Welcome And Podcast Day Check-In

James Cridland 0:00

Today, Inception Point AI and Dave Jones from the Podcast Index with James Kridlin and Sam Sethy.

Announcer 0:08

This is the Pod News Weekly Review with Buzz with Buzz Sprout. Start Podcasting, Heat Podcasting.

Sam Sethi 0:17

James James, it's Happy International Podcast Day this week. It was on Wednesday. What's been occurring with International Podcast Day?

James Cridland 0:26

Yes, International Podcast Day never really seems to be as big a day as as I kind of expect it going to be. But yes, we had some good news from a few people. I think Headliner were giving away stuff. There was news out of uh Nigeria and a few other things. Uh, nothing from Spotify this year, nothing from Apple. They never uh really care about International Podcast Day, nothing from any of the other big services. So it's a bit of a shame. I think that International Podcast Day needs somebody to lead it. It hasn't had that for a long time now, so it would be really good if that was the case.

Sam Sethi 1:02

Yeah, Steve Lee, who started it in 2014, I'm not sure if he's still involved, but you can look up what people are doing with International Podcast Day with a hashtag international podcast day. So I assume across social medias. I mean, overall podcasting is rapidly growing still. The current listenership is over 580 million. It's projected to reach 650 million by 2027. So, you know, good growth is really what we're seeing in the industry still, anyway.

James Cridland 1:31

Yes, yes. Well, good growth in many ways. The Sounds Profitable Podcast Landscape, which came out this week, actually showed a slight, a slight sort of leveling off in terms of the total amount of people who have ever listened to a podcast. It's one of the reasons why I don't think that we should be using that particular stat anymore. But sadly, that was the headline stat on that piece of uh research. But there was a ton more useful uh stuff in there as well.

Sam Sethi 1:58

What should we be using? Remind everyone again?

James Cridland 2:00

Well, so we should be using um total time spent with podcasts because that is going to go up significantly. But I don't think a have ever score has ever been useful, particularly. I mean, I have once stood on Lego brick in bare feet. Uh, it doesn't mean that I'm going to do it again. So I don't think that it's a particularly helpful score for anyone, really. So I wish that we would stop using that. Then let's move on to things like I think from memory it's around 833 million hours of podcasts are consumed every single week in the US alone. If we can use those sorts of figures, then that very clearly shows how much that we're actually growing.

Inception Point AI Pivots Again

Sam Sethi 2:38

Let's move on to your favorite company of all time, then Inception Pointless. Point AI. Sorry, point AI, not pointless. Sorry. My bad.

James Cridland 2:48

Janine Wright was on a point to that's the worry.

Sam Sethi 2:53

Well, no point anymore according to Janine Wright. She's pivoted. What's she done? She spun 360. Where's she gone?

James Cridland 3:00

Well, so Inception Point AI, obviously, we know them for producing thousands of AI-made podcasts. But according to the Lead Balloon podcast, which came out earlier on this week, that that uh quite a lot of the publicity surrounding that was a PR strategy to get attention. So, what we've learned from that podcast interview is that the Quiet Please Network now only has about 300 active shows. They're no longer trying to monetize those. And I think the two things that I would like the company to do is to delete the other crap. That would be a good start, and then to work out exactly if you're going to run 300 shows, but r run it for no particular reason other than just to show off your technology. Well, that's fine, but do a good job with that. But she also gave a fantastic definition of AI slop, uh, which is this.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

I don't know, that there's very little creative inspiration behind the process, and they're using AI tools to make as much content as they can with as little expense as possible in order to be able to monetize the delta, right?

SPEAKER_06 4:14

So wasn't that the original business model an Inception Point AI?

James Cridland 4:17

Uh yes, so I think that sounds quite familiar, as Dusty jumped in and said. Um, so she rather likes the phrase, well, she rather hates the phrase AI slot, but there she is, and she defines it as pretty well exactly what she was doing. So I found that a particularly weird thing. But anyway, uh Inception Point AI is kind of going away. The company is now branded as Liquid Studios. It has a rather opaque thing on their front page at the moment saying that it transforms existing content, not generates from a blank page. I suspect that we will see rather better stuff coming from that company in the future.

Sam Sethi 4:53

Oh, the irony of going on to a podcast called Lead Balloon A. Now. Now let's move on.

Apple’s New Podcast Artwork Tools

Sam Sethi 5:01

Apple said they've been putting out some new stuff for podcasters. They're giving this new design tools. And it says Apple's latest Creative Studio update includes a new podcast category in Pixel Meta Pro, which I've never used. Uh, it's featured professionally designed templates for podcast cover art and a few bits more, James. What are they doing?

James Cridland 5:23

Yeah, so Pixel Meta Pro is Apple's own artwork. Up until now, we would have had to use somebody else's. I think it was an Adobe piece of work, Adobe Photoshop, to get that special artwork over to Apple that they want for their app. Again, a proprietary piece of artwork that you can't put in an RSS feed. But uh now you don't have to do that anymore. You can now use Apple's own Pixel Meta Pro, and there's a template in there for the standard stuff that Apple want. You can't really get a promotion in the Apple Podcasts uh front page without having all of this specific additional artwork just for Apple Podcasts. So this should hopefully make life easy. It's also a clever lock-in to another Apple product in order for you to produce that artwork.

Sam Sethi 6:16

Yeah, they've also been adding to Final Cop Pro, some new video production capabilities. Creators working with video captured on the new iPhone 18 Pro can apply cinematic mode effects during editing. So, yeah, looks like Apple's adding to its own product set a little bit more for the podcast community.

YouTube Vertical Live And AB Tests

James Cridland 6:36

Yeah, no, indeed. And uh talking about um video, of course, YouTube now doing new things in terms of uh funnel enough, this is what we were talking about only a couple of weeks ago, I think, with the launch of the iPhone Duo, talking about um potentially producing a vertical version and a horizontal version of your video. Well, YouTube is now making it easy to live stream content simultaneously in both horizontal and vertical formats. So that's interesting, isn't it? Probably, who knows, timed timed to work with the iPhone duo? I I wouldn't have thought so, but anyway, it's um it's worthwhile uh uh seeing. So there's a few little sort of layout options that they're currently working on, which is nice.

Sam Sethi 7:19

Yeah, they've got fittophone, stacked, center crop. Yeah, they've been working on some stuff. Uh in fact, yeah, you know, we talked about a couple of weeks ago. We're experimenting, we've got a couple of examples of vertical video working. Hanan Lopez is very, very big on the idea of vertical video as well. He loves that. So yeah.

James Cridland 7:39

Yeah, and by we mean you mean uh true fans, of course. But yes, so you know I just thought I just let me let me get that very clear.

Sam Sethi 7:47

You're right, thank you.

James Cridland 7:48

And uh and YouTube have also done a few other things. I mean, I think that the most interesting thing is the A-B video testing, which is interesting in a number of ways, is interesting because obviously you can test different videos to work out which works better. So the idea is that maybe there might be two different edits of this show, and uh you can actually see which one makes people drop off less, for example. The only downside with that is that of course, if you link to a YouTube video now, you don't actually know whether the version that you're linking to is going to be the version that the person who you are linking, who you who you're sharing that video with, actually gets to see. Because the A B test might mean that they're seeing the other version of the video and they're there looking at it and going, well, what on earth does that mean? So that's um kind of breaking how the internet works. One URL for one piece of content. Uh, that's kind of how it should work. So, you know, who knows? But anyway, all of that stuff going on. YouTube, of course, announcing this on a uh specific podcast section of made on YouTube, the company's annual event, uh, which was held last week. Did they bother to communicate any of this to the podcast press? No. Do YouTube care about podcasting? No. Why are we still talking about YouTube? I don't know. Let's move on.

Patreon Ends Per-Creation Billing

Sam Sethi 9:07

Uh yeah, we will move on. So, Patreon. Now they're getting in more and more involved in well, we've been talking about creative portals, we've been talking about podcasting, audio, video, and live, but they've changed their charging model as well, James. What have they done?

James Cridland 9:23

Yeah, so this is actually this is something that they've been planning for the last two years. But Patreon always had a thing that was quite useful for podcasters. If you were making a podcast and maybe you were making an audio drama where you would make, you know, eight shows, a brand new season and hey presto, Patreon had this uh this way of charging that wasn't a monthly fee, which is fine for certain things, but not so good for that sort of thing. A per creation fee. So I could sign up, for example, for you know, the True Fans Patreon, and every time you released a new feature, then you could claim the money that I that I bid against against a new feature. That sounds quite a good idea for some of the types of creative work that people wanted to earn money out of. Uh, anyway, that has been going away for quite some time, but its uh final month of the per creation membership is October. It goes away in November. And it does mean that actually, you know, it's going to be harder for certain people that used to use that legacy method of earning revenue because they won't be able to use that anymore. They'll just have to charge somebody a monthly fee, which doesn't always work.

Sam Sethi 10:44

Yeah, I think when I first looked at this, I thought, hmm, this seems a bit odd. But if you imagine we're used to sort of giving content away for free, that's been the podcast model, and and most creators probably did. Dipping your toe in with a well, you know, I've got loads of free stuff over here, but I've got one or two things would have been a good thing. I think we've now evolved into people accepting that there is a subscription monthly model now and that you pay for good content. So I think probably Patreon are going, we can make more money here, pull this thing out now.

James Cridland 11:16

Yes, yes. No, I'm sure. And you know, I mean it certainly makes life easier for them. And I'm sure that a percreation fee is one of those things that could be abused. And you could sign up for a percreation fee, assuming that you were going to get charged about every month, but actually you ended up getting charged every day because somebody was abusing it. So I I can well understand why they've done it, but it's just, you know, one more one more thing just to bear in mind. If you want to make money from occasional stuff, then uh Patreon isn't where you can do that anymore.

Reddit Kills RSS And Public API

Sam Sethi 11:48

Now let's move on to one of your favourite social media platforms, Reddit. And they're killing RSS feeds and ending the public API access. It's all because of those naughty little AI bots, they say. Is it? James. Is it really? Come on, then, tell me.

James Cridland 12:05

Is it? I mean, they say RSS has now become a common a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. Well, actually, RSS is is, you know, should be dead easy. That's essentially what it's there for, for large-scale scraping, certainly. So I'm not quite sure why they've got upset about it now. But I think the point is that they are also closing the public API as well. What does Reddit earn money from? It earns money from selling access to all of the content that is on the Reddit platform, to AI companies, to other people who are, you know, interested in buying it. So why would you have a free model? Why would you have an RSS feed in there as well? So they're getting rid of that. Can't think why that might be. Oh, yes, I can think why. 43 million US dollars. That's probably why. That's roughly how much that they are earning from other revenue, which most people consider to be those uh data agreements that they've got with other companies. So that that's a big that's a big uh shame, I think, for quite a lot of people that have been using Reddit's RSS feeds to keep themselves updated with various things. I certainly use it for you know, any mention of of the word pod news, I think I get I get some form of you know alert. So it's going to be quite a shame that we lose all of that. But you know, I guess that's the way that things work.

Sam Sethi 13:28

Of course, you know, Reddit are very good at sharing that 43 million back with the people who created the content, right? They do that, don't they? Oh no, no, they don't. No, no, no, no. No, we're keeping that all to ourselves. You create it, we'll profit from it. Yeah, right. That's correct. That's why I think I think what we are seeing though is, you know, and Nathan Gathright did this a little while ago. He played with L402 to create a transcription model where you were charged for the usage of his API. X402 is where it's going now, and I think you're going to see agentic AI using APIs to access this kind of content. But I think people like Reddit will start to charge those agentic AIs. And that's why I think they're closing every other door around it, so that you have to come through the front door and pay them. That's it. End of.

James Cridland 14:20

Yeah, and and just the amount of the amount of wasted web traffic that you know, I'm sure that every single company is seeing in terms of the amount of AI things that we get hit by. I mean, Pod News, you know, I'm fighting a daily battle against all of that uh sort of thing. In fact, my Amazon AWS bill came came in yesterday, and for the first time it was over a thousand Australian dollars, which is more than it should be. And most of that is because of AI scrapers. So, yeah, I think, you know, it's uh unfortunately it's a thing that we just have to, you know, bear in mind. But a typical RSS feed should be a static file, so it shouldn't use any compute at all. It should be really easy to deliver. So I you know, I I think it's pretty obvious that the reason why they're closing it down isn't because of an AI scraper, it's because they just want to charge for that sort of thing.

Sam Sethi 15:20

One of the things they also put up, and I think this is something that we as the podcast community might want to look at. The company also reminded developers building approved third-party apps and bots to register them with the company before January the 12th, 2027 to avoid disruption. Reddit will remove the API access, but for any developer that has re hasn't registered. So, again, they are providing some sort of interface, user agent registration. And again, we keep talking about this. My bill from MongoDB just came in. That doubled this month. I am after this gonna block every bot. I've got a a firewall, a web firewall, I'm going back. I've been lax on it. We built it and we've sort of gone, oh yeah, block a few, show that it works, but let's not really go too mad. I'm gonna go back. I mean, we've got you know, I've put a chart in our notes, James. You can see nine hours of unknown, but you know, below that you've got Apple Podcasts auto-checking. They keep checking about six, eight, ten, twelve times, you know, for every episode. It's crazy. And I have spoken to Apple. Oh, yes, we need this for the transcript. Well, do it on your own platform then. Yeah. You know, you've got RSS. Yes, you can afford this, surely check it on your own bloody platform.

James Cridland 16:37

Make one call and cache that information locally. I mean, you know, that that's what I try and do with everything. I mean, the theory, when you do a search through the Pod News website to podcast index, for example, theoretically, that search will hit the podcast index once, and then that's it for the next week. And we cache it, or rather, Amazon's Amazon's CloudFront caches it because I I don't want to hit lots of people all the time, particularly since you know, we are seeing, I mean, our search, you know, our search function has been a vector for bots to come in. I mean, the amount of search traffic that we were getting was ridiculous. At least I've managed to calm that down now. But uh, yes, you know, so yeah, it's it's uh it is a difficult thing.

Interview Begins With Dave Jones

James Cridland 17:22

Well, talking up talking about podcast index, you ended up talking to the pod sage, did you not?

Sam Sethi 17:28

I did, and I waited years to talk to him on this program, on this podcast. And Dave and I talked about quite a few things. The new podping mesh that he's been working on and why, a new version of the podcast index, a distributed version. What's David's what's Dave's favorite tag, and a little bit about Godcaster and a few other things. But I started off by asking Dave about what's he doing with Podping.

Podping Explained From Polling To Push

SPEAKER_03 17:53

Yeah, so Podping is uh what I would consider the evolution of those previous things. They work, but they all had paper cuts. We've talked before about how WebSub, which was really just a rename of PubSub Hub Ug, because why would you not rename that horrible thing? But WebSub was a similar to a thing called RSS Cloud, which Dave Weiner pioneered back in the day, and then WebSub kind of took those ideas and fleshed them out a little bit more, made it a little bit more generic, and it became a fairly robust open standard, and then there was a WebSub 2, but I don't think anybody really adopted that. But WebSub was an attempt to solve the RSS feed updating problem, generally speaking, not just for podcasting. So if you had an RSS feed that updated with a new item or some other change to it, how do you let all your subscribers know that there's a change that they need to go and pull the RSS feed again? So WebSub tried to do that by making a sort of registration server so the PubSub or a WebSub server would register a lot of subscriptions. So you're talking to the WebSub server and you say, here's a feed. I want to know every time that feed gets updated, and so here's a callback, a webhook in modern Parlance. Call me back whenever this thing updates. That way I don't have to go poll it all the time. And this is a huge improvement, but but then again, there's a lot of gotchas here, a lot of sort of paper cuts you want to call them, where it's server-to-server, it's very hard for a client to maintain this level of subscription, uh these number of subscriptions, let's say if it's a mobile app or some lightweight client that needs to maintain potentially thousands of subscriptions, it's got to be always on. So that's why it's the server-based thing. If you miss an update, if the web sub server sends you an update, says, Hey, this feed updated, if you weren't listening at that exact moment, you miss it. So there's a always on criteria there. It's really just meant for back ends mostly. So what we did with PodPing is we tried to take uh those concepts and just simplify everything, but also have a focus on just podcasting, just podcast feeds. Technically, this works with anything, even things that are not RSS feeds. But uh the focus is podcast feeds. And uh the idea that uh Brian of London and our group came up with is why don't we use the Hive blockchain? Because it's the th it's a three-second blockchain. So every three seconds you get a new batch of updates on the new block. It's a permanent record. So you can always look back in time. You don't have to have servers running all the time to watch for incoming messages. And this solves a lot of those issues. You can just subscribe to the fire hose and just see every update that comes through, and then you filter only say, okay, I'm not interested in in only these 1200 feeds. If anything else passes through and I'm watching and I don't see one of those 1200, I just ignore it. So by design, everybody gets the fire hose. So that was the first iteration. So now the work we've been doing the last few months is trying to not move it off of the hive blockchain necessarily, but move it beyond a blockchain because all of these crypto-based blockchains have always represented a risk because most of them are funded through just the market value that's placed on the particular underlying cryptocurrency that's on it. It's a fantastic technology. If you have a public blockchain that updates every three seconds, that's perfect. It fits this use case ideally. But if it's all uh scaffolded with a cryptocurrency. That may lose 99% of its value at any moment, then all your servers that run the blockchain could just vanish overnight. So that was always a risk. So we're trying to evolve Podping beyond that blockchain-only idea basically by adding other ways to watch Podping fire hose. And the first iteration of that was just completed a couple months ago, and it's now running over what's called a peer-to-peer gossip mesh network. And I'm happy to explain that. Yes, please.

The New Podping Gossip Mesh

Sam Sethi 22:34

You can't come out with words like a peer-to-peer gossip network over a mesh network and then say, that's it, ladies. We're all clear. No, come on. Yeah, no. Next question, please.

SPEAKER_03 22:44

So the idea here is that we're continuing to write to the blockchain just like we always have, and potentially other blockchains in the future. I mean, who knows? This is a living project, but none of that is changing. But the peer-to-peer gossip aspect of this is so everybody's familiar with BitTorrent and even Bitcoin works the same way. So you have a mesh of nodes that gossip with each other. Actually, Bitcoin is the better technical analogy here. Worldwide, you can have millions of nodes that all gossip with each other. So that means if I get a message, I'm going to forward that message on to all the peers that I know about, all the other computers I'm connected to. So every peer in the group, your computer, my computer, Adam's computer, everybody who's running a node, so to speak, quote unquote, is connected to, let's say, a dozen other nodes. And by by designing that mesh correctly of interconnectivity, you end up with full coverage, 100% coverage across the entire fleet of computers. So anyone who's running a podping gossip node will connect maybe through one or two or three hops, but eventually all of your messages will reach all the other computers in the mesh. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon type deal. And so that's the idea there. So it doesn't need a blockchain or anything like that. It just needs connectivity. So the idea here is to simplify everything greatly. You just download the software, the one executable, run it, and suddenly you're just you're up. You're running, you're getting podpings instantaneously. But you're getting them from everyone else in the swarm of computers. And you may be getting it from Adam one day, you may be getting it from me the next day, or somebody else in the podcast. We got one guy who's running one in his bathroom. It's all over the place. But the idea here is that there's resiliency. You're not dependent on one group, one crypto, one blockchain, that kind of thing. This provides a layer of protection against the underlying servers or blockchain or whatever it is vanishing. Because this would just continue. The way you get sort of the resiliency of a blockchain where you can roll back in time and see things you missed in this setup is all throughout the swarm of computers, there's certain computers can elect to become archive nodes. So if you bring your machine up and say, Okay, I want to go back and see what I've missed for the last 48 hours, your computer can just ask the group, it sends out a broadcast message, say, Hey, I need an archive node. One of them or many of them will respond, say, Hey, I'm here, and then you say, I need the last 48 hours or 72 hours of pod ping messages, and then they just start streaming them to you until you get caught up, and then your computer just takes it from the most current and goes there. When I say updates, I mean these are just what you're getting is just a record that all this podcast feed URL updated. That's what you get. That's all that gets broadcast. And then you record that, do what you want with it, move on. That's the way the fundamental system works. The other thing it does, and Alex Gates, who really helped design a lot of this with me and Brian, he describes it as a message bus for podcasting. So right now what you get is feed update notifications, and you get live event notifications. So if a podcast like podcasting 2.0 goes live, you get that notification as well. So if you're a podcast client, you can look at Castomatic is doing this right now, and TrueFans is doing this. If you see a pod ping come through with a live notification and the feed URL, hey, that that podcast, that show just went live. It's now broadcasting at this very moment. And so you can, if you're running a podcast app, you tune in, let your listeners know, let your followers know. Hey, this thing's live, push notification. So this all interconnectivity, and we can lay add and layer more things onto this and will in the future.

Sam Sethi 27:09

That's a really detailed description of it. So let me try and summarize that. In the old days, you'd update your podcast app so that have to keep going. Have you got an update? Have you got an update? Have you got an update? That became annoying. So we then came up with a push mechanism, which was WebSub or PubSub Hubbub. But that wasn't very stable because you could miss the updates. So then along came podping, which was a great way of having those real-time updates every three seconds, but it was a single point of failure. So now you've got a distributed podping fundamentally, which is the mesh. And that means that there isn't a single point of failure. And now that it's like a message bust, yes, you can get podpings for new episodes and live episodes, but there may be more things down the road that you want to push down that pipe that gives us updates. So it could be, for example, somebody just changed a transcript or somebody's just updated the chapters or any of those RSS type updates that may occur and you want to have a real-time notification. So yeah, it's a push notification in simple terms. I also liken it a little bit to DNS as well. So the way that we use DNS, if I want to look up a website and a server hasn't got it, it passes off to another server.

SPEAKER_03 28:22

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you have what primary and secondary and tertiary name servers. Yeah,

How Hosts Publish Via Podping Cloud

SPEAKER_03 28:26

that's right.

Sam Sethi 28:26

Okay, so let's say I'm a podcast host and I want to get involved with this. What do I need to do, Dave Jones?

SPEAKER_03 28:34

Right now, you have to go through this annoying and complicated process of emailing me and asking for a podping authorization token. That's also something that we fully intend to change going forward because that's just not scalable. It feels too secretive, like you got to be in the club. And that's the last thing that the podcast industry or podcast ecosystems needs is more secret junk going on that is just not helpful to anyone. So that needs to change and it will be changing soon. Right now, you can do that going forward. There'll be hopefully within the next few months, there will be a registration process that's open where you can just register and get a token and you're up and running broadcasting. The way the the registration side of things work is that we run a service called podping.cloud, and it's a geolocated service with five nodes across the world, and the hosting companies can just publish to that. It simplifies everything, it's very easy, because all they need to do is have a GET request, and it just it's instant and very simple. And then we take care of putting that onto the Podping network itself, the push side, we take care of that stuff for them. You can do it that way, or you can do where your own node publishing directly into the mesh, and there will be instructions on how to do that once we get all this other stuff. Most hosting companies are just going to want to use podping.cloud just because it's simple, it's reliable, it's hosted on Linode through Cloudflare's geolocation, so it's literally never gone down. We may lose a node for an hour every now and then, but then it just gets redirected, so it's all very stable.

Sam Sethi 30:26

Nice. Now, once this is all up and running, hosts have switched across to Podping Cloud, will we just close down the old hive Podping?

SPEAKER_03 30:36

I don't think there's I'm not a fan of deprecating things just unless you just have to. I think that's just yet to be determined. I don't yeah, I don't know. I don't see a reason to do that right now because it's still functioning, still working. But the other part of this, and it's a strange, it's not really a technical issue, it's more of like a political stance, is some people just hate crypto. And I I understand that. It's it's I'm not gonna criticize anybody's position on that. So some people are just like, if they hear that it's on some sort of crypto blockchain, they're like, no, I'm not interested. So there's that aspect of it too. So this hopefully will show that this was never anything to do with crypto. This was always just using this chain for its technical ability and not for anything else, and hopefully it gets that ick off of it.

Sam Sethi 31:29

Okay.

Why The Podcast Index Exists

Sam Sethi 31:30

Let's take a step back. Five years, six years ago, you and Adam Curry decided to put something together called the Podcast Index. It's a directory of all of the podcasts, four million podcasts. Why did you and Adam do that?

SPEAKER_03 31:44

It is a setback for a few reasons. This was early in COVID, August of 2020. We were still a lot of places are still locked down. And looking back in with hindsight of how things played out after that, I think what we saw at the time was more of more of just a s a sign of the psyche of the modern world. Probably more than an indicator of anything else, some sort of sort of long-term problem. But what we were seeing at the time was podcasts getting delisted out of various directories. And that's really bothersome because and Adam took it Adam takes those things personally. He was one of the him and Dave Weiner co-invented podcasting. And from a technical standpoint, he ran the first podcast directory, iPotter, and that became iPotter became the seed directory for what is now Apple Podcast Directory. So there's I think he took those things personally and said, This is not what I want. This is not what I ever envisioned for podcasting. Podcasting is supposed to be open. Anybody that has something to say can put it in an RSS feed and broadcast it to the world. And that clearly has changed over time, and not everybody respects that anymore. So he called me up and said, Hey, we gotta at least create an alternative so that open podcasting is not just the purview under the control of trillion-dollar tech companies. And so that's that was the impetus for it. I a lot of that, the delisting and that kind of thing, a lot of that is calmed down. There's still something that goes on, but a lot of that is calmed down, and I think that was a sign of those times, but it still was the impetus, and I think it's has turned out to be a very good thing that we did that, I think.

Sam Sethi 33:43

Yeah, no, it has been. There's the Apple directory, the Spotify directory, and obviously the podcast index, and more recently, and we've had to, as hosts, use proprietary APIs to update video to Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. But the podcast index is the open index where you can publish your RSS feed. So when will we see the podcast index evolve? Is there anything that can be done, or is it stable? Is it what it is now? Or is it you've just updated Podping, so my question really is do you think you need to update podcast index

A Distributed Podcast Index Vision

Sam Sethi 34:15

in any way?

SPEAKER_03 34:15

Yeah, so this is where I Adam says I start doing the weave. Because at any given time, there's always so many things that go into future planning. I have this perfect vision of the future where the podcast index becomes very decentralized, and we've been talking about this for a couple of years, and what that means is that we sort of work ourselves out of a job, and we do not become just another directory run by a couple of dudes, instead, everybody has a slice of the directory, and that's been my goal for a very long time, because uh otherwise it's just another directory that you don't control as a listener, creator, interested party in podcasting. So I think all of these things that we do eventually converge at some point in the future into being part of this vision, and I'm moving that forward as we speak. Currently, the last couple of days, I've been rewriting the aggregator, and part of that is going to be not just rebroadcasting feed updates through podping, but also it will be distributing chunks of our database through the podping mesh. And the way that works is with a gossip, you can have what's called a topic. So the podping topic within Podping mesh holds all these feed updates that are coming through. There can be other topics, and one of those topics I intend will be us publishing our actual database as SQL. So that means somebody could literally just subscribe to that topic and get the same SQL inserts coming out of our aggregators that we get. So that means you could download the podcast index database schema, fire up a database server, subscribe to this topic, and then you could literally rebuild the entire index on your own computer within a few days of monitoring the this data. So these are very ambitious things to do, but I think it's also important. Again, I go back to the secrecy thing, and with AMPACORDs and all these things that we've seen over the last few months, there's still just so much secrecy in podcasting. And I don't want to contribute to that. I want everything that we do to be as open and transparent as we can possibly make it. I don't want to hoard data or make our data somehow something that everybody has to pay for. And thankfully, we've had supporters donating to the podcast index for years, and it's helped us to do this. But we also can't always depend on that. So decentralization is important from a cost control standpoint. So anyway, I hope that when I finally call it a day on these things, if it's 20 years from now, I hope that what we've built will be something that just continues to run without us. It's just something that the community just evolves to own by itself over time. I will say this we were criticized when we first did this because people laughed and said, why are they creating a podcast directory? But podcast directories are super important. They're just as important as something like Google. If you're gonna go hunting for a podcast, where do you start? You can't start with the internet, it just doesn't work that way. You gotta start with some place or some directory that has aggregated and indexed all these podcasts. Every podcast app has behind it some directory. Because if you don't, it just doesn't make any sense. It's where you have to start so the podcast directory is this thing that overlays all of the podcast technology that lets all that other stuff come to the surface. And if we can ultimately evolve the podcast index to just be as decentralized as RSS itself, then everybody wins.

Sam Sethi 38:20

Isn't that the nature of the web? What we've learned over time, DNS is decentralized, Bitcoin is decentralized, I'm at four, pop three is decentralized for email. Isn't that the state of the web when it's successful? A decentralized platform.

SPEAKER_03 38:36

Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. Yeah, everything about the web is based on decentralization. And again, when we look back on the past, I don't know, decade, it may be that we see this past decade of big tech dominance as some sort of aberration where decentralization was always going to be the way this thing ended up. Or at least I think that could be the case, and I hope that's the case. Maybe that just people like Google and Apple and Spotify and these things dominating sectors of podcasting or dominating sections of the web itself. Maybe that ends up just being an aberration that collapses over time. I hope that's the case.

Sam Sethi 39:18

Yeah, look, I've seen it before. I was in Netscape when Microsoft were putting ActiveX and their own proprietary technology into the web browser and they were gonna run MSN and the web and blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_03 39:29

Silverlight.

Sam Sethi 39:30

Yeah, thankfully that all went tits up, and we had HTML and we had CSS and we had JavaScript and we had the open web. And in so in the short term, I always think it's like it's like the tortoise and the hair. The race is always the hair is gonna go out fast, but the tortoise always catches up in the end. I think that's very much the case with everything that we've seen in the past as well. Short-term corporate companies aren't able to just implement stuff quickly because they don't have any committees or groups of people to address. They can just do what they want. And we've seen that with Spotify, you know, throwing stuff out very quickly with only one taskmaster to give their approval of. And then eventually people catch up and catch up. And then we see the end goal, which is that open always beats closed. It often takes a long time before that happens. But I think that's the arrow of direction that will go in.

SPEAKER_03 40:20

Yeah, I think you're right. I think open always does beat closed. It can take a very long time. I mean, you have to do a gut check to say how long are you willing to give it before you try to do an end around and short circuit the process, which I don't think can actually work because part of the process is proving to the vested parties that closed doesn't work as well as open, and that requires a sustained batch of failures. And failures are uncomfortable and nobody likes to be a part of them. And so our human nature will we want to short circuit and get around it. But if you try to do that and don't go through the pain of the failure process, you don't have the impetus to actually learn what needs to be

Why Podcasting 2.0 Tags Matter

SPEAKER_03 41:06

learned from it.

Sam Sethi 41:06

Let's move on to another topic that you and Adam got involved in. Something called a namespace and a set of features or tags, depending on the term you want to use. Technically, they're tags. So, why did you and Adam start the new podcasting 2.0 namespace?

SPEAKER_03 41:24

We had stuff we wanted to do. This is really as simple as that. We had things we wanted to do that podcasting just wasn't good at the moment, and it required new abilities to be put into RSS feeds that were not there. So if you take a step back and look at what RSS is capable of, at the time it was capable of delivering episodes of audio, show notes, descriptions, some of the sort of like basic things that go into your mind and say, okay, this is what a podcast is, some basic metadata. But if you wanted to get any more advanced than that and do some new type things, let's say like add a biography of the host, you had to shove all that into an existing tag like the description or show notes or whatever. So this all boils down to the way XML works, which is what RSS is based on. XML works by what's called namespaces. And so the namespaces overlay the basic set of RSS features and just expand that to give you more features and you can define them to be whatever you want. And what Adam and I wanted initially was a way to do decentralized micropayments. So we tried to come up with a way to do it and eventually settled on hey, RSS has namespaces. Let's put a namespace in over RSS, let's create one that will allow us to do micropayments, which requires certain information to be carried inside the RSS feed. So we did that, and that became the value tag in the podcast namespace. And then what we saw was everybody had great ideas. Everybody wanted to get in on defining their pet tag and feature that they had been always thinking about for a decade. So everybody jumped in and we had this explosion of ideas, and some of them were awesome and amazing, and some of them were mediocre, and then some of them weren't that good. But I don't like telling people their ideas are not good. I would rather just put them out into the world and let the marketplace decide. Because I don't know what the marketplace is going to do. Only the marketplace does. And so it doesn't seem right to hide what I think is not a very good idea behind my own opinion. So we just let everything roll out, and everybody created their tags and into the namespace, and it just became this really cool thing to watch. Just so many things came into this, and now development has slowed because that sort of initial flood of three years. Or so of just frantic I've got these ideas and I gotta get them out into the namespace. That's fallen back into a drip. But at least what we have now is a place where podcast ideas, and the most recent one is podcast contact tag. That's a great write-up, and I really want to try hard to get that thing formalized into the namespace. Podcast contact tag, Alex San Filippo came up with it. He worked with Daniel J. Lewis, they put a write-up together, stuck it in the GitHub repo, and I don't see any reason why we can't put that into the namespace. And suddenly we have a great tag that allows detailed contact information to be put into a podcast. And again, it's openness. We didn't need secret meetings with large corporations in order to make these things happen. It all just happened with a few back and forths over Mastodon, all

The Live Tag Problem And Promise

SPEAKER_03 44:56

in the open.

Sam Sethi 44:56

I think having worked with you and Adam and some really clever people over the last four or five years, maybe, it's been wonderful to see the evolvement of the namespace. Do you consider then when Apple, Spotify, and most recently Amazon adopted the namespace and added some of the tags as a measure of success?

SPEAKER_03 45:18

Yeah, of course. Absolutely. I think anytime a large entity like an Apple or Spotify or YouTube or something like that, anytime they adopt a technology that was invented by a bunch of Yahoos in a Mastodon group, I think you gotta say that's an admonition that the quality of the technology is sound. Because somebody, let's just say Apple Podcasts. I think those guys have a thankless job, the team inside Apple Podcasts. They're watched like a hawk. Every breath out of that group is reported on and criticized. If they take risks and try to innovate, somebody's gonna feel like they got Sherlocked or maybe they weren't open enough. I think internally that team would love nothing more than to just unleash the entire podcasting 2.0 toolbox. And but that's just not the reality of the position that they're in. And so knowing that, then if you look and see, okay, they actually did adopt multiple tags now, that has to make you say, okay, the technology was compelling enough to overcome the difficult position that large group finds themselves in. And now the opposite of that, saying nobody's adopted it, therefore that must be a technology failure. I don't think that is true because things take time. Now, ten years from now, if nobody adopts some tag, okay, let's let's have a discussion about whether or not it was a failed idea. But but I know things are always in process. How long did it take? Was it three years from the time that the transcript tag was formalized until Apple Podcast adopted it? These things take time, man. So I'm not too worried about that. But I think but I don't think we need you don't need a large company to adopt your technology in order to validate it. But if they do, I think that is a sign that it's compelling.

Sam Sethi 47:16

Did you and Adam ever have a wobble? Did you ever think, what the hell did we think about? What was the Did we what were you drinking that day when we started the podcast index? Why did we start the namespace? Have you ever had those private conversations?

SPEAKER_03 47:31

Never. No, no, no, never. It's just fun. And it's because we figured out early on that you can't monetize this stuff. There's no path to that. When we first started, we're like, oh, is there a way can we make this a second job or something like that? Can we is there a way we can have some kind of income from this to where it's not just all work and no reward? And the answer is no. That's not the way this works. So once you kind of give up on that, that's fine. Then you just look at the positives.

Sam Sethi 47:59

So there are 28 tags currently that have been agreed upon and are public. What's your favorite? Oh man. Which is your baby that you love. You've got a favorite child. You never tell them, but come on, spill the beans.

SPEAKER_03 48:13

I think live is still the one that think. Why can we not get more people to adopt the live tag? There's live podcasts happening all the time. It's a little befuddling to me that we can't get people to adopt this pretty simplistic tag. Every year I predict that it's going to be the next one. Of course, it never is.

Sam Sethi 48:32

Same here. And I still agree with you. I think it should be widely adopted. But I think there is an issue, and I think this comes down to host. You know, TrueFans with my CO hat on is part of the problem. We haven't put in place yet a live server. We have not made it simple. The live tag in itself is quite a complex tag to configure as a podcaster. So you look at StreamYard, you want to go live with StreamYard, you have no configuration. There's no put the name of the live server here, do this, do that, come here, go there. You just simply say, I want to be live on LinkedIn, X, I want to be here, I want to be here. Click, press a button, go live. And I think that's one thing we need to do. Complexity as well, simplicity, and I think we need to make the complexity of going live a little bit simpler. And I think that's down to hosts as well. We love the guys at rss.com and they supported the lit tag, but the final hurdle was they didn't provide a server. You had to go and get your own server and configure that within the admin. And that's just that extra step that people go, no, I can't be bothered. Whereas you look at Substack now, which does a lot of live podcasting, you look at Patreon, you look at other services. YouTube itself does a really good job of going live. And that's because they hide the complexity of what you need to do to set up the live session behind a single button. They do the work in the background. I think we as a podcast community have to raise our game, make that simple enough to make it a one-click go live on this day, this time. So yeah, I think there are steps that we still need to take as a community.

When Surveys Warp Video Narratives

SPEAKER_03 50:08

There's a tension there. I have a problem with audience surveys. Audience surveys about podcasting in my mind are just fundamentally incoherent. If you take a representative slice of the population and ask them, for instance, do they think they have enough memory in their computer? There's going to be a large fraction of the respondents who think memory means hard drive space. And I know this because I've been in tech support for a very long time. They say, Do I have enough memory? And what they're talking about is their hard drive. So they're going to be answering based off this fundamental misunderstanding of what you just asked them. And you can control for that by asking follow-up questions about their computer that would tease out whether or not that question was misunderstood. And I'm telling you that is unreliable because sufficiently complicated technology lends itself to misunderstandings that are recalcitrant in the minds of people who are flooded with these terms on a daily basis but do not understand the intricacy about the way that they actually work. So if you have a population slice who actually understands deeply how RSS distribution works, then by definition you no longer have a representative slice of the general population. You're now biased towards a certain type of answer. And so a couple of years ago, when the first survey started coming out where a majority of respondents were saying that they listened to their podcasts on YouTube, at that time I took a few charts off various platforms of the top 25 podcasts, and I showed on our show how only about three of those top twenty-five even published on YouTube at all. So the findings of those surveys, they could not be correct just based on the hard numbers of the way that we saw this. And so now surveys are showing people getting are getting their podcasts from Netflix. And I'm like, this is impossible. To me, this is the same category of question, like asking how many roaches are in New York City. It's a fundamentally unanswerable question because the way RSS podcasting works is sufficiently complicated enough to where you cannot control for it. But that narrative that people are getting their podcasts from YouTube persisted so hard that it changed the industry. Like pushing YouTube to adopt podcasting and in my opinion, created the current video push we see right now. I believe all of this was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of these audience surveys. They got misinterpreted and have now really, I think, warped the industry. I'm not saying that video is a bad thing. I'm not, but it has cost a lot of people a lot of money, and we're really not seeing a ton of adoption of this stuff. And I think the reason I'm bringing all that up is because yes, YouTube and other platforms, yeah, they hide, you're right, they hide the complexity, they make this stuff easy, but we also don't know that in podcasting that is what everyone necessarily wants. And I would apply that to live too. I love that tag, but it may end up just being something that five percent of podcasting actually ever wants or needs to have, even though I consider it technically awesome, but it just may not be that it ever has much more reach than just a small slice, and that's okay.

Radio’s Path Into Live Plus On-Demand

Sam Sethi 53:36

I think it's got a wider reach, but I just don't think we've properly marketed it. So I'll give you an example. When I had my own radio station, it there was an element of broadcasting over DAB, which is very expensive. And had the lit tag and the ability for me to broadcast over the lit tag itself, I would have used that because that's a web-based function. It was much cheaper, but it wasn't there when I started. And I think we're seeing so many radio stations close down because of the cost, because of all of those issues around broadcasting. But I do think those radio stations could come back as community radio stations and broadcast over the live item tag and at very little cost. And I think there is a massive opportunity to bring that back where small community radio becomes something that is broadcast live, that people tune into, that they get a pod ping from, etc. etc. etc. So I do think there is a massive market opportunity. I just don't think it's been presented properly and marketed to a wider audience yet.

SPEAKER_03 54:40

Yeah, I think you're right. One thing I've always believed is that you can't stop social momentum from happening, but you also can't make it happen. There's a certain, I don't know, laws of sociology this would encompass, but there just seems to be a certain way that social movements and things happen over time. One group or individual has very little control over all of it. And I think like what you're describing with broadcast radio is obviously it's been quote dying for a long time. And our Mine Adams other project, Godcaster, that we've picked up over the last year and a half, or I guess maybe it's been two years, I don't even remember now. But trying to bring Christian radio stations or really religious radio stations of any stripe into the digital age and give them an on-demand catalog of podcasting and a live broadcasting platform. We still keep pushing this and we see very much that industry it's moving, but it is so glacially slow because for so many reasons. Large investments in in broad linear broadcasting infrastructure age. Some people who have been in religious broadcasting for a long time, they're really not in a hurry. They're more in a hurry to retire than they are to do some sort of huge flip-flop of everything they've known for the last 40 years. And so there's a lot of things going on, and we're trying to change that because for the exactly what you said, local focused small radio footprints I think can be very profitable, but you have to engage in a different way. And at least in the US, the old territorial broadcast format is just dying, man. It's just like there's just cobwebs over there. And if we could just sometimes you just want to bang your head against the wall and say, look, there's this great solution. It's right here, it's called podcasting. And there's all the infrastructure's already built out. You can just slide your signal over here into this podcasting world where you get a live stream and you get on demand and you get all these things. It's just so fully baked already. Why are you so committed to this broadcast signal? But it's just so hard to it's so hard to move things like that.

Sam Sethi 57:05

I think it's moving. James recently reported in his Radio Land newsletter that for the first time ever, on demand exceeded live broadcast radio in terms of the market share. So that's quite a big statement. I think even James was quite shocked by the information he got back there.

SPEAKER_03 57:22

So Oh, yeah, we shared that internally, and that's something that we're gonna have to be telling to the radio stations that we work with is we're gonna put that information in front of them and say, hey, it's no longer about do you want to try this new thing? It's now what are you gonna do with this information that shows you that you have X many days to live? That's uh that's it's Adam has always said that Christian radio will be the background music that they play in the lobby of heaven. It's because everybody's dying that listens to it. I think all the infrastructure that's needed to bring a radio station, whether it's Christian or any other flavor of radio, all the infrastructure that's needed to have a seamless transition over into the digital world, specifically podcasting. I think it's already exists. You can do it right this second. You just have to pull the trigger.

Sam Sethi 58:15

Five years ago, I did 40 live shows a week with my radio station. We used a service called Woshka that Spotify subsequently bought, but that took the live feed that we had, the Shoutcast live feed, with a schedule and it automatically turned those into podcasts on Apple and Spotify for us. Did Omni buy them? No, Spotify bought them, uh sadly, and never did anything with them. But Woshka out of Australia was the company we used, and it worked really well. So it had a live show, 40 minutes. Soon as the show finished, Woshka would take the recording, turn it into a podcast, put our cover up for that show, and distribute it for us. And it worked, and we did that so well, and it was easy to do. I still I'm quite amazed that yet today many radio stations don't do that.

SPEAKER_03 58:56

Hey, you could vibe code that in a weekend. Now you can, yeah. With a whisper server. Yeah, there's no barrier to this stuff anymore.

Micropayments And The Stablecoin Bet

Sam Sethi 59:03

Now, one of the other things you said was the namespace was started to do something called micropayments, and we've been pushing the rock up the hill with micropayments, Bitcoin, SATS, as they're called, and we had some real momentum, I think, at one point, about two years, three years ago, I think there was money flowing around the ecosystem. People were getting wallets, people were sharing money with creators, so fans were rewarding them, there was value for value, it was all looking good. And then there was a little bit of let's call it legal crashing going on where people saw the threat and suddenly lobbyists were put in place and suddenly there was licenses required and the brakes or the drawbridge was pulled up. Let's not revisit all of that. But where do you think because Mark Andreessen, who used to be the CEO of Netscape, has said on numerous occasions that his biggest regret was never creating a micropayment system for the web. And the work that you and Adam did was a great step towards creating that micropayment system, and it was working. Even though technically it worked, I think people didn't fully understand it. I think it was complex in some of its how do you get a wallet, KYC, know your customer, bring this, bring that, do this, scratch your head, and then eventually you could then get some money. But if we fast forward to today, what do you as the pod sage see? Where do you see micropayments going forward now? Is there anything that you think, yeah, that's how it's gonna become successful, or have we missed the boat?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:38

It's so hard to predict because what we ran into is what all of these kinds of things are gonna run into, and that's fees, which international banking and financial firms are not gonna be willing to give up. And it's not a technology issue. It's a regulation issue. That's what killed a lot of the simplicity of what we were doing at the beginning with Bitcoin micropayments. And now one thing is we have stablecoin and that's becoming more accessible. And so I think if there's a programmable money micropayment technology that can work, it's probably gonna ultimately be around stablecoin. Even in the US, which is probably as Bitcoin friendly of a country as you can get amongst the top ten economies, it's still we can't even pass the Clarity Act or anything. It's type of legislation. So I think that whole thing is murky, but stable coins maybe that may work.

Sam Sethi 1:01:34

It's the stuff I'm looking at. I think Stripe with stablecoin, I think OpenUSD, I think MasterCard and Visa are getting involved. I think there's stuff coming. My vision or hope or belief is that my checking account, my bank will give me both a fiat currency account and also a digital payment account, and I'll be able to move money between the two freely without fees, and then I'll have an element of stable coins in my digital wallet that I can then take to e-commerce sites or even my agentic AI. Let's really go into the future. But the idea fundamentally is that I think it'll be my bank that will provide me with that digital wallet that I will be able to then use a protocol like OpenUSD with a stablecoin to allow me to make those micropayments. But I think we're still 18 months to two years away before that all fits into place.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:25

Oh, I think at least, yeah. Banks just do not want to give up these fees. It's such a huge revenue source for them. And they're gonna have to see the huge fight against the Clarity Act and the stable coins in the US has come from the banks. The big banks fought tooth and nail to block that bill, and what they found the most reprehensible in it was being able to give bonuses and interest on stablecoin holdings. And because that's their turf, man. They don't want to give that up. I think that's what was the most disappointing about we know I act like it's dead. There's still micropayments floating from TrueFans and Fountain and all kinds of podcast apps. That technology still works. It still works every single minute of the day. It's crazy to watch. But I think people are down on it now because halfway to wholesale adoption has just gotten so much harder with all the regulation. And that's the disappointing part. It was never a tech issue. This is all everything that's hurt that technology has always just been a regulation issue. But you know what? You start messing with money, you run that risk.

Marketing Podcasting 2.0 Without Hype

Sam Sethi 1:03:30

Last question, Zendave. One of the biggest disappointments for me has been, I guess, the marketing of podcasting 2.0, the wider adoption and awareness of what has gone on in the last five years. And I say that as somebody who got involved with the podcast standards project, somebody who was very excited when Daniel J. Lewis and James Cridlin started the podcast 2.0.org website to explain some of this stuff as a marketing front end. But I don't really feel that we've really got beyond the bubble or the fishbowl that we all live in the geek world. And I say that because I've gone to the podcast movement and the Ambies, and I've been in the queue with people waiting to go in to collect their awards and stuff. Hey, do you know about this? No, no, no idea. Swahili. I could be talking anything. And I've done that at the London Podcast Show, and you talk to the organisers, and there's no interest in them having technical sessions or threads about it, and it just ends up being AI, video, uh, advertising. And you think, no, there's more to podcasting this. And you you talked about YouTube and Netflix getting into podcasting with inverted commas. Because the marketing teams there understood that the word podcasting was shorthand for two people talking on a mic, not that it was RSS. Because as I said to James last week, if we don't, I guess, protect or save RSS from the likes of proprietary platforms, then and insist that podcasting is only podcasting if it has an RSS feed. And I think all the work that we've done with the namespace, all the work that we're doing with the extensions becomes immaterial because they are included within the RSS. If it's I and I get angry with people like Apple and Spotify and YouTube using proprietary APIs and not the alternative enclosure to use video within. And they can, they know they can, they choose not to, and they hide behind things like it might have porn in it. There's ways to detect that. I must give them a hat tip because they did use the alternative enclosure. But here's my question Have we created too big an elephant? I put a post up on Muston this week, it was basically we've created 28 tanks, we've created a lot of hard technical work. It all works, and the people behind it are brilliant. But we haven't told people it's like we've built this amazing car, but we never gave it a manual for how to drive it. We don't have any way that we have broken it down. Now, hosts understand it because they're technical. Apps understand it because they're technical. But podcast create I don't think people are understanding some of the uh value that they will get by adding these tags to their RSS feed. And my my last point, and and then I'll hand over to you is I've been in marketing for many years, and the way that I wanted to do this was to break this down into smaller bite-sized chunks so that we can market and nobody seems to want to do that. In the Mastodon, it was very clear back to me that no, this is not what we want to do. And I was like, okay, back off. But I don't know then how are we gonna get mass adoption? We said just now people didn't pick up on micropayments because it was either too complex or not known about. We talked about lit. It's either too complex or not known about. And I worry that we're gonna do all this great work, and then as you said, ten years from now, look back and go, didn't really get picked up. Is it the marketing of what we have to do now? Because we've done all the tech. You said it yourself, Dave. It's a drip now of new tags. Three years it was mad, and now it's drip drip, maybe one tag here, one tag there. So have we done all the technical hard work, but we're not doing the shouting about it in the marketing sense?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:22

Is that the problem that's left? I don't think that it's a marketing problem. I I think that the marketing now hang with me here. I think that marketing could actually produce the opposite result of what we want. And what I'm saying is if you go out and you market hard, so there's this concept of I've always liked this term, is what you sell them with is what you sell them to. So if you sell somebody on the idea that a certain thing is going to be really good for them and their pri they should put it in their product and it's gonna have it's gonna do this and this. If that doesn't materialize, then they are going to be disappointed and they're going to walk away with a bad taste in their mouths mouth saying, I did all the things you told me to do. I spent all this time putting this feature into my product to support this tag or this podcast in 2.0 feature, and it didn't pan out. And so the next time you come to me and tell me how to do something, then you can take a hike. And I think that is always a danger with marketing, and it explains a little bit to why I personally, I can't speak for Adam, have always been reticent to go and try to find people to push features on and try to get them to adopt things. Because uh, if on the other hand, somebody comes across the podcast namespace when they're looking to do a new feature in their product or looking to build a product from scratch, they come across the podcast namespace and it's got these 28 tags in it. They're like, whoa, look at all that look at all of this stuff. Look at all these things that you can put into a podcast. Maybe they focus on one or two things because it fits with the overall goal of their product. Maybe they focus on a couple of those features and they really dig deep and they figure out some novel way to use these feature, to use that feature, that one or two features. Maybe they figure out some real cool, surprising, novel way to use that, and it takes off for them and becomes a real standout thing that makes their product shine and gets them a lot of traction. Now that person, you have won them, and you did no marketing. What happened was they invested their own mental life and elbow grease in the thing you made, and they had success from it. If they don't have success from it, then they tried it wasn't you, maybe they just didn't do it well, whatever. Everybody has false stars. So I think marketing can be a two-edged sword, and I believe that now specifically, with all the AI coding and that kind of stuff that's going on, you look two, three years ago, had somebody like Barry from Podhom who really wanted to go all in on all the podcasting 2.0 features. It took him months and years to get all that stuff situated. These days, you could just point you're bobcoding a new app and you point it at the namespace documentation, it's done. You gotta proof of concept. So I I think the barrier to entry is now very low. But also so we don't know what the next few years are gonna bring, is what I'm saying. It could bring an explosion of adoption that we are not prepared for. But also I think the people who create the tech and this maybe this only applies to f to to open source software, I don't know. The people who create the tech. You can't become too married to the outcome. All you can do is make sure that you've built the most technically sound, reliable thing that you can think of. And then what the market does with it and how it succeeds, you can't control that. You can't control that. That's in the hands of other people and it'll work out or it won't. But if you invest too much of yourself in it, then I think that could potentially have negatives.

Where To Follow Dave Jones

Sam Sethi 1:11:49

As I said, I could talk to you for hours. It's been a pleasure talking to you. If people want to know more about the podcast index, more about what you've been doing with the podping, the new distributed version, and the namespace, where would they go?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:05

Oh, listen to our show first, the podcasting2.0. Most Fridays, almost every Friday, sometimes we take breaks, but most Fridays at 1230 Central we do it live, and probably be the best place to catch up, and then podcast index, obviously, and then our Mastodon, which is podcastindex.social. I'm Dave at podcastindex.social, and there's always a party there going on talking about something.

Sam Sethi 1:12:30

Dave Jones, thank you so much for all the hard work you've put in over the years, and uh yeah, hopefully we'll catch up with you soon, mate. Take care.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:36

Yep. Thanks now.

Announcer 1:12:38

The Pod News Weekly Review with Buzz Sprout with Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Global Podcast Data And Regional Reality

James Cridland 1:12:46

Right, let's go around the world. We will uh start in where shall we start? The US. Paul Rissmandel writing in the Triton blog about podcasting is global, research should be too. But one of the things that is in there is I found actually quite interesting. YouTube, yes, is number one for podcasts in the US. And so therefore, everybody assumes that YouTube is number one for podcasts pretty well everywhere. It's not number one for podcasts in Australia, for example. So actually, having data which is from each individual country is a very useful thing because you begin to understand that actually different countries are different. So that was a good reminder, I think, from Paul in terms of that. Obviously, as you can tell from this show, I'm I normally am in Australia and Sam is in the UK. Neither of us are based in the US. So hopefully you're going to get a more global view in terms of that. But uh yes, that's uh but that's certainly a thing.

Sam Sethi 1:13:49

Now, talking about going around the world, one of the people who regularly contributes to Pod News Weekly Review has written a report about what Asia should take from the global podcast playbook.

James Cridland 1:14:01

Yes, this is this is Guan Junyo, and yes, he has uh written a ton of very useful information about uh actually how different Asia is. And for example, Asia actually is much more relaxed about AI and AI hosts than than the US, for example, is. And so actually, you're probably going to see much more AI stuff happening out of many countries in Asia, uh, just purely because that they have a different view of that sort of thing. So it's a good, it's a good article. It's worth a read. You'll find it in the pod news uh newsletter, of course, talking about AI. Uh Edison Research releasing a little bit of information. Hands off my host, AI. 66% of weekly podcast listeners reacted negatively to the idea of an AI host, to most saying that they would feel betrayed. There is another slice of research as part of that data, I'm told, which actually also says that 50% of podcast listeners would be quite happy with AI hosts. So watch this space in terms of some of the data which is there. More people jumping into podcasting in Holl in Holland, the Dutch streaming service Videoland, which is, you know, a streaming service for folks in the Netherlands. They are, guess what, adding podcasts from the 8th of October. Not quite sure what podcasts they are adding, but nevertheless, you know, they are adding some, which is interesting. Lots of stuff from the UK, including Goalhanger, bringing their ad sales fully in-house next year. I mean, well, why why would the director of commercial operations at Goalhanger suddenly want to pull all of that stuff in-house? But I guess it's because the company is big enough now, so they've actually got quite a lot of information there. That was an interesting uh move, I thought, Sam, wasn't it?

Sam Sethi 1:15:53

Yeah, and I think, you know, it again, it makes sense as they grow. Uh, they've got more control over it. Throughout October, the company will be briefing agencies and client partners on its commercial proposition for 2027, including plans for goal hanger up fronts as well. So, you know, watch this space if you're an agency. I'm sure you'll be looking out for that invite.

James Cridland 1:16:14

Yeah, well, they're certainly big enough. Ofcom, which is the UK media regulator, has reported some nice data about UK podcast listening, doubling since 2019, apparently. It is now 43% when video podcast viewing is included. 27% of adults now listen to podcasts each week. I think that those figures are low, and I think that we've seen other figures from the UK which are rather higher. But uh nice to uh see those uh figures anyway. They've also released a ton of other nice research all about podcast listening. Podcast, and quite a lot of this is from Rajar and from other studies that we've already seen. So if you take a look at podcast listening as a percentage of all audio, for example, then podcast listening is now 11% in the UK. It's 20% in the US. So there's um clearly still quite a lot of space to grow there. But this is the sort of thing that we should be measuring rather than people who have ever listened to a podcast, in my humble opinion. But a ton of data in the Ofcom information, including video, obviously becoming a more prominent part of podcast consumption, they say. More than two-thirds of podcast listeners consume shows that also offer video, which is interesting. 44% saying that video podcasts are more engaging. Apparently, it's much more engaging to look at two people: one person in an office in Marlowe, one person in a hotel room in central London. Apparently, this is much more engaging than just listening to it. But anyway, there we are. Um The United States in the United States sounds profitable, released uh the podcast landscape 2026. And as mentioned earlier, overall reach of podcasting remains steady at 74% of all Americans, that is ever. 34% of podcast consumers say that they started consuming podcasts within the past year. That's up from 28% in 2025. What I would like to know is of that 34%, what platforms are they using? Because my suspicion is Apple is already number four in terms of a platform that uh people have used in the US. So Apple is already a laggard 15%. But my suspicion is that if you look at the last year, my suspicion is probably Apple's pretty well nowhere. And it certainly won't be fourth, it'll be considerably further back, in my humble opinion. But it would be lovely to see some of that data. Where do you think new podcast listeners are coming from, uh, Sam? How are they how are they consuming?

Sam Sethi 1:18:54

Uh yeah, I I I think you know they're gonna go to YouTube. I mean, I look at my own 20-year-old and all their friends, a YouTube, YouTube video, video, video, and yeah, Apple doesn't register at all with them. I mean, again, I I've said that the entry drug is music and Apple has disparate parts. So nobody I know in that age group goes to Apple Music and then comes out and then goes into podcasts and then comes out and goes into books. You know, they want Spotify, that's it. Yeah, I'll know that things have changed when the YouTube premium uh subscription I pay for and the Spotify subscription I pay for changes to can we have Apple? That's never been asked in my household for a premium subscription.

James Cridland 1:19:40

Well, that's uh that that there's an interesting question, isn't it? Yes. And um and one other thing in Africa, the Nigerian Podcast Index has released its 2026 Industry Report. Quite interesting, showing that there are many more podcasts in Nigeria, which is a large old place, but that the number of podfaded shows has also significantly increased. So shows that people started but uh haven't actually but haven't actually continued. So uh you can read the entire industry report if you uh follow the link from the pod news newsletter and uh Tony Doe has done a fantastic job with that too. So, yes, lots of stuff going on around the world, Sam. Indeed.

Sam Sethi 1:20:22

I think overall we'd say more video, more podcast listening overall, but podcasting is still audio first, and yes, people don't want AI hosts.

Apple Podcasts Curation Vs Algorithms

James Cridland 1:20:32

Uh in terms of uh people muse, what have I got here? I've got a ton of um interesting things. Now, one thing that um I was just sort of curious about Nicole Johnson, who I've never heard of before, but she was working at Apple Podcasts in the content strategy and programming team. That's Apple Podcasts Content Strategy and Programming Team. She's wrapped up her time at the company. There was a long, fulsome, excited LinkedIn with saying how much that she had enjoyed working at the company. And I I thought it was an interesting read because she talks about loads of people at Apple who are working on the editorial in within the Apple Podcasts app. People like Becky Celestina, uh, Greg Herman, Stacey Bond, Hilo, Kimura, and and other people, and talking about you know how much you know hard work that they end up doing. And I thought that it was interesting, because firstly, lots of names that we are completely unaware of. I've tried to interview people from the content team at Apple Podcasts and got a robust no from uh Apple PR. But also, secondly, I don't know about you, Sam, but whenever I'm opening Apple Podcasts, if you ever open Apple Podcasts, I'm seeing a much more algorithmic view and seeing much less curated stuff that has been curated by the Apple local teams. It always struck me that Apple actually had a very local view, and you could open Apple Podcasts, and there would be for you lots of stuff from the UK, for me lots of stuff from Australia. And now I'm most definitely seeing a very algorithmic thing, which is very different to the view that you get when you're not signed in and you're having a look at it on the web. So I'm kind of wondering what's going on there.

Sam Sethi 1:22:17

Surely well, iOS yeah, the iOS 27.2 beta that just dropped changed the UI within the Apple Podcast app from what we had before, you know, and that has gone very algorithmic, and you are seeing much more of a programmatic view of what you get. I think in the past we've talked about the best way that you could have got onto the front page of Spotify or Apple was to find people like Nicole Johnson, wine and dine them, and then get to be on that page by sending them, oh, new episode of my latest podcast. Can you chuck that on the front page? And I know that for fact because I've spoken to a few production companies who used to do that quite well. So maybe this is the way that Apple says, you know, we need to streamline it, but also we need to make sure that it's consistent across the globe.

James Cridland 1:23:09

Yes, and and and I think that you know that will be a mistake. I mean, Canadians don't want, I listened to a very uh engaging Canadian speaking yesterday at the conference that I'm here for, and Canadians don't want US content. They really do not want US content. It's a bit like giving the enemy's content right now. And but but you know, the algorithm is just spewing up the same old big US shows. So I think it's I mean, it's such a miss. If you've got all of these great people who are around the world, and the and there's and there's Kate in Australia who does a fantastic job. I met somebody else from Japan recently who works at Apple Podcasts and works on the curation there. It seems such a such a misstep to then hide that behind algorithmic stuff, so that actually that work isn't actually seen. I was talking to a producer yesterday and he said, well, why not both? Why not have the algorithmic feed? Of course, you know, shows selected for you, but then also be able to see what the Apple uh editorial team have also highlighted because uh some of that stuff is really, really good. It seems such a missed opportunity. But anyway, so that's part of the of the people.

Sam Sethi 1:24:19

Well, I was gonna say No, I was gonna say, one of my well, I'm old enough to know this. I was around before the the internet. Yes, that old. And one of my joys used to be going around the world discovering uh new cultures, new music, new foods, right? Because you didn't know about it, you you landed somewhere and it was like, oh, I don't know anything about this. And one of my biggest hates now as somebody who loves music is you go onto something like Spotify and the amorphous top five are there, you know, Bruno, Taylor, Ed, blah blah blah, right? And it's global, it doesn't matter. You can say, right, show me what's going hot in New Zealand, uh same shit, you know, and that's the problem. I think this feels like that's what we're gonna end up with. You said the Canadians don't want American stuff, but I think we're gonna get homogenization of podcast content because that's really what you know reach for those podcasts is all about, and that's what it's gonna be, I think.

James Cridland 1:25:17

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a I think it's a bit of a shame, but but still there we are. I was just fact-checking the internet or ARPANET was invented on the 29th of October 1969. There you go. So uh facts checked. Um a few other things going on. Yes, and I am still older than that. Yes. A few other things going on. The Anklers like and subscribe suggests that Netflix is hiring for a new head of Inverted Commerce Podcast, closing verticommas. Those are my inverted commas because Netflix doesn't do podcasts. And Michael Mignano, the founder of Anchor, who, if you remember, wrote this thing uh showing how little he understood about RSS. Uh anyway, he is back. He's launched a thing called Supertake. Imagine the worst thing, and then and then times it by three, because that's what you've got here. It quote, leverages frontier AI and trading agents to transform your unique takes on the world into real shareable investment portfolios. So basically, if you think that the future of the whole world is the colour red, then it can actually find all companies with red logos and invest in them or that sort of thing. So uh yes, well done, Michael Mignano. Keep on doing that. Thanks very much.

Awards, People Moves, Industry Notes

James Cridland 1:26:33

I think my edit was yes, yes, correct. Correct. It's been uh it's been a week for awards, quite a lot of awards being announced. The Black Podcasting Awards announced earlier on in the week. And last night, the British Podcast Awards were also revealed at Indigo at the O2 here in London. I was not there because I was very tired. But uh the podcast of the year went to Hold or Fold by the Prison Radio Association. The Prison Radio Association is a fantastic organization, really, really clever. It is there that makes it makes great audio for people in prison, but also helps the prisoners make great audio for people in prison. It's a really interesting thing. And hold or fold uh looks like an interesting idea. It explores gambling harm through the lens of the criminal justice system. So to have a podcast like that, winning podcast of the year, instead of a vacuous celebrity talking to other vacuous celebrities in a, you know, in a set to made to look like somebody's front room, that is a wonderful thing. So many congratulations to the PRA for that. You have already added a playlist for the Black Podcasting Awards, I notice, on TrueFans, which is nice.

Sam Sethi 1:27:53

Yeah, no, we do that. It's thanks to somebody called James Cridlin with OPML, I think. Yes. It's very nice of you to add the OPML to the Pod News Daily website.

James Cridland 1:28:03

Well, there you go. So there'll be one of those. It's my life much easier. There'll be one of those with the British Podcast Awards, I'm sure, coming up. Yes. So that's all good. Many congratulations also to Dino Sophos, who I caught up with yesterday, of course, founder of Persiphonica, but also founder of the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield. He has been honoured as a fellow of the Audio Academy, which is the UK charity for much of the Audio Academy, alongside uh Tony Phillips, who was always a very clever man working for BBC Radio 4 when I was there, and Pominda Katkar, who is also a former trustee of the Audio Academy, as am I, and she's a co-founder of True Thought Productions. So there you go.

Events And Conference Watchlist

James Cridland 1:28:47

Events, James. What's going on, mate? Events, yes, events. So, Podcast Movement. If you want to go and watch all of that, you can watch every single session, 82 different sessions from Podcast Mus Movement, New York City. That is all on uh YouTube. Uh, quite a lot of it is just single camera, but it's uh still very useful, so worthwhile popping on to end up uh seeing. Uh Pod Summit is happening in Calgary in a couple of weeks' time. I was there last year, won't be there this year, but I noticed that Justin Jackson will be there this year, and he will be there with his boundless enthusiasm and his positivity. So you should go there too. It's in the Grand, which is a good, I was gonna say old-fashioned theatre. It looks old-fashioned from the outside, but it's brand new inside, and very nice it is too, in uh Calgary in Alberta.

Tool Updates For Creators And Hosts

Announcer 1:29:33

The Tech Stuff. On the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:29:37

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. Buzzsprout have been busy, haven't they, our sponsor?

Sam Sethi 1:29:44

Yeah, they they've updated their embed player to give you more control over how your podcast looks on your website. New styles, new colour options, new preview tools. Yes, so if you want to go and get an embed player for your website and you're a host with BuzzSprout, then there you go.

James Cridland 1:30:03

Excellent. I also noticed that the iPhone Duo Simulator is out, which is uh Which is a thrill. Amazon are doing some interesting things.

Sam Sethi 1:30:13

Come on, James. Get with the future.

James Cridland 1:30:16

Amazon are doing some interesting things in terms of Amazon Music for Fire TV. They are basically adding uh video podcasts into that. I was surprised that it wasn't in there, but apparently it's uh it's scheduled to launch this fall, it says. So there'll be uh commit committing to a date there.

Sam Sethi 1:30:34

I love it. Committing to a date.

James Cridland 1:30:36

That's commitment for you. But yes, so they are building them directly, building video podcasts directly into a TV interface, which is uh nice. You will also be able to ask your small Jeff Bezos spy called Alexa, you'll be able to ask that for a podcast by title or creator. Amazon says you'll be taken directly to the content. Everybody else knows that you'll be taken directly to a random song on Spotify that you didn't ask for. Um but still that's basically how that works. Podogy has released a uh fundamentally redesigned platform. I get the feeling that the folks at Podygy have discovered AI coding. Have you had a chance to take a peek at this yet, Stan?

Sam Sethi 1:31:19

No, no, I I'm not. No. Tell me more though. Go on.

James Cridland 1:31:23

Well, quite a lot of it is that they've done some new analytics work, they've done some new uh work in terms of uh this is a Podiggy MCP server. There's tools for recording as well as uh obviously hosting, distribution, analytics, content repurposing, and monetizing, all built in. So they've basically rebuilt the entire thing from the uh ground up. They're a very good company based in in Berlin, in Germany, and they seem to know exactly what they're doing. So always worth a peek on that. And uh talking about you know rewrites and new stuff, Flightcast has added a smart thing that they're calling collaborative publishing, and essentially it means that if if I'm in there editing the title for this show and you're in there editing the title for this show, then one of us isn't going to overwrite the other one, which is uh very good.

Sam Sethi 1:32:15

So well, clearly we will at some point because one of us has to make a commit. Well, yeah, we can't have two titles, unless we're doing YouTube A B testing, in which case I can have one and you can have one.

James Cridland 1:32:25

No, I think uh I think the the there's some quite smart things that it's currently working on. It'll show you, you know, a bit like Google Docs, it'll show you, oh, Sam Sathy is editing this field at the moment and that sort of thing, which is quite nice. So so hurrah to Flightcast and of course Rox Codes is our latest power supporter. So hurrah for our still our favorite person until we get another. So uh so that's what he was fourth. He hasn't quite made one yet, has he? Oh, fourth, fourth favourite podcast hosting company, yes. Yes, exactly. Yes, yeah, yeah. He hasn't made one yet. Not yet, not yet. No, absolutely. There are a couple of other you know tools out there. Podcasts to text, for example, is one of those. Polyglot is another one which translates your uh captions, which is quite a nice idea. The the podcast transcript tag does actually have in there a language, a language tag, so you can potentially put your transcripts in three different languages or four different languages in your RSS feed if you wanted to, so that people in Germany could read the transcripts for from this show, but read them in German, uh, which sounds like quite a nice idea. I'm not sure that anybody is supporting that yet, but anyway, Polyglot is a new translation tool which should allow you to end up doing that. So uh yes, and I I posted something about QR codes, Sam.

QR Codes And The llms.txt Trend

Sam Sethi 1:33:51

Yeah, well, you did. I mean, you've been working on your website, and you said it turns out that Lossless WebP is about a quarter the size of a lossy one. And I was like, well, what have you been doing, James? And then more interesting for me is you've been working with a little txt file. So tell me more about both.

James Cridland 1:34:08

Yes, so I have a script that outputs QR codes on the Pod News website. If you go to a podcast page on desktop and you want to listen to that particular show, then there's a QR code there, and you can click on that and it will open that uh particular podcast in your podcast app on your phone. And anyway, I thought that you know WebP is a is a good image format, and I thought, well, I should just use the lossy version of that, and that'll look great. Anyway, it turns out that if you output that as lossless, then it's about a third or a quarter of the size. So much, much smaller, works much better. So if you're producing QR codes, don't put them into a lossy thing like JPEG, put them into lossless, because that works better. The other thing that uh you you you just talked about there is uh the lms.txt file, which is a it's it's it seems to be emerging into a standard, and it's a markdown file that you can link to, which is basically a manual on how to use your podcast for an AI scraper or for an AI uh agent. So if you go to podnews.net slash llms.text, then you'll see the one that that uh I put together. There appears to be a standard in terms of what it should look like with headings and links in markdown format and everything else. And so I've basically put you know a bunch of of detail in there. I have no idea whether people are actually using it, but it is a standard, and the standard is now being checked by Google's Lighthouse if you end up using that. So I thought, well, you know, worthwhile updating it. It'll only take a couple of minutes. So we'll see what happens there.

Sam Sethi 1:35:58

Has it got a field in that file that says bugger off?

James Cridland 1:36:02

Well, under the under the heading podcast directory, it says, do not use this website as a directory of podcasts. It is incomplete and not intended for use as a directory. For a directory of podcasts, you want to look at podcast index, where there is a freely downloadable database and a full API. Here is the full downloadable database. Do not use the podcast website looking for a podcast directory. You will be quickly rate limited and it will not work reliably for your user, which is pretty well saying bugger off in terms of that. And similarly, there's something under the search heading that says you may not use our search engine. So as I say, I don't know whether anybody uses it, but no harm in at least trying and writing the information that if if a well-behaved scraper was going to read it, would actually be able to use that. So yeah, who knows?

Sam Sethi 1:36:53

Now, one of the things that Dave Jones and I spoke about was what was his favourite tag, the lit tag, and on Mastodon, I got people saying, I don't like live podcasting. And I'm like, Well, you don't like it, I do, tough. And and I own a podcasting app, so I'm adding it. So there you go. Um build your own one if you want. Wow.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:16

I've got nothing against it, it's just a waste of time, but I've got nothing against it. That's fine.

Sam Sethi 1:37:24

But one of the things Dave Jones and I talked about was a slowdown in the number of tags that are actually coming out of the podcast community right now. And one new tag that Dave's very keen on to get into the next phase is something called the contact tag. Something that Daniel J. Lewis and Alex San Filipe have been working on. It looks quite simple to implement, looks quite good, and Daniel's done some good UI mock-ups to show you what it might look like. We're currently, as true fans, implementing this at the moment so that people can have a working model to play with. It's a great way of just saying, look, if you want to have feedback, here's my email, here's my voicemail, here's a link to the show, here's my sponsor, if you want me to be a guest, or if you want to come on my show. So again, lots of little bits of info. So yeah, it seems quite easy to put together. We're gonna try it, probably have a working thing for people to play with next week.

James Cridland 1:38:20

Very nice, very nice.

Sam Sethi 1:38:23

And lastly, something I spotted, uh X402, which is basically started off with Cloudflare and Coinbase working on it, was an update to L402, which is what the Lightning Network used. It looks like the X42 now supports the Lightning Network as well. They've merged together the two specifications. This along with something called Open USD, which is a group of about a hundred different payment companies. Look, I'm keeping an eye on this. I don't have a definitive this is how micro payments will work in the future, but the arrow of direction seems positive that X402 may be the way we go. It may be the way because big companies like Google, Visa, and Stripe are now using it. So watch this space. We'll talk about it more when there's something much more tangible to

Voicemails, Live Debate, Contingency Talk

Sam Sethi 1:39:14

say.

Announcer 1:39:14

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

Sam Sethi 1:39:28

James, let's go and have a look. What's in the inbox? Any voicemails?

James Cridland 1:39:33

Yes, uh, we've got two voicemails. Firstly, here's a voicemail from Greg Glende at ACAST.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:41

Hello, James and Sam, longtime listener, first-time caller. This is Greg Glende with ACast. And I'm actually responding to a previous caller's voicemail. Neil from Podmastery, you know, implied politely that maybe the podcast pulse research that we commissioned was designed to boost our fledgling video business. In actuality, it's the complete opposite. We've been running this research for a couple years now, and video is becoming more and more prominent in the research. So we're basically a mirror to the industry. Our product roadmap is based on the research and what we hear from creators, advertisers, and audiences. So again, research guiding the product roadmap, not product guiding the research. I thought it was important to clear that up. And I hope you guys have a great weekend. Thanks.

James Cridland 1:40:31

Thank you, Greg. Yes, worthwhile bearing in mind that actually some of that research, just because you commissioned it, doesn't mean that you get to choose what the research actually says at the end of the day. So thank you for that, Greg. Much, much appreciated. ACast uh having a good time of it right now. And talking about Neil Velio, here he is.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:51

Hi James, hi Sam, it's Neil Vellio from Podnos here. Sorry that this voicemail is getting to you quite late. I didn't have much of a voice until this morning. Uh just referring to your live streaming bit last week, where James, you said live streaming isn't podcasting, and Sam says it all works over RSS. Well look, I did morning radio from the mid-90s, so I'm about to be insufferable and say, you're both right. And get this radio shows kind of land in podcast feeds every day, and nobody asks whether they were live at the time. The broadcast is radio, the file is the podcast. Live is a very different job with no edit to hide behind. And I reckon that loads of podcasters have never had to do that. So two things to argue about. If a live show lands in the feed an hour later, is the live bit part of the podcast or just how it was made? And Sam, if nobody's asking for live, who's it then for? The listener or the host who misses having a room?

Sam Sethi 1:41:50

Yes, I agree, but and Sam said, if nobody's asking for live, who's it for then? Look, I think we are going to see look, YouTube's doing a lot of work with live. We the the recent upgrades that they've just done. I look at uh companies in my competitive space like Substack who are doing a ton of work with live and made it super easy. I still think we're missing the boat here in the podcast world. I think we haven't made it easy, I think it's in fact hard. And Dave Jones said the lit tag is his favourite tag. Look, every Friday night I listen to the podcasting 2.0 show, I give them live feedback. I then, if I miss it, can catch it on demand. I don't get the issue. It's not one or the other. You know, you can have both. And for people who are in radio, look, when I had River Radio, my own station, we did 40 live shows and then we turned them into podcasts. It's not half this stuff. That was five, six years ago. So I don't know why we're slow and dragging our knuckles. People say they don't want it, that's fine. People who do want it, I think we've got to do a better job because we're letting them go to other platforms and not to the podcast community.

James Cridland 1:43:01

Yes. Well, there we are. I mean, it's uh it's I think live is interesting when you live in the other side of the world and you have a time zone which is uh quite hard for anything live, then you realise that actually live probably isn't a particularly exciting thing. And I think certainly if you take a look at the you know, the average podcast gets around a hundred downloads, the chances of people joining you live are quite low for the average podcast. And I think that that does mean that you'll end up with just you know people literally broadcasting to nobody. So, you know, I I I can see both sides of it, but I'm not I'm not sure that I'm particularly excited about live. But if other people are excited about live, then great.

Sam Sethi 1:43:47

I used to sit on a radio station and and wonder if anyone was listening. I'd be like, okay, you get no feedback, nothing. Yes, you know, but you still broadcast it, you still put it out there.

James Cridland 1:43:57

Yes, but I I suppose the difference is you can actually see whether anybody's connected to your live stream. Which is uh which is always the difference. Which is always the difference.

Sam Sethi 1:44:06

Uh ignorance was bliss.

James Cridland 1:44:08

Well, yes, yes, indeed. Indeed. Uh and one more piece of voicemail, this one's anonymous. I have no idea who this is.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:15

But anyway, they say You know, I can't be the only one who's wondered this before. But what's the contingency plan with Pod News and Pod News Weekly? You know, uh Sam, from what I know, is going off and hiking on these crazy mountains, and James is constantly pissing off a bunch of very powerful organizations. So I just can't help but wonder what's the contingency plan? And it's also coming from a place of just pure selfishness because I can't see a future where pod news, pod news weekly is not in my life, you know? So um from one very morbid, curious uh fan, I'm just curious, like, what's the plan if you feel like sharing? And don't come after me. I I promise that this is well intentioned. Okay.

James Cridland 1:45:15

Well, uh, contingency plans, my goodness, I think you have spotted the the hole in my business strategy in that there is no contingency plan for me. Um and the problem that the pod news daily newsletter has is that the only person that knows how the system works and that can actually send out an email is me, which is good news for privacy, it's good news for lots of reasons, but it's bad news in terms of, you know, if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow or whatever it is, then that's pod news gone until such time as I recover and can and can start putting it back again. So I do think that a contingency plan is something well worth, you know, having a having a think about. I don't know what the contingency plan for for for TrueFans is either, Sam.

Sam Sethi 1:46:04

No, nor do I. No, well. But I thought you had a contingency plan. I thought you were training her up. I thought your uh Christmas specials with your daughter was training for the future.

James Cridland 1:46:15

Yes, no, I don't think that that that's going to happen. No, it is interesting. I mean, you know, we we did see, you know, obviously this time last year, Todd Cochrane had just passed away, and you get the feeling with quite a lot of stuff that was going on for Blueberry, you get the feeling that Todd hadn't necessarily thought too much about contingency plan of what might have happened to him. And it's just something that I think we do need to bear in mind. I wrote an article about it at the at the time. So it's an interesting question, anonymous caller. So thank you for that. And not quite sure whether or not I can reply with anything other than, oh, okay, and that's uh that's probably something that I should fix. That would be a good thing. But still, there we are. Um fewer flights. Yes. Well, yeah, well, we'll well that that might be a thing. So uh anyway, we will see how all of that works. And thank you for uh sending us voicemail, which you can do with a link you'll find in our show notes. It now even works in Spotify. And also thank you to our power supporters, our many power supporters who have been uh supporting us for a long time, including the excellent John Spurlock, uh the excellent uh Ralph Eastat Jr. and Brian Ensminger as well. Thank you uh so much uh for that. So, what's uh happened for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi 1:47:30

Well, we've been working on building award pages. So the Black Awards, we did one, we did one for the independent podcast awards that's coming up. Yeah, but one of the things we added was new location maps. So taking the location tag and showing where each of those podcasts is is quite a nice thing to do. So it's something that we've been working on. We are working with podcasters on on something that I can't talk about yet, but we will be partnering with them on doing something similar. So that's probably been quite nice because I think you know, sometimes you can see all these podcasts, and yes, we can show the cover art and we can turn them into playlists and all that clever stuff. But actually using the location tag, and it just brings to mind how little of the location tag's been used because we're going back and populating it ourselves to give that sort of chicken and egg. Look, this is what you could do if you all added the location tag, but you know, it's it's tiny steps.

James Cridland 1:48:28

It is certainly a useful thing. You're also working on the new contact tag, which uh you mentioned earlier. Soundbyte, what is what are these? Oh, this is the the the soundbyte tag, isn't it?

Sam Sethi 1:48:40

Yeah, I mean we talked about it a couple of weeks ago. So now we've got some examples of horizontal and vertical video working within the soundbyte tag. So you can upload. So let's say you're using Riverside or D script. You know, one of the options is to output clips in vertical or horizontal video clips, right? And so we didn't have an option in TrueFans to allow you to upload those anywhere. It just seemed odd. So now you can just go into your admin dashboard, go to the clip section, and then upload horizontal or vertical video, and then in the app, we will then work on that orientation for you. So I think it's a baby step from us. We're not we're not YouTube, we don't have the deep pockets of YouTube, so we're not as clever as some of their simultaneously streaming. But I think as a format, I think vertical video is something that we all need to keep a little eye on because I think it's becoming more and more prevalent and uh apps need to support it.

James Cridland 1:49:38

I know indeed, indeed. Well, yes, I mean quite a lot of these things do come down to support, don't they? And sometimes it takes a big company to add that support and make sure that everybody starts using it. But um, yeah, no, very interesting.

Sam Sethi 1:49:54

James, so what's happened for you, mate? You're in London, what you've been doing.

James Cridland 1:49:57

I'm in London, yes. I'm in uh I'm in a hotel room in Ealing today, which is uh very exciting. So yes, so I was here for the audio festival that was earlier on in the week. Tomorrow is the community media conference, which I will also be at. I think the title of my talk, not that I've written the slides yet, but the title of my talk is AI Tools for Radio and Podcasts and Why You Shouldn't Use Them, which is a slightly over-the-top headline, but essentially I'm I'll be showing off a bunch of good AI tools and then also some bad AI tools that nobody wants to use. So that should be fun. And then off to uh Berlin on Saturday afternoon, which is Oktoberfest. Congratulations. Go, go, go, drink, drink, drink.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:41

I don't think I don't think that's going to be happening.

James Cridland 1:50:43

No, I've got to go, uh I've got to go and do some do some fancy work for a big fancy client. So uh looking forward to end up doing that. But yes, uh more details. Can I recommend curry verst? Go for curry. Curryverst is excellent, yes, it's always one of my favourites. Berlin treat. Yes, it's a proper, a proper Berlin treat. So, yes, so looking forward to that. If you are curious how my flights and things are going, then james.cridlin.net slash blog is where you'll find my blog, and you can read all of my tedious trip reports there. There's a thrill. Uh, and that's it for this week.

Wrap And How To Support

James Cridland 1:51:19

All of our podcast stories taken from the pod news daily newsletter at podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:51:24

You can give us feedback using the BuzzSprout voicemail link like we had this week. In our show notes, you'll find a link, or become a monthly power supporter like the 25 Power Supporter bought us at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland 1:51:37

Yes, our music is from TM Studios, our voiceover Sheila D, and we're hosted and sponsored by BuzzSprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Announcer 1:51:46

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