching a brand new big show on, you know, Transistor or Captivate or whoever it might be, and just saying, oh, by the way, just for you to know. And I'm always surprised at how few of them actually will go. Oh, look, you know, so-and-so is hosting with us. So yeah, definitely there's something there, I think.

Speaker 3: 55:08

Especially as Transistor added comments, the Blue Sky comments, you know, again, they've got web pages. Promote them, Do something with them. No, indeed. Moving on then, James, this was an interesting company and I think you might know the answers to my question, so I'm going to ask you. Yeah, or Dillick, I think, is the name of the company, is an audio processing tool for podcasts that uses the broadcast standard, which I've never heard of, called Orban Optimode tool. I thought it was a drug that I was supposed to take. I have no idea Now. I've never heard of it, but I did look it up and it looks pretty sexy. It allows you to do audio broadcasting over FM, DAB plus and HD radio, but the things that I thought you know. It had some nice features within that, but one of those was you can remotely control HTML5 web browsers as well, and I'm like what is this thing? I have never heard of it, but I thought I know a man who does. So come on, James, tell me what it is.

Speaker 1: 56:03

Yes, so it's an OptiMod, not an OptiMode. It's an OptiMod, not an OptiMode. It's an OptiMod and my voice used to go through one of those for a number of years until they got rid of it and they changed it into an InnoVonix, which does much the same sort of thing. But essentially what it is is it smooths out your levels, your audio levels, so that everything doesn't sound too loud or too quiet. Everything sounds just right.

Speaker 1: 56:28

Orphonic is the tool that a lot of podcasters use. If you're using Magic Mastering on Buzzsprout our sponsor then you're using Orphonic. To be honest, behind the scenes it does a very good job of smoothing out the audio levels. Optimod is significantly better. It deals with an awful lot of very clever stuff to do with just making audio clearer and easier to understand. And it was really mentioned because I ran a slightly tongue-in-cheek feature this week called Having a Bad DAI, and it was some pretty awful DAI that had been produced, you know, with an ad, half the volume of the surrounding content and all of that kind of stuff. So that was quite interesting. But essentially, what this tool, audilic, allows you to do is it allows you to use Optimod, optimod's technology and Optimod's algorithms on any piece of uploaded audio so you can get your podcast sounding just as good as a punchy sounding FM station.

Speaker 3: 57:45

So yeah, would you not have this included in things like Rodecasters or Shure mics or stuff as a natural thing?

Speaker 1: 57:52

Yeah, and to a degree, quite a lot of that is. So the microphone I'm talking to you on today, which is the Shure MV88+, this has got limiting in it, it's got compression built in, it's got EQ built in and this is why I'm sounding you know, whenever I use this mic slightly more butch than when I use the mic that I have at home uses quite a lot of additional work. It was built by somebody that really understood how to process audio, especially how to process audio for it to sound as good as possible on AM or on FM, which have their own things as well. So basically, yes, things like this exist, but nowhere near as good as the OptiMod algorithm. So that's what you're essentially getting you know with this Audillic tool.

Speaker 3: 59:01

Now, moving on, there was a clickbait podcast that came out this week from In and Around Podcasting, which is Mark Asquith and Danny Brown, friends of the show, who had Clearweight Brown as well, who's one of our power supporters and they were just simply saying is podcasting 2.0 a failure? Did you hear the show, james?

Speaker 1: 59:19

I did hear the show, yes, and I thought it was a very good show. I mean the whole, the whole is podcasting 2.0. A failure thing is a bit of a bit of, you know, clickbaity nonsense. I don't think anybody was necessarily saying that, but, yes, it was a very interesting and quite nuanced conversation, which you know, which is about all of that. I mean, you know, I said that it was a bit clickbait and Mark Asquith says yes, absolutely, but it got some ideas. He's very good at doing that, but it got some eyes on that. But what I said to Mark was that Podcasting 2.0 is a collection of ideas. It's not one thing, it's a collection of ideas.

Speaker 1: 1:00:11

Some of those ideas are total failures, like the images tag, completely unusable. It's a duplicate of a different tag that already exists. It's a total waste of time and effort. Virtually nobody's using it. We should get rid of it, but seemingly we don't have the balls to get rid of it to exist, which is bad. But secondly, most podcast hosts either don't support it or, worse, do support it but mess it up, which is even worse. So, actually, the podcast GUID. Maybe I should agree with surprise. Maybe I should agree with Dave Weiner when he pointed at the podcast GUID and he said no, no, no, just use the RSS feed URL.

Speaker 1: 1:01:16

Yes, there are problems with using the RSS feed URL as well, actually, but that is significantly better, in my humble opinion, than the podcast GUID, as somebody that has a database of shows using the podcast, guid has just been a bit of a nuisance, and I'm busy trying to work out whether or not I should just get rid of it, you know entirely.

Speaker 3: 1:01:39

No, no, no, no. Don't get rid of it Because, look, we need it for things like remote items and things like that and publish feeds. No, please, don't get rid of it. Just hosts, get on with it.

Speaker 1: 1:01:51

Bloody hell, you haven't got much else to do. Well, we only need it because we've gone down the route of only saying that the podcast GUID is the thing, rather than linking to RSS feed addresses. So you know, I would just point that out, but anyway also finally look.

Speaker 1: 1:02:07

So you know, maybe I would just point that out, but anyway, but also finally look. You know, some of the ideas in the collection of ideas that we call Podcasting 2.0 are brilliant ideas, ideas that even Apple has taken up, like the podcast transcription tag, for example, the pod roll awful name, but a great, but a great idea that anybody can do. Only one person's done it well, but a great idea that anybody can do.

Speaker 3: 1:02:28

Only one person's done it.

Speaker 1: 1:02:33

Well, I'll give you a clue. I've done it too. Okay, two of us have done it.

Speaker 3: 1:02:38

Well done to the pair of us.

Speaker 1: 1:02:46

But the pod role should be a really good idea that everybody can do. But you know, but there we are. So you've got things which are total failures, things which are not very good, things that are brilliant. So saying is podcasting 2.0 a failure is overly reductive, because actually there isn't one thing called podcasting 2.0. There's lots of different things and some of it has been a tremendous success and some of it has not been.

Speaker 1: 1:03:11

In my humble opinion, this is what we need for Podcasting 2.0 to move on. We need a feature champion, one person to promote each feature and responsible for that feature's take up Um. So, instead of um, uh, you know, buzzsprout or whoever it is, um, uh, occasionally talking to Dave Jones and saying what are the new features that we should be supporting? And uh, and Dave, you know, takes time out of his um day to um, go through a couple of these new features with him and blah, blah, blah. It should be, you know, if there are 30 features out there, then 30 different people contacting Buzzsprout, contacting Libsyn, contacting whoever it might be, and saying, look, this is this feature, it's really cool. When can you support it?

Speaker 1: 1:04:01

And really pushing that particular feature and everyone knows that if it's the podcast location tag, you have to talk to James, because James understands how the thing works. If it's the pod role tag, you have to talk to, you know, daniel, because Daniel understands how it works. That's where I think we should go, and I think we shouldn't be waiting for somebody to lead the podcasting 2.0 movement, because, I mean, that's kind of Dave and Adam, but also they've got their own things to do as well. So, yeah, so that's my plan.

Speaker 3: 1:04:35

Okay, I don't disagree with you on most of what you said. I think 80, 90% of what you said I agree with, I think, the lag between the idea, which is what you said they are a bunch of ideas and the adoption by hosts and apps, and then the user adoption. I think the lag time between some of the tags is small and some of the tags is long. So where they're obvious, like chapters and transcripts, it's pretty easy to understand and again don't understand when hosts don't support it or apps don't support it. That's just me.

Speaker 1: 1:05:11

Well, it's when it's obvious and also when it's easy to implement.

Speaker 3: 1:05:13

I think when it's hard, some of the harder tags, I think, okay, I get it. You know, I've heard Kevin Finn talk on Buzzcast about how adding an extra tag adds extra weight to the RSS feed times. The number of people who pull that feed adds a significant cost. So they take a strong look at whether that tag is worth doing and then they make a decision and so I get the business point uh as well. Um, but what I, what I do think is, and I say, and the lack of leadership is is where I think we have a problem.

Speaker 3: 1:05:45

Now, look, look, adam and Dave champion podcasting 2.0. I listen to that show religiously on a Friday night, right, and I love what they do, but Adam has made it absolutely 100% crystal clear. He will not be leading the charge from the front by being the keynote speaker, and unfortunately, I think that's. I wish he would change his opinion, because you standing up, james, is amazing, right, and I've seen your keynote speeches and they're great and um, that's great, but you never invented podcasting. No, you don't have the gravitas of adam curry. Adam can stand there and wandry will listen to him in awe and they will then go. What is this new thing you've invented adam podcasting. To tell me more, adam. If James stands up and says let me tell you about podcasting, I go. Oh well, you know, whatever, I think Adam doesn't appreciate what he is and who he is in terms of the gravitas he would bring to the market if he would take that role on. But he won't. And it's four times a year. You know you're talking about the London podcast show, podcast movement, twice, maybe in one other show, you know, and that's where I think it is, and I think it's that leadership element of being the symbol bearer of podcasting 2.0 and carrying that gravitas with it that Adam can bring. Now he won't change his mind, I think. But that's where I think we lack. I also think we're going to talk in a minute about where we are with the apps.

Speaker 3: 1:07:11

Now. Many, many months ago, pod2 came up with an idea with me for a small fund right, it was, I think, russell offering 5% of his revenue. Now he's a small host, so that's very small. And then when you divvy it up between all the little apps, I mean it's nothing of nothing but it's a gesture and it's a very appreciated gesture. I've tried to say that. You know, again, in a leadership format, the PSP, which, again, I don't know what it's doing, where it is, who's running it, what's going on. But again, you know, if, if each one of these big hosts put in I don't know a thousand pounds each, they could fund an evangelist right, but they won't do that. They could put money aside to help the apps who are promoting podcasting 2.0 while the market adoption is slow, but they're putting in the technology at the time to support them until they get to the point where they get external funding, in which case they don't get supported by an angel fund.

Speaker 3: 1:08:11

These are ideas that I think we should be talking about because, unfortunately this week, martin from Podfriend has said he's hiatusing the Podfriend. He can't afford to keep the servers going. So there's one app who did a lot of work that's going to go away for a while. It may be going away forever. Have you heard from Podverse James? I haven't. I don't know what Mitch is doing. I hope he's well. I hope he's squirreling away on an amazing new version that we don't know about, but I haven't heard a thing from him.

Speaker 3: 1:08:43

Castamatic and is doing I don't know what customatic is doing. I think they're adding support for strike, but I don't hear from them. Um, you had this week castro talking about what they did this year. Pocket pc hasn't announced anything recently. Um, I just feel that all these apps that are supporting the podcasting 2.0 tags and implementing them and spending time trying to educate their users and the market need help, and that help would come from the bigger hosts who make significant money. Right, it's not going to happen. None of this will happen. By the way, james Adam won't lead the charge and the hosts and PSP won't take on the role of supporting the apps, and I think my biggest fear is that some of these apps will go away in 2025 because they can't survive and we will just be left with Spotify and YouTube.

Speaker 1: 1:09:31

Yeah, I would, I would agree with a lot of that. So, um, yeah. So the question, of course, is what happens next, and, um, it'd be good to, um, be good to get some ideas. I uh, you know, I'm guessing.

Speaker 3: 1:09:44

Moving on. Then, james Apple came out with an announcement yesterday and I thought you must know, because you know you've got friends in Apple. Why are they for eight hours, closing down Apple Podcasts Connect? What are they launching? What's their one feature of the year that's coming?

Speaker 1: 1:09:59

out, and this always happens Every single time that Apple needs to do database maintenance and turn their stuff off for a little bit. Everybody rushes around and goes oh I wonder what the new feature is. And every single time, there is no new feature and it's just a nice man called Ted with a beard who has to get up early that morning because he's got his annual database management stuff that he has to get done and everything else. Everybody does this, everybody does this. So, yeah, so if you don't know, yes, apple Podcasts Connect, which is just the back end for Apple Podcasts, none of the you know, nothing will be impacted, uh, other than you going in and having a look at your analytics and stuff like that. Um, won't work. Um, the morning of March the 1st, if you are in, um, uh, la, um, and that's basically. That's basically that. Um, I uh would not think that there is any new app uh coming, because there never is, so we probably don't need to particularly worry about that.

Speaker 3: 1:11:13

Yeah, 164,000 people on Apple and I'm still waiting for one new feature.

Speaker 1: 1:11:18

Anyway, Good Lord, they've just launched a new phone this week. I mean, you know.

Speaker 3: 1:11:24

Oh, oh, come on, I mean seriously. The designers for the iPhone could be Stevie Wonder. What are you producing? It's the same size, the same look, the same thing. What's new about it. We're taking one of the cameras off and um, it's the one that's much, much cheaper than you know than everything else.

Speaker 1: 1:11:50

And uh, yeah, and they've updated it and it's um, you know it's. It's finally got rid of the, the ridiculous home button that was still on there, so you've got face id now on on even those phones, um, and they seem to have done I'm gonna prove it failed.

Speaker 3: 1:12:04

Right. I'm gonna test you. James, are you buying the 16E for your daughter to replace any Android phone? Because it's cheap, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:12:11

Well, it's not that cheap.

Speaker 3: 1:12:13

No, exactly that's the thing. There you go, $800.

Speaker 1: 1:12:17

But it's Apple. No, it's not $800.

Speaker 3: 1:12:21

It's less than that no, no, no, they failed.

Speaker 1: 1:12:31

They got it in and out at $800. Well, yeah, oh well, yeah, I mean it is a significantly cheaper phone than any other phone that Apple have made. So from that point of view, I mean, yes, I wouldn't be buying my daughter it, but then my daughter uses Android and has always used Android, and thank heavens for that, given that she managed to drop her phone last week and had to go out and buy a new one. But the new one was $227, which is Australian dollars, which means that it was about 120 quid. It was not an expensive phone, but yeah, I don't know. Anyway, Right.

Speaker 3: 1:13:04

One last thing with Apple. They're on a purge.

Speaker 1: 1:13:17

They're on a purge in Europe because of the Digital Services Act that's coming into effect. They've got rid of 135,000 apps from the EU app stores. Regulation has a requirement that app developers must provide their trader status. So are you a sole trader? Are you a company? Are you just one person? And if you haven't done that, and if you haven't done that, then your stuff gets taken down because it's not legal to have there anymore. So now you can ask whether or not this is malicious compliance by Apple, apple making unpopular changes and blaming it on the EU, but it does seem to be. You know much of what the EU wants and similarly, apple did say last year that every podcast has to have a website attached to it in the RSS feed and that website has to have corporate information on it, because otherwise Apple will, you know, I mean potentially take shows out in the future. I can't see them necessarily doing that, but at some point they might have to because, again, of the EU's rules.

Speaker 3: 1:14:43

So, yeah, blame the EU. Yes, everyone else is. Everyone seems to be doing that, mr Trump, well, jd Vance, yes. Anyway, the last thing on this. I mean I think this if I can afford it, the next phone I'd love is the Huawei tri-foldable phone. I think it looks really cool and they've just announced the price €3,499 or $3,662. But they've launched in five new countries now. None of those in Europe yet, but it's interesting to see that they're moving into those markets first, rather than the Western.

Speaker 1: 1:15:20

European markets? Yes, and those markets are Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. They're not going to get rich necessarily. Well, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, they're not going to get rich necessarily.

Speaker 1: 1:15:31

Well, the UAE, they might, oh well, I mean the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Yes, perhaps, but yes, that's about as far as we will go. Yes, now interesting moves from Huawei. And of course, that $3,662 US dollar price is not what you would pay in the US anyway, because doubtless there will be quite substantial tariffs on that price as well.

Speaker 3: 1:16:00

It's okay, you can get the iPhone 17. It's just going to be a single screen and slightly thinner, with the same camera and battery.

Speaker 1: 1:16:06

Brilliant. That's what you need and a slightly different looking back to it, by what I understand.

Speaker 3: 1:16:12

I would like rose petal gold please.

Speaker 2: 1:16:14

Boostergram, boostergram, boostergram. Super comments, zaps, fan mail, fan mail, super chats and email. Our favourite time of the week, it's the Pod News Weekly Review Inbox.

Speaker 1: 1:16:27

Inbox week. It's the pod news, weekly review inbox. So many different ways to get in touch with us. Fan mail I love that jingle. It's good fan mail by using the link in our show notes, super comments on true fans, boosts everywhere else, or email, and any money that we get is shared as well. Um, no fan mail this week, but, um, a couple of boosts that we'll read out anyway, both from Neil Velio. Thank you, neil Ree. The boy from space, neil says you may need to go back to last week's episode to understand what any of this is about.

Speaker 1: 1:17:01

I think I must have watched it in 1984 on a tape in school. Oh, do you remember when there used to be? There used to be a trolley with a big television on it and a VHS video recorder and they used to move that trolley between classroom and classroom and you always knew that you were in for a good day when you saw the teacher pushing it into your classroom. Lights down, go to sleep in the back. Brilliant, yeah, that was it. My favourite was occasionally in Italian class. I think they would bring it in and we would watch Italian news, and I found that fascinating. Anyway, that was Mussolini.

Speaker 1: 1:17:41

Neil, how dare you? Neil Velio says they used to show an episode to us as an end of term treat Education establishment endorsed trauma. Awesome, Right. Well, there we are. He also says something about a story that I'm not going to read out because I know Malay bull laws, so let's move on. And he also loved the Spotify warning jiggle. Yes, we love the Spotify warning jiggle too. Please do send us messages however you like. That would be very kind of you, and thank you for the Super 16 subscribers that we have. Power supporters, who are Cameron Moll, Marshall Brown, Matt Medeiros, Mike Hamilton, Dave Jackson, Rachel Corbett, Si Jobling, David Marzell, Jim James Rocky, Thomas, Neil Velio, Ms Eileen Smith, Claire Waite-Brown, John McDermott, James Burt and the late bloomer actor For your kind support. Weeklypodnewsnet is how you can become number 17 in there. We would love that. That would be super excellent. I had a lovely chat with Si Jobling this week, by the way, Did you Well there?

Speaker 1: 1:18:55

we are. What are you planning with him?

Speaker 3: 1:18:58

Well, no, si is very useful at giving me feedback on True Fans, and I love it, and we were talking about something I'll talk about in a minute. But also he showed me where that pub is. We're invited anytime to his local pub. But he also talked about something that we'd launched, which was support and monthly payments equivalent to Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee or again similar to what Buzzsprout has here, and he was going should I go and do it there with Sats? I was going, no, no, no, stay where we are, it's fine. You don't need to use that feature, you're okay. Stay on Buzzsprout, please, it's fine. So, yes, so he's lovely to talk to and he's got a plush new him.

Speaker 1: 1:19:45

Well, there you go. What else has happened for you this week?

Speaker 3: 1:19:48

We talked about TrueFans implementing Blue Sky support for comments, and we'll extend that, so that's really cool. We also automated YouTube playlists. As I said, we took the leaf out of PodPage and so we now allow you to copy and paste your playlist from YouTube, put it into a field in your admin dashboard and we will automatically sync the video into the alternative enclosure for you so that, when you're in TrueFans as a listener, you can switch between the audio and video. We've done that for you, James. You can take it out if you don't like us. We've done it on PodNews Daily as a test, um, and it worked perfectly. So, um, you can, if you so wish, James, remove your video support in your alternative enclosure and have YouTube pay for it all instead, if you want.

Speaker 1: 1:20:38

Well, that's always a good thing.

Speaker 3: 1:20:40

Uh, so very nice. And then last week we added private notes. I took on board your comment. It now says private underneath, so that that's fine. Um, and very similar to um pod page as well. We are now adding customization. So reordering of tabs is the first one, but next week you will see um domain names. You'll be able to use your own domain name with true fans pages oh, fancy yeah fancy um and finally, yes, we are upgrading to Nextjs and React.

Speaker 3: 1:21:12

I've been warned and we lead off on the native apps after that. So yes, it's all kicking off. That will be exciting.

Speaker 1: 1:21:20

Also in the show notes it says that you are going to be adding WebSub.

Speaker 3: 1:21:24

Yes, we've got it working on our test server already. Podping's great and there was a new version of Podping that came out and we looked in it and there wasn't much. But again it's more back-end stuff rather than stuff we could utilize. But Pocket PC did this many months ago.

Speaker 1: 1:21:44

You mean Pocket Cast?

Speaker 3: 1:21:45

Pocket Casting sorry, Pocket Cast did this many months ago. Ellie Rubenstein and I was like, well, do we need to support WebSub, which was the old PubSub hubber, and again for things like Megaphone and for Spreaker and for those that don't support Podping, having WebSub is a good idea.

Speaker 1: 1:22:03

So yes, Now Castro also said that they are supporting WebSub as well, and it's been very useful to them.

Speaker 3: 1:22:11

So Podping utter waste of time implementation and the adoption seems to be a lag. But you know most of the podcasting to that oh, app hosts are doing it. You know bus brow um, the blueberry transistor, etc. Etc. It's just some of the old 1.0 podcast hosts that aren't moving.

Speaker 1: 1:22:39

But I mean web sub is a standard which is out there which lots of people use. Now there are people that promote Podping and say that WebSub is totally unsuitable for podcast apps and it's impossible to implement, but yet I'm seeing more and more people you know, castro true fans support WebSub. So that's clearly not the case. So what's the problem? Why would people be saying that WebSub is not, you know, is not fit for purpose?

Speaker 3: 1:23:11

It's not that it's not fit, it's just we wish we didn't have to do it. It's a case of the hosts aren't moving the ones that have not implemented PodPing. So we have to go back and find a way of making sure we update them properly. And if you can't beat them, you have to go back and join them right. So in this case, websub's the way we're going to do it, because otherwise we're just going to have a lag between some of the podcast hosts updating to our apps, and that's not a good thing. So, yeah, we need to go back and support WebSub. I don't think WebSub was originally, if I'm right, when it was PubSub, hubbub and originally Comet, if I remember rightly in my history of updates, was mainly for RSS feeds and blogs.

Speaker 1: 1:23:58

It wasn't pre-designed for podcasting like Podping was. Well, no, but I mean, it's the same thing under the hood. The thing that Podping does that WebSub doesn't is. We're doing a live show. Tune in now. But accepting that, I'm still sort of struggling a little bit with why WebSub isn't a perfectly adequate solution for signalling. Look, this person has updated their show.

Speaker 3: 1:24:27

I can't give you a categorical answer, James. I wish I knew I'm going to support both, because then I've covered both bases.

Speaker 1: 1:24:35

Oh, yeah, yeah no, I mean, it makes perfect sense and I think supporting both you know, I was just aware that all of the technical conversations that I've seen say that actually, you know, if you're going to subscribe to WebSub for 4 million podcasts, then essentially you will be always subscribing because of the way that you know a subscription runs out. So I'm just sort of curious as seeing companies saying, oh, we're supporting WebSub now, when I've been always very clearly told that it is totally useless for podcasting. So, yes, somebody needs to understand what's actually going on here, and I think that somebody is me.

Speaker 3: 1:25:29

Let's put it back to Dave Jones. Go on, let's have Friday night podcasting to the subject web sub versus pod, what's the difference?

Speaker 1: 1:25:36

Answer on a postcard and you did another Thames walk, I believe last week 25 miles, that's nice. Yep, yes, and you're going to do another one this week. You'll be walking past the old Thames Television Studios in Shepparton.

Speaker 3: 1:25:52

Yes, it's very plush. Still, they've got a nice little Hollywood sign at the front. Yes, nice Shepparton Studios Rubbish train service, but that's another issue. Trying to get from Shepparton to Richmond took about an hour and a half. The walk was less I felt, but anyway.

Speaker 1: 1:26:09

Oh well, there you go. But yes, now we're, and you'll have walked past the brewery for Budweiser, I think yeah. Which is on the river down there.

Speaker 3: 1:26:18

And we're off to go and see His Royal Highness at Windsor Castle next.

Speaker 1: 1:26:22

Oh well, that's very lovely. Yes, Well done. Wait to see if he's in.

Speaker 3: 1:26:25

Maybe, tea at the end.

Speaker 1: 1:26:27

Well done. Are you going to tell me off for anything?

Speaker 3: 1:26:30

I am only because I love you dearly, yes, because you do so many good things. And then I go yay, james has done it. And then I go why why? Why James, why not? So first one is you put in the social interact tag for the episode on Monday and Tuesday and then on Wednesday maybe because you were flying, you forgot to do it, but the episode with Todd didn't have it in for some reason. So, yes, and then so we keep looking. Is he doing it? No, he stopped. Okay, so that's the first one. And then the other one is updating your location because you're not in Brisbane, but your Pod News Daily says you're in Brisbane.

Speaker 1: 1:27:09

Yes, well, so there's two things on that. The social interact tag will always appear Currently, will always appear without me doing anything special, but will always appear 24 hours late because of the order of things that I do. That needs fixing and so I need to rewrite the publish code in order to do that, but that will essentially mean that the social interact tag does appear in the RSS feed as soon as possible. So, yes, I need to do that, and yes, and the location tag. I'll be honest, I've not done the location tag for a while because, firstly, I haven't been travelling and I'd forgotten that I have to do it.

Speaker 3: 1:27:55

We've got a feature coming out called when Is James?

Speaker 1: 1:27:58

Yes, so I'm going to go back and update the ones where I was in Geneva, so we'll get that one done, not Geneva, neuchatel in Switzerland and I will, because I'm doing a lot of travelling next week and the week after and various things. Yes, I will keep all of that updated. I've just got to kind of build that into the system, right, because at the moment it's very manual. So I should probably try and work out a method of making that a little bit more easy to do. But still, there we are.

Speaker 3: 1:28:38

Well, hopefully hosts will do it as well for their own clients.

Speaker 1: 1:28:44

Yes, well, this is the James will implement this, but in a half-arsed way. Isn't production ready yet? So I should go back and make those production ready, I suppose.

Speaker 3: 1:28:59

So, James, where are you? What are you doing? What's happening in the world of Mr Cridland?

Speaker 1: 1:29:03

Well, I'm, yes, I'm currently at a conference, at a media conference, so that's a thrill and an excitement. But what else have I been doing? I have, yes, I've just been. One of the things that I did last week is I bought a very small, for about $50 Australian. I bought a very small little colour screen to attach to an old Raspberry Pi of mine. So now I've got this nice little thing, which I've got, which is showing me how much power the solar panels are making, how much power is going into the electric car. It even pulls information from the electric car, like you know, what's the range on it, how charged is the battery already, are the doors closed? It's got all of that kind of information, which is quite cool. So yeah, so that was interesting.

Speaker 3: 1:30:04

Have you paid for the car?

Speaker 1: 1:30:04

yet Breathing new life. I haven't paid for the car, but I did notice that I mean it's very slow charging from a mains plug, because you would expect that, but I did notice that it's basically cost me nothing to fill it up because it's just powered by the sun.

Speaker 3: 1:30:24

What's that?

Speaker 1: 1:30:25

We haven't seen that for a while. As long as I only plug it in during the day, but yeah, so that's good. And what I could do with Home Assistant and this is all Gene Bean's fault what I could do with Home Assistant is I could actually program the car to charge only when I've got enough electricity to charge it for free, and then, as soon as the clouds go over the solar panels, I can actually get it to stop charging the car automatically, which is pretty cool. So I can actually write the code to do that. It's just a case of getting around to it, to be honest.

Speaker 3: 1:31:05

In terms of priority. You can drop the location tag in the social interact tab.

Speaker 1: 1:31:10

Yeah, I know exactly, I personally think save a ton of money would be better, and a website, yes, and a new podcast's website that I've been trying to launch for the last month and just simply haven't got round to actually finishing the three little bugs that I need to finish in order to get that launched. I should probably do that first, given that I've got that sponsored and everything. So, yes, but anyway, there we are. That's where I am and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories were taken from the Pod News newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter. Oh heavens, I thought I'd edited all of this stuff out. So I will say and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories were taken from the podcast daily newsletter at podnewsnet.

Speaker 3: 1:31:57

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Speaker 1: 1:32:12

Our music is from Studio Dragonfly, our voiceover, sheila Dee. We use clean feed for our audio, we edit with Hindenburg and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Speaker 2: 1:32:23

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Speaker 4: 1:32:29

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Speaker 2: 1:32:37

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