Dave Jones: Podcast Index

Welcome to podcast answers, the show where I answer your podcasting questions and help you grow your podcast along the way. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Today we are going to have an excellent episode. We are talking today with Dave Jones. Dave is one of the people who run podcast index and alternative index to Apple's podcast index. And today we're going to get into some stuff about why the index was started and what the index offers.

But then more than that, the podcast namespace, bringing new things to podcasting. It's exciting guys. And if you've not heard of podcast index, I just can't wait to get into this conversation with Dave. So without further ado, let's go.

All right, with me today, I have Dave Jones of the podcast index. Dave, welcome to the show. Hey, Andy. I appreciate you having me. Thanks, man. So we've known, I say that in quotes, know in each other for a little while. I've never physically met you in person, but we've worked, you know, I've done a lot of stuff with the namespace and trying to get my feeds compliant.

And so I've been working with the namespace quite a while, but if, can you just introduce yourself a little bit first and then we can go into the namespace and the podcast index, what's your name? I'm David Jones. I'm a podcasting and podcasting. Yeah, Dave Jones have been around RSS and podcasting and open source software for, gosh, long time, probably 15 years at least. Farther than that on the open source front, but long time. And buddies with Adam Curry for about that long.

And we ended up, you know, we've come together on quite a few projects and the latest one was podcast index. And yeah, that's my role within the project really is sort of, I don't know, community organizer, community manager. I don't know what you even call it. Code contributor, just a little bit of everything. General Hype Man, I don't know. Maybe Adam's the Hype Man. I don't know. He's the Hype Man and you're the get it done man. Yeah, sidekick. Yeah, right. Comic relief.

So can you explain a little bit what the genesis of podcast index, like what made you and Adam decide to do the index? Yeah, that one's pretty easy. We just had a phone call one day.

Well, backing up a little bit before that, we did for a very long time, at least a decade, we did a project called the Freedom Controller, which was a open source server that you could run yourself, still around where you could have you and a bunch of buddies or family or whatever could all join the server, have an account and you could all follow RSS feeds. We started that a few years before Google Reader went bust.

And the idea there was that one of the tech proficient people in your life could run a server for you and then all of you could have your own sort of community there because it went beyond just RSS readers. We called it a OPML pull only social network.

So all the servers, every time a new server came online, all the other servers, all the other Freedom Controller servers could see that and then you could, I would follow your RSS feed, but if I replied using my RSS feed, your server would pick it up and see that as a reply and then nest those things together in a thread. So just by publishing RSS feeds back and forth, we could all communicate and have this weird decentralized social network. This is all pre-activity pub and that kind of thing.

So that was the whole idea and it eventually evolved to handle Adam's podcast RSS feeds and show notes and all these kinds of things. And it became sort of a podcasting tool. And then around summer of 2020, during the middle of the pandemic, Adam called me and said, hey, there's a problem.

We need to create a directory, a decentralized directory of podcasting because Apple and a few others had just all coordinated together, loosely coordinated together to all take down not just Alex Jones, but some other X22 podcast. There's quite a lot of podcasts that got de-platformed off the major podcasting directories at that time. And I mean, I don't even listen to Alex Jones, but I'm like, well, that's not right. I mean, you can't. Yeah, that's not cool.

And so we said, well, let's do this. And so we have the expertise. We've been doing this for a long time with RSS. So over the course of about a month, literally, we just threw a bunch of code together, put up the podcast index, started our show called Podcasting 2.0. And off to the races. And that was the origin of the index. So for your listeners, there's a distinction here between you have the index, which is one thing, and then you have the podcast namespace, which is something different.

And then you have podcasting 2.0, which is something even different from that. So there's some moving parts here, but that's how the index started. Sure. Yeah, I remember I found you guys pretty close to the beginning. I don't remember how many episodes of the podcast you had gone through, but I remember binging from the very beginning and was like, this is great. I love this. I've heard about that guys. The idea that you wanted something that people couldn't be taken out of the directory.

I don't listen to Alex Jones either. I don't listen to that stuff, but I am about freedom and freedom of speech. And I think that, yeah, I don't want to see people get de-platformed just because of other people don't like them. And so I remember coming on onto that and going, this is great. I got to get involved.

And I think shortly after I started listening, I said, you know, I signed up for an API key because I'm a part time developer, you know, and I decided I was going to try my hand at this. And I've done some things throughout the thing. My biggest thing was for me, I wanted to get in and get working on some of the namespace stuff. And we can talk about that here in a second, but because I use, I use blueberries tool, the power press to create my feeds.

And at that time, you know, now they're, they're going gangbusters now. But at that time they weren't doing anything with that. No one hosting wise was really doing anything with that. And so I decided to get in there and dig into their code and see if I could insert some of these namespace tags in there. And so I kind of became the, the shim for a lot of the, the power press users. You did. But yes, that's, that's how I became part of it.

So can you explain to our listeners a little bit about what, what the namespace itself is and why, what, what you guys are, what we're doing with that. Okay. Yeah, sure. So you have, you know, what we talked about with the index earlier with the end for clarity, the index is a, is for programmers.

It's, it's really for app develop podcast app developers to be able to get a parsed RSS feeds easily and just get information about podcast easily without having to run a bunch of servers on their own time themselves. So we had that part. And so, but then we also knew immediately though, from the very beginning, we like, we want to do some important things. We want to make some new features.

And so we'll have this index and then that will also be a sandbox for new features that we can put into podcasting. We didn't exactly know how that was going to happen yet, but then with, we, we started thinking about what's called the, what ended up becoming the value tag or you could send micro payments back and forth directly from the listener to the creator without going through a third party. I mean, literally point to point. And so we said, well, you know, how are we going to do that?

We need some way to put that into the RSS feed because this can't be a third party. It has to be controlled by the podcaster themselves. So well, well, the only option within the world of RSS is a namespace. So we created what we call the podcast namespace. And once you have a namespace, you can overlay lots of new features and tags into the RSS feed, as you know, Andy.

And then we created that and it's like, we created it just for, initially for one purpose, but then immediately we had four or five other ideas and the community had, you know, 20 new ideas of things that had been tried in the past and failed or things that had never been tried and people just had as great ideas for the, you know, all of a sudden 20 years of sort of, you know, innovation and people having these ideas versus was sort of uncorked.

And then immediately people like, let's do this, let's do this, let's do this. And so then we hit we, so we open source the namespace as, as it's up there on GitHub now and the namespace now has, it's like 20, I don't count them up, but it's well over 20 different tags, each one of those representing a, a particular, a new feature that is now in RSS that, that either, either was not before or it was, and it was sort of didn't meet the mark, you know, it didn't go all the way.

Sure. Yeah. Cause I mean, yeah. So like RSS is, you know, extensible, which like you said, you can add namespaces on top of it. And Apple has, you know, had their namespace, but hasn't really done anything with it for a long, long time. And so, you know, there's not really been any, any new features in, in podcasting in a very long time until 2.0.

Okay. You know, the namespace came around and I like what you guys are doing too with not only are you creating new tags, but you're also having like a drop in your replacement as far as a lot of your, your, you're also recreating some of the tags in Apple too, you know, like the season tag and the episode tag, but also adding to them. So not just rec, not just creating them, but also adding to them.

Cause like with the, the podcasting 2.0 namespace, you can, you name your seasons instead of just having season one, two, three, four. So I do really like the fact that yeah, you're not just trying to come up with new things, but you're also enhancing other, you know, older features too. Yeah. And that's, that's been, I won't say that it's past. It's been controversial. I don't think it has been, but I think it's been probably maybe a misunderstood part of what is happening in the namespace.

So you take a look at some, you know, if you look at the list of tags, you have like the transcript tag, that's, that's new. That's never been there before. You have the, the, the sound by tag that's never been in there before the person tag, the location tag. There's a lot of these things are new, but then like you were talking about, there's also the season tag. Well, the season tag is, is also in Apple's iTunes namespace. So why would we sort of do that?

Why would we recreate the wheel and to just explain the thinking there, it's sort of a two pronged thing. One is we can have, we have the opportunity to do something to add new attributes, new features to that tag. Like you said, naming, you know, having a named season.

But then you also, the other thought that we're trying to do is we want to also have a backward compatible tag with the iTunes namespace so that in the future, it may take, it may take two decades, but at some point in the future, if the podcast industry, when there is eventually enough adoption to where everybody has is, is using the podcast namespace, has it declared in their feeds, there can be a switchover.

This is, okay, we're going to move away from Apple's proprietary iTunes namespace, which they control. And the reason that's important is because, you know, a podcasting was an open thing. RSS is open, it's decentralized, nobody's in control of it. There is no, there's not even an RSS advisory board anymore. RSS is just, it's completely, completely open. There's no control.

But in podcasting, you have this weird situation where Apple, and now Spotify, but at the time Apple are just in complete control over large portions of podcasting, be it their directory or their control of the iTunes namespace, which the industry adopted as a standard, but it's not an open standard.

If you want to add something to the podcast, to the iTunes namespace, if you want to add something to it or change, you have to go and petition Apple and just hope that they will eventually do it, which 99.9% of the time they won't. So this, we're creating an open, you know, like an open podcasting namespace. And so it's important for us to pull in some of these existing iTunes tags so that in the future there can be an easy switchover to the podcast namespace.

And now at that point, after that happens, then the podcast industry is in control of its own destiny. They can do, they can do what they want because everybody has a voice and participates in the open project, which is the namespace. Sure. Yeah. So you mentioned some of the new tags that you were creating. The very first one that you had mentioned was, well, you mentioned transcript, but you also mentioned the value block.

Can I know the very first time I heard that I was a little bit turned off way because I'm like, you know, Bitcoin, you know, I don't want to do that. Crypto. Yeah, crypto. But I've really come around to it. And one of the things that I like about it is what we've called boostagrams, you know, where we're able to not just send, you know, little bits of streaming money. So that's kind of what the value tag is.

You can, you can say, you know, I'm going to send, you know, 10 sats or 100 sats or 1,000 sats a minute. But then if I want to, I can send a message right to the podcaster with my, with that value attached to it. So can you talk a little bit about like value for value and just kind of a high level about the value tag itself?

Yeah, sure. So value for value as a concept. It's not new, of course, but it's, it was sort of crystallized by Adam on their, on his and John's show, no agenda over the last 16 years. And they started out and said, well, the nature of our show, we're a, we do commentary on the news media. And we really cannot have any credibility at all if we are taking advertising dollars. Because once you have an advertiser, then you have somebody who's going to have input on your show and the content of it.

And it's just not going to work. And they're like, well, nobody's ever going to trust us, our opinion that our opinion is our own unless if, if we have advertising. So they're like, well, this is going to have to be a donation model then. So we're going to have to just survive on the content, the quality of our content and whether or not people will donate money back. So they involved that initial idea of just donations into this concept of value for value.

And the idea is you, you take whatever the look around in your life, take whatever, whatever you see as valuable and how much dollar amount do you attach to those things. Now look at what you get from our show, attach a dollar amount to that, to our show and then donate that, that, that back to us. So if you're, you know, if you're spending $20 a month on Netflix, how often do you watch it? How many hours a month do you watch Netflix?

Well, you know, convert that into something equivalent to our show and, you know, send us that. Because this idea of your, it's really this subjective value where it's like, I'm not as the podcast are going to tell you what to give me or what it, what is required to unlock my paywall content. I'm just going to give you my content and I'm going to then ask for you to please just give me back what you think it's worth in your life. And that we tried.

So then we took that concept, which has been very successful for them over the years. It's responsible for two full-time incomes for Adam and John. We took that concept and said, okay, how can we make this work within podcasting at the technical level? And that's where we came with the value tag. Because the value tag is a high level here. I have a, I have a Bitcoin wallet and I'll talk about in just a second why it's Bitcoin. I have a Bitcoin wallet. You have a Bitcoin wallet.

These are both public wallet addresses. So I should be able to, if I'm listening to your show and your RSS feed has a Bitcoin wallet listed in it that belongs to you, I should be able to send you some money. It's that simple. And so the technical aspect of that is that a button shows up in the app that says this podcast, this show accepts Bitcoin. And you, if you attach your wallet to the podcast app, now you can send them what we call a boost.

And that's, you say, okay, I want to send you, maybe sometimes it's a, you know, a certain amount per minute, streaming payments. Maybe it's a one-time boost payment where you just hit the button and like you said, type in a message back to the podcaster. Then the podcaster receives that, that Bitcoin payment, sees the message. And now that message and the listener becomes sort of part of the show because they're a supporter, they've also sent you a comment.

And that works because it's all completely voluntary. The you're listening to the show, you're getting the show already. And if you decide at some point during the show listening that, oh man, this was great. I really want to send some money in a message. You can just do it right there. Nobody's forcing your hand or paywalling anything. Well, yeah.

So I think the, just the Bitcoin part, the reason is Bitcoin is really for once, just one simple aspect of it is it's the only way to do programmatic money that is low enough fee to handle micro payments and also widely adopted and accepted and valid enough to be able to be used by enough people to make this viable. If you go off with some weird altcoin, you know, weird crypto coin that nobody's ever heard of, you're never going to get any traction.

Everybody, not everybody, and then everybody's, a lot of people's feelings on Bitcoin is mixed, but at least, I mean, we now have spot Bitcoin ETFs that are coming. I mean, it's a legitimate asset. So it has the credibility and the ease of accessibility through things like Cash App that almost anybody can get Bitcoin within five minutes if you wanted to join in. So that's the reason we did it. Well, like, you know, you said, the thing that's important is right in the app.

You can send a message to it. And I found myself several, several times where I'm listening to something, you know, especially the podcasting 2.0 podcast, but where you guys say something or the host says something and I want to immediately just like, I push the button for boost and send a, send a comment right with it. Because it's, if I wait, sure, you have an email address, right?

And I have an email address, but if I wait until I'm stopped and I type in your email address and I send an email to you, chances are I'm not going to do it because I'm usually driving when I'm listening to podcasts or washing the dishes, right? And so same. Yeah. So I'm not going to pull out my email and try to send an email, but if I can push a quick button, I don't have to address it to anybody because it's already, the app already knows who it goes to because that's in the feed.

You can easily just type that in there and then you get the fun response of confetti in most, most apps kind of like hands to party. And, and then, and then a lot of times, you know, that becomes a feedback mechanism like you said, because a lot of, a lot of hosts will read that back on the show and people like hearing their own comments on the show.

And yeah, it's just a great way to not only get, give value back to the, to the podcast because again, yeah, I could do that through buy me a coffee or Patreon or whatever. And I mean, I have one of them.

I have, I have that for this show too, but at the same time it allows, yeah, the feedback group is great because again, it's hard enough getting comments or you're trying to get people to make comments and give you feedback on the show that, you know, but when they can do it right in the app, that's, yeah, that's perfect. I love it. Yeah. There's a couple of things there about that. That's a good comment because like, you know, Adam's been doing radio. He's been a DJ.

He's been, you know, on television for, you know, since he was a teenager, I mean, literally since he was 15 years old, he's been DJing radio. And you know, even he will tell you to this day, it's still a thrill to hear your comment read on a show. It's not just, you know, he's not immune to that. It's a thing. And we all love to be part of the show that we're, that we're invested in. We want, we want to be listeners, but we also want to be, it's fun to be part of it too.

You know, so there's that aspect of it. But then also, you know, we've all had that experience where you have a subscription to something and so let's say it's a PayPal subscription or a Patreon or something like that. And maybe time goes, maybe there's certain times that go by where, you know, your life's busy. You don't have much time to listen to the show.

And maybe it's been a couple of months that you've caught an episode and you look at that in that Patreon bill comes through and pop in, hits your credit card, you know, for $10 and you're like, you know, am I really listening to this very much? Maybe I should cancel this subscription because, you know, I haven't listened in a while and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to again. So you have that moment of like that natural, well, maybe, maybe I'm not getting a lot of value of this.

So maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should cancel. And then, then that, it's unlikely that it becomes more, excuse me, it becomes less likely that you're going to resubscribe in the future. Even if you pick the show back up, there's this weird thing that happens when you're, when your payment or your support of the show is disconnected from the listening of the show.

And so if you combine, like you said, if you combine those things into the same app, into the app experience, now you're only, you're literally only paying when you listen. You don't have this weird sort of mental disconnect or when you get kind of like an annoying surprise of the monthly subscription coming through and hitting your credit card. So it, it kind of, it marries the two things. It's like, well, you're listening to the show right now.

You obviously value it or you wouldn't be listening to it. You know, otherwise you're kind of weird. So it gives you the opportunity in app, whereas these other paywall sort of workarounds for this listener support model have, they really kind of fall down there or at least to me, they're kind of suboptimal. Well, and to, you know, not only that, but you can, you can do splits on, on a show level to, or not, not just a show level.

So for me, I'm the only host of this, this episode, this podcast, but you know, I can do it at an episode level too. So if Dave gives me his, his information, which I'm hoping you will, I will put you in the split for this episode. And then anyone that boosts this episode or, you know, does that it's going to go to not just me, but also to Dave too. And so that's one of the things that I like because you're also then valuing your guests as well.

Yeah. And so you could have, I mean, there's, you know, Andy, there's shows that, that are a, you know, within the value for value world that have 20 different splits. So it's not just the podcaster themselves getting, getting those payments. It's, you know, people that contribute show art, people that do chapter work, people that, you know, that edit the show, somebody that did the intro music, somebody that the, that the podcaster just lied and wants to support charities.

I mean, you just, you could throw all these people into your, into your value block with what we call in the, in the feed. And then my single payment of let's say $5 to your show gets split a dozen ways and portions that you specify percentages go to the, each one of these different people. And it happens in perpetuity because these shows remain published forever.

So if somebody goes back five years from now and listens to an episode of your back catalog, they, those wallets still get payments just like they did the day it was published. Yeah. And then you also start getting other things like services where you, you know, you put a split in here and then you can do XYZ with my service, you know, like, like, uh, John Sprelach's new chapters, uh, thing where if you boost, you get a chapter with your name and the image on it. I think it's wild. It's wild.

I tested it out and it's, it's crazy, but it's one of the things that are possible. And not only that, but then as the, you know, we've, we've all seen it, you know, 99 cent apps, cause anything more than that, people are like, I'm not paying, you know, $20 bucks for an app. But you know, for my podcast listening, I really love the apps that I listen to use to do that. And I want to continue having them develop. So they also can take a chunk of it on top.

They just kind of add on top and I'm a hundred percent cool with that because it allows me to support them in their development work and anyone along the value chain for the way

that I'm listening. Cause it goes more than just the podcast or yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at blue, you brought up the example of blueberry earlier, you know, they went all recently have gone all in on podcasting, podcasting 2.0 features and they support the value tag now. And so they also have a, a wallet that they take 5%. So if you're using power press, you know, they'll take a percentage of that.

And so if you think, if you look at it, you know, if I'm using, let's just say if I'm using cast-a-matic and I'm listening to a podcast that's hosted on blueberries, a power press extension, everybody in that chain gets a piece of that payment. And it's not the podcaster gets, gets the payment, but also the podcast app developer Franco of cast-a-matic gets a piece. It gets a few percent. Blueberry gets a few percent for hosting, for building the tool.

And then the podcaster gets everything that's left. And then you're, and however, you decide to split those chunks up to other people potentially. But yeah, it's, it's a, it's really the first time, I can say this for sure. It's the first time in the history of podcasting that the app, the programmers and the developers and the creators of these tools get brought into the value chain.

And that's an important thing because, you know, the, the namespace is a feature, is a feature platform for all of podcasting, but it does grow out of, it isn't an extension of our work on the index podcast index, which is app developers focused. So we, we really care and serve programmers in the podcast ecosystem. And those people, those developers have never been able to really have a chance to make a, to make a lifestyle out of this.

And now I think, I think because of this, they're making, they're making more money than they ever have. I mean, you know, I don't know how much, but I do know that the numbers I've heard is contributing. I mean, even if it's, hey, even if it's a two or $300 a month, that's two or $300 a month that was not there before. Yeah. You know, that just did not exist at all. Because people do, like you said, people do not want to pay for apps.

Yeah. Now value, value block is not the only thing in the namespace. It's one of the things I think that's, it's a hundred percent new to people, you know, as far as features go, but there's a lot of other tags and features that we've been adding to, to the namespace. And I say we because like you said, it's not just you and Adam coming up with these things, but you know, 150 other developers who are saying, you know, I want this, this would be great. So I do, I say we on purpose.

Yep. Thank you. What are, what are some of the other tags and features that we've added? I don't know if this is legit, but I, yeah, and thank you for saying we, because that's a hundred percent true. I don't know if this is legit, but I tend to sort of bucket the namespace features into like two different buckets.

There's, there's some that are like, I don't know, I don't even know the right term, sort of groundbreaking, not real happy with that term, maybe like paradigm shifting, you know, better big features that sort of, if you begin to think about their scope, they just have wide range, like wide reaching ramifications. Value tag would be one of those. The medium tag would be another one. The medium tag is a very simple tag. It goes into your RSS feed and it declares what type of content this is.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's critically different than a category. And the category is what the content is about. The medium is what the, what the content is. So you can have a music category, but that just means you have a podcast about music. When you declare that you have a music medium using the medium tag, now you're saying that the content in the podcast is music. It literally is music content. These are, these are songs that you're going to hear in, in this podcast.

And that is a fundamental shift. So the available mediums now are music, audio book, film, video. So you can have, you can have all of these different types of content that are now can be delivered. They've always can be. They've always, they've always been fine. You can deliver any music, any audio or video through a podcast is, you know, through that meet, through that platform. But now you, now you've told the apps what to expect. So you're saying, okay, I'm going to put songs in my podcast.

That's what these things are. These episodes aren't going to be podcast episodes. They're going to be music tracks. And I'm telling you podcast app that that's what these are. And that way the podcast app can make intelligent decisions about how to handle that content. Now when it's just a regular podcast, you may, the podcast app may be doing things like gap zapper, you know, where it's removing silences.

It may be doing a speed, variable speed, one, you know, one X all the way to two X things like that. Well, those things don't apply to music. You don't want music to be gap zapped and sped up. So now the, now the podcast app can say, Oh, this is music. Okay. I will reset myself to handle this type of content.

And like the same with an audio book, you know, there's now it's like, okay, now these things, these chapters that are in this podcast, these are now not just random place markers within the podcast about different, maybe different content. Now these are, these are actual table of contents headings is what these things are. And like you can make lots of and also know how to reorder them so that your audio book can say your audio book playback goes in correct order.

So there's lots of different, this, the medium tag is one of those, like the value tag that has got wide ranging ramifications, even though it's very simple. Another one I would put probably in that category is the value time split that that goes one step further than the value tag that we talked about earlier where you can declare your wallets.

And now that says, okay, during this section of my podcast, let's say from a minute, you know, from 25 minutes and 30 seconds to 27 minutes and 45 seconds. During that time, I played a clip or a song from a different podcast. And so I want to tell the app, don't pay me during that time, pay the other guy, you know, pay the other person where that content originated from.

And now the app, when you, if you send a payment during that, during that period of time, it'll now redirect that to the other wallet of the originator. You know, you can, you can pull in content from another podcast and still give appropriate credit and payments to the originator of that content. So there's, there's those types of tags where I think it's sort of like, these are big deals. This is a big deal.

And then there's some other tags that in that other bucket that are like, these are just, these are just solid features, things like being able to put the transcript, a curated transcript of each episode in there, or a, the person tag where you can say, okay, you're going to declare that this person was in this podcast here, like me and you. So I'm on your podcast. If you could put a person tag in there with Andy Layman is the, is the host Dave Jones is the guest.

You could have a little avatar of our picture, maybe a link to our bio, that kind of thing. And then when the app sees that and is playing back that content, it can throw up a little link to our bio. We can throw up a little avatar with our, with our image on it. Some apps have gone so far as to even link the person tags to the transcripts so that it's showing our picture, depending on who's talking during playback. Well, yeah, it's rad.

But some of that stuff, I mean, Apple had, you know, for select podcasts, I mean, Apple had that for really big podcasts where they'd have the hosts and maybe some guests, but that was never available to just everyday podcasters like you and I, like that was something that was reserved for big podcasters. You couldn't declare it in your feed. It was, you had to be specially invited by Apple to do that where now we can do that and we can credit everybody in the podcast.

We can easily link out to whatever we want to link out to bios. Yeah. It seems like we're getting, yeah, just more and more freedom where we don't have to rely on these walled gardens like Spotify or Apple to provide features that we can do ourselves now. Yeah. That, and that's really what this is. I mean, the, I mean, you know, this Andy, the, our whole project.

So if you take the index and the namespace and then all the community projects that go within it, that collectively becomes what's this thing known as podcasting 2.0. So podcasting 2.0 is just this collection of ideas, software and services that support the mission of taking podcasting back into being controlled by podcasters and podcast companies and interested parties and developers and taking it away from being fundamentally controlled by the big, by the big companies.

Yeah. And unfortunately we're seeing that even more now with YouTube jumping into the game and trying to quote unquote podcast. I'm not even going to call it a podcast, but quote unquote podcast with it. Yeah. We're seeing it even more. So yeah, the more we go into this, the more I just really appreciate what we as a community are doing to kind of take back podcasting to back. Well, like it was originally, you know, like I, I started podcasting in 2007. So I wasn't the very, very beginning.

But I, you know, I've done it on early though. Yeah. It is. I started way back then and I, I had to step away from my podcast for a while. Somebody else kept it going and it's actually, the other podcast is actually still going. But you know, so I've been doing podcasting on and off since 2007 and a lot has changed since then, but you know, not necessarily for the good.

So it does feel, it feels now like grassroots, like it was back then where you're, you know, you're trying to clobber things together to make it work and trying to, you know, come up with these new things. Come up with new things. And so, yeah, this is feeling like that to me where we're just, you know, getting a lot of new stuff and it seems, it's fun. It's fun again. It is.

It feels like early internet days, you know, and the, the fun is, yeah, you talk about YouTube and this is going to, this is all, this is going to happen forever. This is never going to not happen. You know, Spotify came in because what they saw was, hey, here's a bunch of content that's free. Everybody's out there making content and just posting it and we can just grab it and make and layer ourselves on top of it and skim some money off. And that's, hey, that's a gold mine.

And that, that's exactly what that's what that fact is never going to change because podcasting has always been fundamentally free content and will probably always will be even there's some paywalling that's happening now. But it's not, you know, 99% of it is free available content and you're always going to have people that see that as an opportunity to just add a big on top and get some money. And that's what's, that's so Spotify did it first. Now YouTube's doing it.

It's always going to be that way. And it's something that podcast, I don't, I think personally there is no podcast quote, unquote industry. I don't, I think there's podcast, there is a podcast community. There's definitely a community of people who know each other, support each other and are all going in a similar direction content wise and technology wise and ideology. And so I think there's definitely a podcasting community that is large, but I don't think there's a coherent podcast industry.

And I think that's a good thing. What we think of as the podcast industry is like, is this loose list of advertising agent, digital advertising agencies, podcast hosting companies, podcast consultants, the podcasters themselves. But, but that's not, that's not an industry because they're all self-interested parties doing their own, going in their own direction. And a lot of times they're at odds with each other.

And that's what happens in times like this with Spotify and YouTube and that kind of thing is those, those differences become apparent because the podcast, the podcast consultants and the podcast advertising agencies, they have no problem with YouTube and Spotify and these big companies coming in. It means more money in their pocket because the digital advertising opportunities are a natural fit for that, for that business model.

But that's not what podcasting and the podcast community thinks of as podcasting. So you have these two different, you know, the, the, that Adam calls it the podcast industry of complex, that digital advertising supported arena within podcasting, which is just going to always run to the new shiny thing that can make the next, you know, they can make the next percentage of digital advertising revenue and podcasting itself has always been something very, very different.

It's been something that's based on freedom and, you know, an ideology of openness. And that's a thing that we really cannot, that has to remain the core or else podcasting itself just doesn't exist. Right. Podcasting came from the fact that, you know, there were people who didn't like what was going on on the radio and or couldn't get on the radio, but had had something that they wanted to say. Yeah. They weren't, they weren't trained in radio.

They weren't all Adam Curry, you know, and, but we were, you know, we're allowed to do it. And yeah, I think that yeah, that's, it needs to remain like that. Cause that's, yeah, I think then that's where I see the podcasting 2.0 and the podcast index and everything is helping shift people that way. Cause there's a, yeah, a freedom and an ability to, to make content and not have to have your gatekeepers or, you know, whatever go through lots of different things. Anyone can do it.

And there's all ranges of podcasting. I mean, obviously people that are just starting and may have a really, really crappy mic to people who have, you know, $1,000 bikes. There's going to be that range and that quality range too. But the thing that's great about it is it doesn't matter because you can do it. And if you have listeners that were willing to listen to your show, then you have an audience. That's right.

Yeah. And with things like, like the medium tag that we talked about earlier, now you have musicians that are coming in and starting podcasts where their podcast is an album of music. And this is, this is new. I mean, like there's been, there's over time, there's been, you know, you'd have one little blip every now and then of somebody who might do something like this, like on a soundcloud and, and they got an RSS feed for free because they're on soundcloud. And so it would end up out there.

But there was never a way to identify that stuff in such a way that the music artists saw it as a fertile ground of opportunity for them to put their content out. So now that's different. Now that has changed. So now you have a new area of freedom for musicians where they can come in and begin to put their albums on to out there as podcasts.

And it become just this, it's this perfect delivery mechanism where now all this music is showing up in people's podcast apps and you have a way to send them, send them a value back through a boost. So this, this is a way where podcasting is doing what it always has been great at. Exactly what you said.

Not everybody can start a radio station, you know, nobody, nobody, nobody has, nobody in your neighborhood has 200, you know, has a quarter of a million dollars to get an SEC license to broadcast. But everybody can start a podcast, which is what the web did for publishing podcasts did for audit for multimedia. And so now that the, the mediums and these, these new features are coming out, you're seeing this go to its logical next step, which is continuing to break barriers of gatekeeping.

That's what podcasting is. It's a gate destroyer. And that's what's where if, if it's not breaking down gates, it's not doing its job. And so I feel like 2.0 is bringing back its ability to break the gates.

Well, and, you know, not only now with your medium tag, you can have your podcasts apps switch to, you know, just, even just showing media, just showing music, instead of having it all mixed together if you'd want, but with the wallet switching technology, as Adam likes to call it, you know, now Adam can do a music show and the artists get paid when he's playing the songs. If people are liking it, they just boost it and the artists get paid.

And then we're seeing, you know, people like Ainsley, kind of Costello, who have said they are making basically pennies from the traditional streaming apps and things, but are now making a decent living on, on the fact that they're making money on, on something that's like that's podcasting. And then, you know, a year ago, even two years ago, we wouldn't have even imagined that.

Yeah. And, you know, take that to the next step beyond that, which is audio books and there's so much content out there. You know, we all, we've all had to go to LibriVox, you know, at some point and get, and get an audio book for something, a classic public domain audio book. And you know, God bless those people that, that do that, you know, they're, they, they spends, they spend their hard, their, you know, precious time to record those audio books. And some of them are, are just not good.

The, they're, they're just of poor quality, but they, they really spent their time to do it. Now they can get a return on that. Now that, now they can get, they can easily get payments to come back to them. And I think you're going to see another explosion of content. Once we start to focus on audio books, then you will have people that are incentivized to go and get in there and do a really good job.

Whereas before it was, you know how it is, Andy, I mean with, with open source software is that way too. When it's a labor of love, it only carries you so far to, to where, you know, a lot of most, most open source projects, open source programming projects, they get, they get 90 percent of the way there. And then the last 10% of polish and finishing the job is so hard that they just never get finished. Well, other things become important. Other things become important.

You know, your, you know, there's other things going on because you're not making money off of it. You know, your day job, whatever. And so yeah, there's things that are becoming more important. So yeah, you're a hundred percent right. Money doesn't solve everything, but it helps in the long run to be able to, to motivate, to put the quality there. Cause you're going to, you're going to wait that a little bit higher because you're making something back and you're getting value back in return.

Even if it's just in these are, even if it's just 20 bucks, there's some, it is, it's more,

it's less about the money, honestly, as it's more and more about the money as a signal that there's somebody out there that's valuing and, and sort of, and depending on what you do. And we, you know, we're, we're a donation based, the primary role of our podcast each week on, on Friday is to, is to inform about what's going on in the project, but also it's the way we fund the project. The index costs us about $1,200 a month to run with all the different hosting fees that

we have to pay. And so we have to make, we have to get some money back. And the fact that people are willing to support us. And I know a lot of them are just supporting the show. They're not necessarily supporting the index cause they don't use the index, but that's fine. I mean, it gives me, it gives me a lot of motivation in the form of, hey, and it's a Thursday night and it's time to do show prep. And we just got home from, you

know, from rock climbing with my daughter and we're all tired. I'm like, you know what? Yeah. But there's quite a few people who donate to this, to this project to keep it going. And it motivates me to get up and go do the work to do it. Whereas if that, those donations weren't there, I, they would, it would be very easy to just skip, skip a day, you know, not put my whole heart into it. Definitely. Well, there's, I mean, there's so much involved with, with podcasting 2.0

and the namespace and everything. I would encourage people to look at, I don't want to keep you too long. I know you've got a day job. You got to go back to also, but I, you know, I want to thank you for, for being on, on the show today and, and where can people find out more about the index? Cause again, there's so much more going on with just than what we just talked about today.

The best place to hang out if you're interested in index stuff and the namespace and everything going on with 2.0, I guess the best thing to do would be listen to our show on Fridays at noon central time, uh, well 1230 and, um, It's live. You record it live. It is. Yeah. It is live, which, which was fun. I had never podcasted before until, um, you know, until doing this show with Adam. And then all of a sudden we're doing a live

show. So that was like trial by fire. Um, but we, uh, listen to the show every, you know, every Friday, but then also, uh, podcast index dot social as our mastodon instance. Um, and so you can go and hang out there. Uh, if you need an invite, it's invite only because we try to keep the junk out, keep it focused. Yeah. Keep it focused. So, but

you can still, you can still watch, uh, look at the content. You just can't post, but if you want to post and, and join up and have, have fun, join the party, uh, send us an email

info at podcast index.org and I'll get you an invite code. It's not, it's, there's no gatekeeping. It's just to keep out the job. Sure. Yeah.

All right, guys. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. If you got any value out

of this podcast at all, I ask that you either send us a boost to Graham, like we talked

about in the episode, or you can go to podcast answers.com slash buy me a coffee and give me a one off, uh, donation or you can help support, uh, any, any things that we were doing right now. I'm trying to raise funds for buying a sure SM seven B and that'd be helpful. So without further ado, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much guys for hanging

out with me. And if you have any podcasting questions, I would love to answer them. So please contact me at podcast answers.com slash contact. And I can answer your podcasting question on the very next show guys. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Have a great week. Good luck. You you you