“Preserve This Podcast” podcast lost an episode

Recently, I wanted to re-listen to the episodes from the Preserve This Podcast podcast (a podcast that discusses strategies for saving artifacts used in creating podcasts). I had written about this podcast when it came out in 2019, and poked at the creators for depending on the Internet Archive to publish the site instead of paying for hosting themselves. After all, they had a GRANT to cover the production costs! Surely they could have budgeted for 5-10 years of hosting. I went to the site, got the feed URL, added to my podcast app, then started listening. When I got to the second podcast (Episode 1), my podcast app displayed an error message that it could not download the file. However, the app was able to download the remaining episodes. I decided to open up the feed in a text editor to see if there was any problem. I found the URL for the episode and pasted it into a browser tab. To my surprise, the browser said there was nothing at that URL in the Internet Archive. I then checked the URLs for several other episodes, and they showed the expected files. After some searching at the Internet Archive, I found this collector page for Episode 1, which led to this URL for Episode 1, which did not match the URL in the feed. UGH!

It is quite ironic that a podcast about preserving podcasts has a problem with its own feed! I will try to contact the team from their About page, but if anyone knows how to get in touch with one of the producers, I would appreciate it!

The need for curation and the cost of curation

Over the years, I have performed many “acts of curation”. Most of this has been simple collection of links, but several instances (Portland Protest News, Kamala Campaign Timeline) resulted in creation of websites to document a particular topic. These two sites in particular were collecting of daily links to document protests in Portland, Oregon, and the campaign of Kamala Harris for US President.

For curation of news events, it is important to keep up with content collection on a daily basis, as almost all news sites provide little to no support for tracking of stories, and searching usually turns up items in the last 2-3 weeks. For more stable topics, adding content as it is discovered is sufficient (see my Links Zettelkasten as an example).

Beyond the collection of links/information, the other primary problem is the organization of links/information. Curation, as a practice, is an attempt to organize information. My zettelkasten used individual topics in alphabetical order as headers, with links underneath. Other examples of collections include Indieseek.xyz from Brad Enslen, a curated directory. Karl Voit has a series of posts/presentations on personal information management (PIM). Chris Aldrich (through the use of tags in WordPress) has been performing some significant research on zettelkasten and the zettelkasten practices of Niklas Luhmann. All collections of this kind require effort, and most of them are for the benefit of the creator. Still, once these collections are available, they can be discovered and used by others.

Update on the Portland Protest News site

I got behind on posting when I was on a long business trip, but kept collecting links, and now Portland Protest News is now current again. The media coverage of protests at the ICE building in Portland has slacked off (last protest on local news media was for Veterans Day, over two weeks ago). It is possible that protests are on-going, but not getting coverage, or that protests have slacked off (this occurred in 2020 when the weather change to the regular cold/rainy fall started). The current state of the court review is that a local district judge banned National Guard deployment in Portland, but this is now under review with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

ICE has definitely increased its activity within the state of Oregon. The media focus has shifted to mass arrests by ICE, arrests of US citizens, cities passing “state of emergency” proclamations, and federal contractor moves indicating ICE interest in creating a detention center in Newport, Oregon. Portland Protest News will continue to cover the activities of ICE, and further court activity.