Adam Curry: podcasting 2.0 for October 23 2020, episode eight
or should I say chapter eight?
Unknown: That's how I feel on a Friday.
Ladies, Gentlemen, welcome to podcasting 2.0 where we are
retooling podcasting as a platform of value, after we
preserve it as a platform of free speech, and now the man who
parses XML faster than JSON the debt from the deep south. Ladies
and gentlemen, Dave Jones.
Dave Jones: What's up? What's up this week?
Adam Curry: What's up now you got to have a better better line
when you start.
Dave Jones: I mean, like, I just mean I'm just down in a
keyboard.
Unknown: pounding the keyboard. I gotta remember that one.
That's a great one for an opening. keyboard. Ah, I'm Adam
Curry's Dave Jones, you're hearing for those who have never
heard the show before. There's nothing
going on this week. Slow a slow
week.
Nothing to see here at all. This is where podcasting 2.0 is, is
germinating, as we try to make something out of something, I
guess.
On The Bus cast show.
You know, I did the buzz cast show. Yeah, great. Oh, you heard
Oh, it's already out. I didn't know it was out already. Oh,
okay. Cool. I
get it dropped last night.
Oh, yeah, baby. I felt some time. You know, my problem is,
I'll be looking at because it did. What is the name of that
program? I think it's it's some kind of thing that's made for
podcasting. It's kind of like, what we use clean feet only they
have a video element. And so I'm seeing four guys. And, you know,
they're just looking at me, so I'm just talking, sometimes,
feelings, like someone's gonna jump in and shut me up. Because
I don't even know what I'm talking about. Now.
you've, you've diverted three steps away, you're like, you
know, you're six levels away from where you started from?
Yeah,
I can. I hope I answered all the questions, but I did learn a lot
about them. I like these guys a lot. You know, they started
they just seem like cool, guys. I mean, I guess you'd want to
have a beer with
exactly. And they started buzzsprout as a hosting service.
I have not I haven't looked at their, at their pricing plans.
But I think they mentioned 12 up to $24 a month. But what they
really do is a lot of the education to really help people
podcast and make it simple and make it understandable. And I've
actually I've gotten quite an insight to the hosting Guys, if
I can just put it that way. I've never liked another one of those
things I've never really had to worry about. Because bandwidth,
while the initial test for ever tell you that story about the
initial test for for for podcast for podcasting, you know, 1516
years ago,
like where the bandwidth was coming? Yeah,
yeah. And you said that he said that Apple It was like on Apple
drive.
Exactly. It was Yeah, I think they call it the Mac drive at
the time. And it was a little bit it was the early early cloud
storage service from Apple. And so we're talking 2004, something
like that. 2005 2004? Probably, I don't remember, I'm bad at
dates. Yeah. And, you know, I was putting all this stuff up
there. And, you know, on this drive, I don't know, maybe there
was back in the day, maybe 100 megabytes was the was the limit.
But there was really no, nobody was using this to serve files
from per se the way we were doing it. And I heard later when
I had my, my meeting with Steve or maybe after that with some of
the team that they'd noticed this, they'd noticed all this
bandwidth. And apparently was the that said, just let them go.
Just give them whatever they need. Let's see what they do.
That that's like, if you listen to those initial daily source
code episodes, there's they're real short. And
what how long are they? 1010 minutes? 15 minutes?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. How big of a file was that? Maybe 10 meg,
and it would take an hour to upload. At least Yeah,
it's crazy when we when we first started. So I don't think I
think people who have come into the, to just the computer
technology industry, in general, in the last, if you've come in
within the last really 10 years, you have no concept of how bad
and how of how hard it was to get decent bandwidth A long time
ago. Like if you go one of my first jobs, and it was a
sysadmin at a Insurance Brokerage. And we have big, big
multi state brokerage with lots of branch offices and that kind
of thing. So we had leased lines between every office and these
were these were like, you know, 50 letters email like 64 k ISDN.
Whoo.
Yeah, big bandwidth.
Yeah, I mean, it's back just enough to care is basically just
enough to carry like a terminal session for for an IBM mainframe
bro. Hence, you couldn't, there was no there was none of this
like, Oh, just go out and download the latest copy of such
and such. I mean, that just you had you got shipped. If you
needed anything more than, you know, like 50 megabytes?
Oh, yeah, you got it on a drive baby.
Yes, cry.
CDs. Yeah. in the mail. But I mean, like, and it made
everything complicated. I mean, I remember when we. So here's
one, failed technology, the list of failed internet technologies
is also a great topic. And another failed technology that
that I've seen in my career is a point to point wireless
internet.
Oh, yeah,
sure. Yeah. We had an office here in downtown Birmingham. And
then we had our bandwidth was so bad through our ISP. And all we
had we had a dual ISDN lines 128 K. And then this gas came in so
we can like double that. And, yeah, so there's just there's a
skyscraper here in town. And they're like, we have a
microwave dish on the top of this gas scraper. And we just
aim it at your building work. Yeah. And so it was like, it was
just no more expensive than what we were paying. So like, Yeah,
let's do that. And did it work? No, no, it was horrible. They
like it would every time, you know, it'd be rain or, you know,
lightning or something like that. All right. Well,
this connects right. Oh, my goodness.
Yeah. Today, man, they were selling that hard here for a
while in that name. I this just if you if you haven't been in
the it or technology world for more than 10 years. I mean, you
really just have no understanding of what it was
like,
right? Well, we're in we have a really interesting age group. We
grew up with telephones connected to the wall and
televisions with an over the air reception antenna. And that's
flip flopped.
Become exactly the opposite. So go figure.
Yeah, and, you know, I was thinking about this the other
day, too, is how, how much computer stuff has changed. It's
in general, like, up my first computer ever was a Commodore
64. Mm hmm. And I remember when you boot it up, it goes on is
almost instantaneous boot. But when you boot it up, it was what
you landed in. was a BASIC interpreter. Right. And so you
just you're programming. That's that was that was
your Yeah, that was your command line was basically you were in
basic. Yeah,
yes, exactly. Right. And you could just start typing basic
commands. I mean, you flip the switch. It comes on within
within a second and a half. Yeah. And you're typing basic
command. Wait,
your television has to flicker first three times.
Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I had the
Sinclair ZX 80 was my first computer before the Vic 20,
which was the precursor to the Commodore 64 and a Sinclair ZX
80 got to look it up. It basically was a piece of plastic
and had a plastic overlay keyboard built into this thing's
just a small unit with a TV modulator in the back and you
could hook up a cassette recorder. But what was funny
about it, because you know, didn't have real keys, just
those plastic things. You press down
looking at it, it's like there's like a little thin, very thin.
Yeah, very thin.
With Clive Sinclair made it actually went on to do make many
famous inventions. But the problem was every single time
you press the key, the screen would flicker. So if you were
typing, we flicker flicker flicker flicker flicker flicker
flicker flicker flicker. But back in the day, when when BBC
came out with their computer, which is around the same time
this is I think this was still pre Commodore 64. I forget the
name of the BBC computer. They would broadcast programs. So
they'd be like, Okay, get your cassette decks ready, and you
press play and record. And then they would go and it's in this
minute or two minutes. It would be an entire program. And you'd
have it, which was a great distribution method. If you
think about
it. That is weird.
Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was very, it was actually cool. Because we
could get BBC on over the air where I live in the Netherlands.
And yeah, that's how they distributed their programs. They
have an hour long program, was it the spectrum was it was BBC
spectrum. I think, BBC. I just see home computer. I want to get
it right because people are probably yelling at their
podcast. Yeah. acorn, acorn, the BBC Micro think it was based on
acorn.
acorn. Now acorn is nice to be the parent company or maybe
still are an arm chip right.
Now, I'd note I don't know. Do I have that wrong? I don't know.
I really don't know. Okay. acorn, acorn. I mean, I haven't
been completely wrong. Yeah, I don't I don't know. That like
the the BBC, like the British broadcasts are a really the
European broadcast stuff in general, has always seemed to be
ahead of the game for the US stuff
with technology always ahead of the game with content decades
behind.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it was all government money. So that a lot of a lot. I
mean, I worked in when I first started in radio and television,
illegal radio and television in the Netherlands. And this is 84.
We were already doing satellite broadcast on Europa television
all over Europe. These facilities they had, I mean, I
did television, when you had eight cameras for people in the
makeup room. You'd rehearse for a full day, a day before the
actual recording. You know, it's there was money and money back
in the day, but also that I remember the first, the first
digital effects coming in Quantel, it that Starburst
effect which everybody was doing for a year.
How did how did they do this stuff like that was a third and
all that
before that, before that, literally, you had a caption
camera. So in the edit suite, or if it was live, it would be a
separate little table. And there's a camera focused on the
table and the art department would make these black cards
with the art on it. And you'd align it right underneath the
camera, and then they just wipe it in Lower Third, they
literally wipe in a lower third. And it would be it would be a
live camera. If you put your hand under it, you'd see the
hand on the on the screen over the title.
Like the weather report.
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And these are the days when we had
this we just had blue screen is green green screen now but I'm
so old, we use blue screen. For chroma key
why the switch? I've always wondered what well, was there a
switch from blue to green? There's just better.
Yeah, there's so much. You know, I don't I don't have a technical
answer for it. But for sure, blue was too close to black.
There's a lot of blue in blacks. That, you know, that just makes
keying a lot easier is a choice, I guess. But there may be a
technical reason I'm sure someone out there knows
what you need. If you need help staying on topic in podcasts.
I'm not your guy.
Now. I have a feeling people don't mind hearing a little bit
of our, our history and our banter. Yeah, so I've been
listening to a lot of different podcasts, because podcast
movement is, is still underway. So lots of people are
congregating virtually this year. And it's been very
interesting to learn a lot more about the hosting side of the
business. So it's just your learn to switch your learning.
Here's what I'm learning both. Well, I didn't realize how much.
Uh, not all but many of the hosting companies are involved
in advertising or want to be involved in advertising, or have
some degree some level of advertising. Then it kind of
explains to me everything I hear, and maybe it's just me,
but everything I hear no matter what it is, to me all comes back
to making money. Yeah, and it's the same for tags really. For
the tags that we're discussing in the namespace A lot of it
seems to be well, if I could No, this was an interesting,
interesting discussion that was with things as James Cridland on
podcast index dot social, James runs pod news. And it's about
the referring URLs, which is current because you just, I
think, posted some kind of fix. And what he wanted to know, or
what he was saying was, you know, the referring URLs that
we're getting from, just from, in general, it's a problem,
because you really don't know if it's coming from from which app
it's coming. If it's a no if it's pod friend, there seems to
be some extra issues because that'll show up as a Mozilla
browser, which of course it really is. And I'm sitting there
thinking, does anyone really care? And does I mean I I've
never thought about it that way that again, that comes from my
background in radio where you never have to think about the
radio I'm thinking about the person connected to it, which is
old fashioned thinking I realized but as I was probing a
little furthers, you know when someone says well, you want to
know where to spend your marketing dollars as someone
who's spent no dollars ever on marketing any of my podcasts
ever. I you know, got into the conversation with James and I
didn't know that that there are podcast apps that have already
have existing relationship with podcasts may be featuring that
may be highlighting them this is a lot of stuff I just didn't
know so I'm there's there seems to be more ecosystem or more out
there than I realized, but it seems really inefficient and I'm
not against adverts. I don't want it I don't need it for me
advertising is censorship. But I do want to make sure we we
deliver what what will help people, no matter how they, how
they want to run their show their podcasts, their hosts
their the app whatsoever. It's just, if we can get it all out
on the table is about making money, because then maybe
there's more things we can do without feels like it's dirty or
something. It's like one of these, like, no one wants to
touch it, maybe because of the nature of podcast index. But I
just want to make sure that that we're fulfilling the need that
people have.
Yeah, the there's an interesting stat that I saw on Twitter the
other day, and I don't wish I remembered where it came from,
because I think it was just a poll that was done by a hosting
company. But I don't remember if somebody knows that y'all can
tell me that. They it basically broke down. It was just a simple
question. Why do you podcast Mm hmm. And it had a few different
answers. And the by far, the biggest one, it was like, almost
50% of the responses said, just because it's fun. Or just
because I want to, like there, I think that's that there is
obviously a big, you know, funding ad monetization issue
within the space because it is an it's a meat, it's it is a
meat media at this point. But there's also a large percentage
of people who really don't care. And there's going to be,
there's, there's going to, they're going to always be and I
think that's what makes this medium unique, is like if you go
out and try to set up your own radio transmitter in your
neighborhood, you're going to get a knock on the door, you
know, from the FCC, it's not something you can do. And
whereas a lot of people probably would want to, and would want to
do that, because there's something powerful and fun about
getting to broadcast yourself to the world. Mm hmm. And, but, and
I think all that sort of, I wouldn't say pent up desire to
do that. But there's evidently has always been this desire
amongst people to put themselves out there in the medium of
audio. And podcasting allowed, allowed that to happen in a way
that was cheap enough to be accessible to people. And so
even though there's no monetization, excuse me, even
though there is monetization, that is a big concern. There's
also like, I mean, 50%, that's a lot of people. They really don't
care if they ever make a dime off their podcast, I see people
like on the Reddit podcasting thread, or subreddit, whatever
you call it, I see people on there. Somehow I got on the
freakin Reddit mailing list for this thing. But so I get these
things all the time. And there's people on there dropping
hundreds or thousands of dollars on setups for their podcast
studio in their basement. Yeah, and they have like 10 listeners.
And that tells me that it's about his hobby. That's almost
like
a ham radio. I was about to say this is a amateur radio, amateur
radio. Exactly. I know guys who spend $100,000 on their antenna
alone. Yeah, not even the gear. Well, and this is really
important.
So thank you to
blueberry, who now are not only auto submitting, I think they've
been auto submitting to us for a while. So if you're a blueberry
customer, and you create a new podcast, they take care of most
the way I understand it, they take care of most of all the
feed submissions for you.
They give you they give you a dashboard where you can pick and
choose where you want to submit. And I'm thinking that most
people just go and go boop, boop, boop, boop, and just do
them all. Sure.
It would be great for exactly that kind of person who is going
through that process of just, hey, I want to do a podcast. And
I use the example of a professor with his lectures because I like
it because I think it's valid, but also, it's time sensitive.
And the end, what we're solving is the idea that you have to
wait for Apple to approve your podcast before it starts to
trickle down into everything else. It would be nice if there
could be a list of podcasts that support the index, a podcast
apps that support the index, or at least say hey, if you know if
you want your friends to be able to get it right away. Here's a
number of apps that you know that will be carrying your
podcast The minute you hit submit, or within 15 minutes or
whatever, whatever it is for us to pick it up. And you know,
then in three days or four days, you'll be available on on on the
other apps and other platforms because that immediate You know,
the idea that you can get everything up and running just
like amateur radio key up the mic, and you got to signal. It's
so disappointing. And I think I think it's a barrier to entry
when people say, I got to wait.
I got admitted a bunch of podcasts to Apple. What? What's
the typical turnaround on that?
It's not fair to say for me, because I've had stuff that even
got rejected. And I sent an email and said, What? And they
said that we'll figure it out done. That's it. That's just you
know, that's the that's because of people I know. I think thing
is, at minimum two days, I really don't know I haven't
submitted that many recently.
is, that is a disheartening thing kind of sucks. And
it makes you feel like you're just like, one of the devs on
podcast index. dot social was saying he said, Oh, it's the
pod. podcast, podcast guru. Yeah. Says he submitted his app
to the Google Play Store. And it's taking a long time longer
than usual. That's horrible. But what it should experience? Yeah.
So frustrating.
Apple has gotten a lot better from, from my understanding,
they're usually pretty quick. And now Google's gotten worse.
You don't you don't even know. Like, you're like, what's the
hold up? Like, you don't feel have any guidance is still, it's
just really, you're just kind of throwing it out there into the
void. And you just wait Enos like a,
although, although I disagree with it, I have a feeling
they're going to have to break that up. I think the
government's going to step in. I personally, I personally don't
agree with it. I don't like how it's turned out. But I think
they have every right to do whatever the hell they want. But
as with lots of things in America, when you get to
successful, you know, we have a an oligarchy. Now we have
basically two, two players in the in the App Store, arena. And
it's just not enough. So anti trust laws do come into play
when you get this big. So that kind of a victim of their own
success.
And it's one of those things where if you break up, if you
break up one, you have to break up the other? Of course, of
course, because you could tell you the one that's more
concerning to me even like not from a podcasting perspective,
necessarily, but the one that Google is clearly the one that
that is the most difficult, the biggest target, like logically
speaking, really, because they Well, they have a heat, I mean,
they just have a track record of, of actual anti competitive
harm. Right, you know, they, they share, they, they share a
lot of other things all the time and bake it into search. Right,
right. Right, like they did they essentially kneecap Yelp and all
these other review sites and yeah, they they put you know,
they put smothers, I think there was a, there's been some some
very good articles that come out about the actual stuff, you
never hear about little mom and pop shops that got destroyed by
by Googlebot, you know, change, and they were clearly targeted
for that, you know, for that to happen. Right? Right. But, but
you know, if you can't, from just a behemoth standpoint, if
you're going to look at antitrust, II and you're gonna
start breaking those up you I think Apple even though they're
not really as much of a target, they're gonna get brought in
anyway, just by association. And meeting bring this around to
where we started.
We really need to have technology history being taught
in schools. We are in this place because there's an entire
generation that's grown up that only knows what they've seen. So
Facebook and Twitter and Instagram is the internet Yeah,
and have no idea that oh, you know, you can do all kinds of
other things. The mastodon server that we are using is is a
godsend it I cannot say it enough how great this has been
for our little development community of 100 hundred and 50
people and it was we were running out nine nine euros a
month it's a guy in Denmark Hugo who runs Massa dot host. And in
and I know, you know, running no agenda, social comm it takes it
takes quite a bit of resources to run one of these particularly
if you're federated and search is a big deal. So yeah, we
didn't have search enabled, of course, we needed that. And I
went over 39 bucks, boom. Okay, so it's definitely it's more
expensive. But man, now we can search everything and it
functions so well. It's so much better than a message board. It
kicks up a mailing list asked by 1000 oh god yes. Oh developer
mailing list that's that's like back to the days of use net just
want to go shoot yourself. One on a Leonard Cohen record, baby.
I'm hopping in the bathtub with a toaster. It's another another
email list.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, the search is huge.
So to do that, to kind of get us into the into some of the tags I
want to talk about chapters, because that's been the chapters
is something that's been discussed. Quite a bit, which
has been, I would say, Jerry rigged in different ways, just
from my perspective. I don't like chapters, okay. And the
reason why I don't like chapters is because the product that I
make, I want people to hear the whole thing in context. I don't
want them jumping around. I understand in hindsight, it's
really great if you want to go find something, which is why I'm
tickled pink about transcripts. I love transcripts. But we've
been using transcripts and no agenda player, but also no
agenda show calm now. Although they stopped temporarily, but
you could go and you could say, Oh, I'm looking for something,
we're talking about you typing a few keywords that goes to the
transcript, and right there as a play button. And you can play
and share and tweet and do all that stuff, right from there,
love that I was really lacking, for me is tools to create this.
I have no idea where to go. And I like the idea of putting
markers in after the fact or even as I think CSB mentioned
having that crowdsource, which has its own issues with spam and
crap but in general it works out pretty well. Unless you ask
people to register to do it then no one does it. And I'd really
like to be able to use the no agenda show podcast for all of
these new tags and you know, because we have a pretty wide
reach across a whole bunch of different apps and players so
adding all these features in is a really good place for me to
try it and to be able to talk about it here on on on this
podcast. So just from my purse get perspective, I'm not all
jacked about chapters where people can just jump around and
I do it myself I go to a good example is a teepee Marcos
podcast, and I'll just look at the chapters don't like nap not
interested.
Because it depends on how its worded or whatever sound
like and it doesn't seem like an interesting show and I
know I'm selling myself short.
I wonder if because because chapters sound exactly the
opposite chapters. Chapters excite excite me a lot. And
there's and it's really not what they get
out of the house more is what they
let me tell you about chapters. Baby.
Tonight, Donna,
I'm gonna tell you all about the JSON spec for chapter
is nothing gets started like that. But I mean like, it is not
the ability to jump and skip it because I rarely ever do that.
I've there's two podcasts, I listen to ATP and Dr. Peter
Atiyah has a podcast called the drive. So I listened to that not
very often, but I do listen to sometimes they both have
chapters, which is rare and podcasts because it's the tools
required to bake that into an mp3 or not, like accessible to
the average people. So they're rare. So when you see one, you
you notice it and but I never used to skip, like I listened to
all the mid sort of ad reads and that kind of thing in ATP, I
listen to all those I just just listened to so what do
you what do you use the chapter markers for them.
So my the idea of that gets me jazzed about the chapter markers
is not the skipping, but the the ability to add rich content into
those specific points. So like ATP is a good example. Sometimes
they will bake in a different piece of show art at a certain
chapter marker. I don't know if you've ever noticed that? No.
Okay. So if you're if you're looking, if you're looking, you
know, if you're sometimes they'll be talking about
something like this something that's visually difficult to
describe. And they'll actually put a screenshot that will take
the place of the temporarily of the cover art of the album art.
And then once that chapter goes away, the album Mark comes back.
And you can visually see it's a, it's just a cool it turned is
essentially turns if, if you had this, okay, and this is what I
would like for chapter spec to be. And that's why I've been
kind of pushing hard for it to be an external JSON format is
that if you have an external file where you can pull where
you can define rich content within chapters, you can have
the podcast apps, give them the ability to pull in that data at
the right moment. And you can essentially turn a podcast into
like a PowerPoint presentation almost. It's you can say you
know at a certain point, and I see that you can see this
already in hyper catches. And I've been using hyper capture
more the last week on my iPhone, you can see what happens like in
in the bus cast podcast. It has, it has transcripts. And they're
popping up in the way David Norman chooses in within hyper
capture to display that case, he displays them as like, almost
like cards, right? I saw
that
shift from from chapter to chapter at the at the key time.
So you could really have, like one of those cards could be an
iframe with HTML content in it. Or it could be for another. And
this kind of alludes to something that I want to talk
about later, we do some clips, but one of them could be like a
poll, you take a bubble, interactive content, and it
comes up at the moment that it is appropriate for within the
audio. And, like, if you if you define a decent, you know, file
format in that way, there's really no limit as to what you
can put in there. And it's just up to the podcast app to support
that type of media. So
I like I like what you're saying. And again, it all comes
down to tools. I am not a post processing guy, I don't believe
in it. I don't like it. That's just me. Having the having the
tools. I do three, three and a half hours I'm done. I know I
want to I have another 20 to 30 minutes of post production to
get you know, to bake the mp3 to put all the information into the
mp3 to get the show notes up and running. I'm just focusing on
not screwing it up. Which still happens way too often. What I
like about what you're saying is