Podcasting

There are 75 posts filed in Podcasting (this is page 3 of 8).

The historical record of podcasting

As I was working on my Podcasting category in my zettelkasten file, I realized that I did not have a link to the history of podcasting. I started doing some searching, and decided that I should try to collect “original sources”, as they say in historical research. Here, then, is a start at a chronological collection of links to pages on podcasting from original sources and some versions of documenting the historical record. Feedback is welcome!

DaveNet – Initial description of early meeting with Adam Curry at a Scripting News meetup, includes description of “the last mile” (2000)

The Two-Way Web – Payloads for RSS – Initial description of podcasting technology (January 2001)

Grateful Dead Podcast Feed – Creation date of May 18, 2001

Adam Curry – Description of podcasting for a session at BloggerCon in 2004

Scripting News – More info on early podcasting (people/timeline) (2005)

Scripting News – The origin of podcasting (2010)

References the meeting with Adam Curry, and also this post on “virtual bandwidth”, which has more detail on the Adam Curry meeting in 2001

Harvard/Berkman Center – Essay on Dave Winer/Chris Lydon collaboration (2010)

Scripting News – No silos – comments on the rise of podcasting companies trying to lock in users (2017)

Scripting News – An addendum to the creation story of podcasting (2017)

Mentions Adam Curry, Doug Kaye, Chris Lydon among others

Scripting News – Podcasts are feeds. If there is no feed, it’s not a podcast (2018)

Scripting News – CBC podcast on the origin of podcasting (2017)

Andy Sylvester – Comments on “Alternate Histories of Podcasting” podcast (Radio Survivor), pointing out that Andrew Bottomley’s research on audio file usage on the Internet was not podcasting (no RSS feed! see Podcasts Are Feeds item) (2018)

Scripting News – Twenty years ago in podcasting (2021)

Dave Winer’s side of the story in how podcasting got started, also references Podnews story on first podcast feed

Podnews – The story of the first podcast feed (2021)

Covers first meeting between Dave Winer and Adam Curry in 2001 and first feed using Grateful Dead songs

PocketCasts is open source

I have used PocketCasts as my podcast client for several years, and I think it is a nice thing that Automattic is making it open source. I also agree with Dave Winer’s feature request that a OPML subscription list should be able to be imported via a URL (OPML file hosted somewhere on the web) instead of having it be a file local to the app (on your phone or in Google Drive).

After finding out about it on Scripting News, I have started listening to the podcast “The History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs”. Episode 2 had some neat history on labor disputes during World War 2 that greatly affected the music industry – I really enjoyed it! 2 down, 153 to go (the podcast is planned to take 5 years to get to 500 songs).

What about the IndieWeb and RSS?

Dave Winer wrote a post with the title “IndieWeb should love RSS” recently, with one of the themes being that the IndieWeb has a lack of support for RSS. I would like to provide a little background from my participation in the IndieWeb community.

In January 2014, I attended a Homebrew Website Club meeting. This was (and still is) a gathering of like-minded people to discuss personal websites and making updates to them. The lead person was Aaron Parecki, one of the IndieWebCamp co-founders. We all introduced ourselves, and shared various opinions on web site development and talked about our individual sites. One of the things mentioned was the use of microformats as a technique/technology for building websites. I had not heard of this before, and looked into it more after the meeting. I then wrote a post on what I was interested in exploring, and one of the items was “following other sites”. What I found in looking at other Indieweb-type sites was that they did not have any RSS feed for posts. Specifically, the two co-founders, Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik, did not have feeds available for their sites. In the next meeting I attended, I brought this up. The response was that they were using microformats to encode data within their websites, and that there were microformat parsers which could read that formatted data and present it in a feed reader application. Aaron Parecki even did a hack on the Selfoss feed reader application to allow it to parse microformats-based sites and present site updates like a RSS feed reader would. I even wrote up some instructions on how to set this up (after the fact). In the meeting, however, I asked how the attendees expected people to keep up with site updates without some type of feed to monitor. Aaron’s response was that more people needed to adopt microformats. I said that this was a “boil the ocean” strategy and that people who use feeds to monitor sites expect to use RSS and Atom, not microformats.

Sometime after that, I noticed that both Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik started providing a feed for their sites, although it was really a feed generated by some other application that was parsing their microformats stuff. For the next several years, though, the general trend in the group of websites that considered themselves to be part of the IndieWeb community focused on microformats and technologies that built on microformats as a building block. Over time, this overt position against RSS/Atom feeds has subsided, and (per the IndieWeb website), I would say the current focus is on the principles of (1) principles over project-centric focus, (2) publish on your site, and (3) design and UX come first, then protocols and formats are developed second. In that list, RSS and Atom become part of a “plurality of projects“, acknowledging that there can be “more than one way to do it”, as Perl devotees like to say.

The more active IndieWeb members (Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik leading the way) have created a number of standards based on technologies grown from implementations on Indieweb websites (Webmention, Microsub, and Micropub). Time will tell if these develop into more mainstream technologies. I think Webmention (supporting site-to-site communication/commenting) is the furthest along (I have it enabled through WordPress plugin on my main site), but I am interested in exploring the others. RSS, though, has stood the test of time, and is still powering feed readers and podcast clients throughout the world. Dave Winer should rightly feel proud of his contributions in this area. RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences. My hope is that they can coexist and at times even work together, but always with respect (as the IndieWeb code of conduct states: “Be respectful of other people, respectfully ask people to stop if you are bothered….”).

The end of podcasting, chapter 59

This week, a Substack newsletter was posted about problems that podcasts from former podcast studio Gimlet Media were experiencing (getting cancelled). In 2019, Spotify purchased Gimlet Media for $230 million dollars (more here on other Spotify podcast acquisitions). Why did people think being acquired by a big company was going to allow them to keep their artistic freedom and continue to do things the way they had done them? Demonstration of control of the channel (a la CBS/NBC/ABC of the 60s/70s/80s – you had to convince them to approve your show to get on the air) – maybe go back to producing podcasts yourself? After all, you must have a lot of money after that acquisition. Chapter 57 of this story discusses the Joe Rogan move to Spotify, and I wrote in 2019 about how to avoid the corporate takeover of podcasting. As Joel Grey and Liza Minelli sang in the musical “Cabaret“, money makes the world go around. If people want to produce podcasts to make money, there are ways to innovate, but the best place to start is to make great podcasts.

Some choices for how to host a podcast and create a podcast feed

I was talking with Ken Smith about hosting audio files and how to make them available. Here is a summary of the tools/techniques we discussed.

The key elements of a podcast are the audio file and a RSS feed which points to where the audio file resides. If you are using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, you have a way to create a RSS feed which can reference audio files. The Drummer Change Notes blog has a post on specifics for referencing an audio file. Now, the audio file has to be hosted somewhere. If you have an Amazon Web Services account, you could store static audio files there and point to those files. Amazon Web Services has a page on how to host a static website (which could just be the audio files, or some website as well).

The method I use for my podcast Thinking About Tools for Thought is to use a standard self-hosted WordPress weblog to create the RSS feed and host the audio file. To my disgust, I could not find a single page with the minimum info needed to add an audio file to a WordPress post, so here is my short list (this assumes you are using a current WordPress install with the Gutenberg block editor):

1. Create a new post

2. Add whatever text you want

3. Click on the Audio block in the Gutenberg block editor and navigate to the audio file on your computer, then select the file. WordPress will display a player in the post.

4. Publish the post. Once the post is published, you can load the feed URL for the WordPress site (https://site/feed/) (example) to a podcast player, and the player will pick up the episodes.

The way ahead for RSS and podcasting

Dave Winer has released some new tools/apps using RSS this week, and referenced some recent posts on podcasting concerning innovation in that space. Both of these deserve some review and context.

The RSS tools Dave initially demonstrated showed mailbox-reader styles of displaying the content of a RSS feed. Next, Dave talked about two-way RSS as a method to connect outliners with other publishing systems. I voiced an opinion that I did not understand why RSS needed to be involved. With the Twitter + Markdown + RSS unveiling, my view of “the way ahead” is becoming a little clearer. A tool is used to create tweets which contain Markdown markup. Those tweets are sent to Twitter. At the same time, a RSS feed of the tweets is created containing Markdown markup. Finally, a feed reader app is consuming that RSS feed and rendering the Markdown markup in the presentation of the RSS feed. Now, where is the value added by this workflow/system? Twitter is not making use of the enhanced RSS feed, but another app is using those features. And – those features are enabled by the use of a namespace (the source namespace), a feature in RSS that has been there for a long, long time. This is a demonstration that new apps can be built around RSS and using RSS. Now, what else could be done with this RSS feed? Well, at some point, who needs Twitter? Someone could create an app or service that uses the RSS feed as the content container and notifies users when the feed has been updated. Historically, feed reader apps do this when you start the app (highlight new entries), or rivers of news display the new items at the top of the page. But it could be done in a much quicker manner, perhaps using some other protocol like Micropub/Microsub or XMPP. Dave Winer has written about this in 2016 (The Internet’s Twitter), 2011 (fractional horsepower Twitter feed), 2009 (Fractional Horsepower Twitters), again in 2009 (A Billion Twitters). I also wrote a series of posts in 2016 where I also put forward that RSS could be the basis of an open messaging system.

Now, I will turn to podcasting. In the past week, Michael Mignano wrote about the lack of innovation in podcasting. Dave Winer commented that this is not the case. Alberto Betella then had an excellent reply to Mignano, pointing to the work Adam Curry has done on his Podcasting 2.0 initiative, supporting micropayments and other cool features. Again, the vehicle for innovation was using the RSS namespace feature. This is how the rest of the world can overcome the juggernauts of Spotify and others (which I have written about here, here, and here).

So – nothing keeping people from being innovative here – let’s get to work then!

The end of podcasting, chapter 58

In chapter 57, Joe Rogan had just done his licensing deal with Spotify. In today’s chapter, John Sullivan writes for The Conversation (via NiemanLab and Stephen Downes) about other recent (meaning 2021-2022) corporate attempts to corral podcast listeners into silos. Here are the final paragraphs:

On the one hand, the traditional, scrappy, upstart version of podcasting will survive thanks to the open architecture of RSS. Podcasting still has relatively low barriers to entry compared with other media, and this will continue to encourage independent producers and amateurs to create new shows, often with hyperniche content. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee allow creators to make money off their content on their own terms.

As companies like Spotify, Amazon, NPR, SiriusXM and iHeartMedia aggressively monetize and market exclusive podcast content on their platforms, they’ve positioned themselves as the new gatekeepers with the keys to an ever-expanding global audience.

Independent podcasting isn’t going away. But with the promotional power concentrated in the hands of the very biggest tech firms, it will be increasingly challenging for those smaller players to find listeners.

My response: WHO CARES! I started two podcasts (Convocast and Thinking About Tools For Thought) without any media empire support. Did I make any money? No, but that wasn’t why I created those podcasts. I did it for fun and to share information/perspectives with others. Yes, “money talks”, and people will do anything to make money (think “streaming services”). For my recommendations on how to address this, read chapter 57.

I wish people like John Sullivan and Andrew Bottomley (professors of media) would create their own podcasts instead of spending time saying “podcasting is dead” (in so many words).