Chris Messina talks about Spotify Ads, the history of open formats on the social web and how ActivityPub could impact the future of Podcasting?

So it's really been drinking from the fire hose and trying to stay on top of all of those things that are happening.

I feel like this is a little bit like, and I don't remember if this is exactly the right metaphor, but the iPhone X or something was a break or a change or a difference. And I think web three is a little bit more like web one than web two. And I also don't think that web three again, without a 3.0, like web three is a product concept or conception of a series of technologies that work in a certain way with a different set of assumptions web 2.0 is almost, I don't know. It's like a business like.

And so I guess I just, for me, there's something that is different. And especially with this audience, I think when you're talking about, web standards and formats and protocols and technologies. Yes. Some of that was part of the web two O world, but so much of it was predicated on just companies connecting to each other in a way where there was some standardization, as opposed to the underlying philosophy of what it was that we were trying to. And so anyways, it's not a continuum,

And I don't know if they did it just to neutralize the threat of decentralization or if they got to the point where their product needs required them to not go down the path of standards because it was too slow and didn't fit their business goals. And so that tension, I think, is so important to keep in mind

Is this the Google ad sense moment where we had it in blogging? Is this the Podcast

You may still have a website that's separate, that's part of the open web, but they want to have something that is normalized to their system. And that provides the ability to, oppress or improve or enhance, or for example, add programmatic inserted ads, and then to measure engagement and then to layer on interactive elements like polls and Q and a and stuff like that. May not be portable to other platforms.

So I think it's important to understand some of the different dynamics that are at play with advertising on Spotify and through Spotify network. However, I think it's incredibly important to think about what Spotify is ultimate ambitions are to be.

I don't know if it's like the audio transport layer for the internet, just as YouTube is for video, but, The Spotify clearly is leading into their ad model, as opposed to just getting subscriptions for music that implies that they're going to need to continue to grow their user base and their listener base. And that's probably the most important thing to take away from a competitive perspective in terms of the other podcasting apps and what they're focusing.

And it feels The closed world always gets faster than the open world and Spotify, as in this close, bringing out new features, bringing out new functions, but will it just end up failing, like most closed world ecosystems do eventually, or do you think it will accelerate?

you have to have sort of a benevolent dictator leader person. That's shepherding the thing forward, listening to lots of different opinions and perspectives and coalescing around a certain set of goals and maintaining a public north star to where you want to go. Spotify doesn't have those same restrictions.

They can focus very intensely on solving or serving the job to be done for the listener, which is giving them the most interesting, relevant content in the formats that serve them best and giving them control. or perhaps working on behalf of the user to provide more control over the playback experience than what, the conventional Podcast or might prefer. And so that's a very different dynamic and different relationship, right?

So Facebook took on that role of normalizing all content so that it appeared to be the same during the newsfeed, and then could really focus on and do user testing at a massive scale on how users responded and reacted and interacted with that content to gain more. Sheriff mind more attention. The open protocols and formats have never really been about those sort of goals. It's really about or at least the way I got to see it. It's been more about maintaining.

I guess ownership and control of the content for the creators and being more on the creator side. But that actually is in some ways it inhibits adoption and growth, unless you really figure out how to, make a really brilliant express. Now Podcast did that, but I robotically, they grew through the centralization of the apple podcast app and experience. And that directory, there were of course decentralized Podcast players that users could use.

But I would imagine that the defaults really matter and that the fact that there was a default Podcast player on, Macko S or at least the iPhone, was really critical or at least maybe through iTunes, et cetera, was really critical to gaining that. Users and that decentralization may or may not have had that much of a contributing aspect to it. Now there's plenty of haters that are going to come at me probably about that.

But I think I would distinguish between what is a good product and what necessarily uses decentralization or open formats and protocols to achieve the goal that they're trying to get to. So

So have you ever had a look at any of the work they've been doing at all?

And I do think The work, for example, that I did on something that was called originally the diesel project, D I S O not to be confused with big clouds, new name, that does no project, And out of that came an effort to standardize activities that could be syndicated between different decentralized, social networking, end points, the concept being that anybody could run their own blog, they could publish activities.

Chris read a book, Sam commented on Chris's video and those things could be syndicated so that anybody could subscribe to anybody else. And you could filter the activities that you receive based on your own interests. Now that concept and those ideas and those primitive. Seem completely useful in the Podcast 2.0 space, or at least in terms of the attention of syndicating, rich audio or rich media around with, an additional layer of context or data about data, the metadata.

so it's, I find it just like interesting, to contemplate that. And I don't fully understand their goals. I don't know what's animating this. I don't know. What's motivating it. Oftentimes when it comes to these open standards, open formats. Efforts it's against some big evildoer, it's like the desktop or Microsoft or something like that. And so if the reason why the pod father has come back is to take something back from apple because now apple has a commercial interest in it.

I totally relate to that. just another sort of aside, as you mentioned, I'm best known for having created the hashtag and getting that idea started and out there, and it's led to, thousands and tens of thousands of flowers, blooming, and that's the whole idea of formats and standards. There was a time in 2011, when I believe Twitter attempted to. Trademark the hashtag because they realized that Instagram was starting to monetize it and it was making money off of it.

And Twitter suddenly realized that actually they wanted to make a lot more money off of it because of course it, it started on Twitter and this of course was very offensive to me. And, because I had originally brought the idea of that. To Twitter and Twitter had said, that's a stupid idea. That's never going to catch on. I then subsequently went to the decentralized, open web and said, Hey guys, what do you think about the solution? And, gradually they adopted it.

And then Twitter acquired those companies. And, the idea took off, but. I suppose what I'm relating to in a similar way is when Twitter sort of decided that they own this idea, which they'd originally rejected in, which was never designed just for Twitter. I became angry and stood up and said, oh, I'm the inventor of the hashtag. Like you guys can't have it. I wonder if something similar is happening with, the Podcast 2.0 work, to take it away from the centralizing early.

That a platform or company like apple may have where they're privileging their own software and their own platforms at the expense of the independent community that really gave them so much value for so long.

And once you go to de-centralization with tipping, that's very interesting, but now you're starting to look more and more like a browser. And so I think that starts to beg the question of what is a browser, what should a browser do? What are the formats that a browser needs to render and Podcast 2.0 might just be another format that a browser could eventually render. And so it doesn't have to be specifically about Podcast. Actually.

I haven't tried it yet, but I know the brave browser has that it's support for platelet. And I know historical, there are other browsers that have the ability to play media because media is then presumed to be a first-class citizen on the web. It's not just about documents. So as a thought exercise, it might be worth thinking about what would a browser be that natively supported podcasts. And does it have to be something that is separate?

And if it's not separate, what formats or protocols could. Podcast 2.0, prioritize in order to see more adoption and get more integration into existing web standards, web formats.

So why did that occur? And then that was the basis for activity streams.

Ah, the cleaner is probably not the right word to use, but maybe easier to use or that there was something about it that relative RSS, was a tighter specification or more formalized or something along those lines. and I guess I would add to that, that RSS seemed very tightly coupled and obviously it came out of Dave Warner's work on outlines. and if everything is an outline and that's one approach to content, Adam, I think tried to, again, I forget the specific differences between, Adam and RSS.

But what I will say is that we decided to format activity streams in the atom format for two reasons. One, because we wanted to have a fallback. Blogs and other platforms emitted an atom based activity feed. It could still be read by conventional feed readers. So it was really an adoption play. What ended up happening. And this is a lesson that I took away from that time period was that it took so long for us to standardize the activity stream spec that by the time we did the activity.

Streams Jason format was so much more pleasant to work with so much more straightforward. Like people really wanted that. And so I was so focused and I was informed by the experience That if you just build something that is slightly different than what people are already doing, you can nudge them in the direction of where you want them to go and what I missed. And I think this is always something that now I'm probably pretty paranoid about is that there is a better product or a better solution.

That's like right around the corner. If you actually fundamentally reassess the principles of what you're trying to solve for. And when it comes to Podcast 2.0. Are there better formats, for what you're trying to achieve. Are there different ways to solve this, that build upon other people's work? And by building on that other people's work, they're willing to then adopt what you've built.

In other words, Seeing sort of the way you want the world to work and you're using the things that are already well adopted rather than coming up with your own reinvention of the thing that might be a little bit more coherent, but again, it takes a long time to herd the cats and it takes a long time to get agreement, then takes a long time to build the libraries and then to see it adoption, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think the payments thing is a really good example of this where maybe value for value in the podcasting space makes sense. and, or maybe there is a. Tag in HTML tag that any content could add, like to the top of the feed or to the top of a webpage. if Twitter did this for all profiles, for example, Relic was payment and it links off to your preferred payment profile that could solve the problem without needing to reinvent it within that, Podcast Depot spec.

So I'm just trying to explain, we started with that. Because we want it to have a back. And we wanted everybody that already adopted the Adam protocol, the Adam format in their feed reader to be able to read activity streams, formatted.

And what was interesting that it suddenly jumped onto my radar is when they were using activity pub as the format basis to do that, which I then suddenly went, hang on a minute. we've gone down this wheel before. What are they trying to achieve Cause then that suddenly says, you've gone RSS to activity pub, which is what you've just talked about. But. They've jumped the shark with no atom in the middle.

So what is the benefit of activity about to explain what activity pub eventually became and What would be the benefit of using in Podcast index today?

He's done a bunch of stuff in the open source world. He wrote the first spec for open ID. He also wrote something called pubsub hubbub and pubs up hubbub is essentially a relay service that allows an individual to subscribe, to get notified when there's new content. of course in the world of syndication, you have push and you have pull and. There are various efficiencies and reasons why you'd want to use one format or the other, but push allowed us to move to a different architecture of content.

So rather than polling, where you're constantly knocking on someone's door and asking, Hey, you got anything new, every 30 seconds or five minutes or whatever, push allows you to say, Hey, I want to subscribe to, your magazine, so to speak. And when you have new content, just send it to this address. So you register an address and then you get stuff sent back to you.

Activity pub was a way to build on that concept in that work so that you could essentially subscribe to a whole bunch of different emitters of activities. And then when those activities would arrive in your aggregator, they could be deduped and decoupled, and they could be made sense because, if I'm syndicating my activities to a bunch of different receivers, I don't want to get bombarded with a bunch of. comments or whatever, right?

You also want to be able to do roll-ups where you can say, Chris commented on five of your recent episodes, right? Because you haven't checked in three days or something, so you need to be able to dedupe and et cetera and so forth. and so that's where that came from now. I think it's interesting that the idea of adding comments in a de-centralized context in the Podcast space might appear to be novel. But in fact, it's not again, the reason why I modeled activity streams, the way that I did.

RSS. And Adam made an assumption about the relationship between the author, which we renamed as the actor and the content. The assumption in RSS and Adam was that the author wrote the content that was specified in the, the feed or the format. And I said, one, that doesn't mean. I could've commented on it. I could have taken a photo. I could have shared it. there's all sorts of verbs. I go to listen to it that are worth capturing in a feed format.

And then the object itself doesn't have to be a blog post, but we can start with that as the assumption. And so all of that is like where that started from. And then we added the different verbs and the different objects and indirect objects, to model both language, but also what we were seeing.

feeds at the time and the activity pub model sprang out of that when there was a realization, especially in corporate land and IBM, ironically was actually a big proponent of this, that there was a realization that different companies or different orgs, or even different groups within a large enterprise might want to subscribe or update to each other via this feed format. And so that's where that concept, came from and where it grew its relevance.

And I would say there was like a gardener hype cycle Boom and bust where there was a lot of hype in the beginning, a lot of excitement about decentralization. And then there was a winter of despair where the workout really hard and, Facebook and Twitter and the rest took a lot of oxygen out of the room. And, I moved on and did other things and other people left.

And, but then it's, one of the beauties of working on open standards that open formats, especially that are published openly on the web is that you have some of their enterprising person come along and they finally have a use case where they finally feel the pain. And so mass, Don was one of the first that actually adopted activity pub. And I would say in a background, radiation kind of way, popularize the format, kept it going. And now it seems like it's having its day. I wanna say.

eight or nine years after, we started that work. so it goes,

And so you can try these things and you can spin them up and it's no big deal. The other thing that I wanted to remind us of John Panzer, who I worked with at Google. and it was a big advocate for these things. Also wrote a format called salmon, which was the concept of being able to comment on other people's blog posts remotely, essentially the concept of salmon swimming upstream. And use this model to federate comments.

and again, like we solve these problems now, granted maybe there some tweaks or adjustments or updates to some of the formatting that you might use. But the core concepts I think are pretty good. And they went through a number of rounds of revisions and, just, lots of eyeballs were on these things. and they were also licensed in a way that should allow anybody to use them without getting permission from anybody.

So I believe that format is still, probably out there somewhere on the web. I think the website is down, but that is one of those. So the idea for was to provide, and to motivate a number of formats and standards that would allow us to decentralize the social web. So there was identity information.

which was portable contacts, and your friends there was identity and authentication that was open ID authorization and access to APIs that was OAuth, activities, which would allow you to syndicate the web that was, of course activity streams, and then activity pub. and then salmon was like crossing. posting and stuff like that. So I think as I recall, those are the major ones that we worked on.

Oh, and you also asked about, blue sky, which is Twitter's initiative to try to decentralize Twitter, from what I understand and, they've hired a bunch of people, who are in that space and they're working on this stuff and. It's unclear if, for how it might advance. But my sense is that Jack Dorsey probably sees a world in which Twitter will gain an enormous amount of value.

If it does learn to decentralize itself and allow for almost Quasi government organizations to run their Twitter nodes and then to inter-operate or to connect across borders in different places. And so on, I know he's really big on Africa. I know crypto is really big in Africa. I know it's no coincidence that the tipping stuff that he's working on Twitter, proper isn't, being informed by some of the things that I think he sees, going on elsewhere in the world.

So when it comes to aligning the Podcast 2.0 stuff with. And initiative that may in gains, some really important traction. I do think blue sky has at least looking at.

Twitter started out interoperating with XMPP and with Jabber like that, like Blaine cook, one of the original architects of Twitter, worked on these things. And that's where a lot of these concepts came from.

The people who built these platforms, I would say, besides mark Zuckerberg, where all roads lead to Rome called Facebook, built and believed in decentralization and the need for decentralization, but the economic reality and the need to, build and move quickly and to iterate and to hire teams and stuff like that. let us down a different path. So that's why the web three and web two thing I think is so interesting because I think web three has more to do with at least.

Web one that I was part of in 2005, especially with Barcamp and with coworking. And a lot of those things were meant to be decentralized, not owned by any central authorities. And then the very thing that I was most worried about, the money came into the system and gummed everything up and, some people have made good on that, but there's also the harms that come with that.

And every day I'd listen to a show and I'd have stuff to say, I'd be like angry or be worked up. And I was, by myself, cause it was a pandemic. And so one day I just reached out to him. I was like, Hey Brian, like, why don't we go on clubhouse? Cause I really want to talk to you about this story or something. And he said, yes. I tried a bunch of things that were like way over produced and didn't really work.

but eventually, it just turned out into sort of a commentary show between him and I bring the Silicon valley product perspective. and he brings the internet history perspective. He wrote a whole book on it. and I think, we have a really good kind of cadence and vibe. we do record typically every Wednesday at 6:00 PM PST and we go for about an hour. So sometimes we have some guests and we just kinda talk about what's going on in the world

So with Twitter spaces and these live audio platforms like greenroom and stuff, what are your thoughts are, do you think that live element to podcasting is a good thing or is it a separate function?

For that generation is going to be normal. And so just as they're used to hopping into a discord and idling in discord or seeing what's going on and observing texts streaming through like the matrix, I think social audio may have a similar resonance for a whole new demographic. Where they assume interactivity, they assume the ability to get up on stage. And so it's not sufficient to just say, this is a, a live radio show and you can call in and listen in, over terrestrial airwaves.

It's the interactive aspect that you can choose to engage in. That makes it a fundamentally different, I would say job to be done and level of engagement. That, isn't the same when you're listening after the fact. And it's, non-interactive, I think if you think about books and you think about blog posts allowed you to interact with the author in a very direct and immediate way that, previously was not really possible. So I would just cage it in those worlds. What I'm noticing in myself.

And even the feedback that I got some times is that the way that we do the technique ride home show on Twitter spaces, it is very conventional radio where sometimes we'll open up the floor, but for the most part, we're not, it's not very social. And that's really because I'm trying to create an experience for the, asynchronous listeners afterwards. And, I have listened to some spaces that are, open and freeform. Sometimes the experience is good.

Sometimes it's really not like you're not getting that liveliness. And you're like, why am I listening to this person blather on, And I think it's worth it to keep in mind like what people are going for and what the experiences that they're seeking and then to play to those strengths when it makes sense.

And I think there's a real generational divide because I probably wouldn't trust myself if I were somebody else to always pay for the content that I think is the best of the most valuable, like the tipping instinct isn't native to me or to our generation yet. Whereas a younger generation growing up says, all this other content sucks. And the web sucks and it's been overwhelmed by ads and it's all native advertising. And so I can't trust anything.

I know that I need to water the garden that grows the plants that I want to eat. Namely, the bloggers, the podcasters, the streamers that are producing content that I'm actually interested in. And I want to show them that I'm paying attention to them with something that is very valuable to me, which is both my attention and my currency. So if I were to move in that direction, I do worry of course, that I would lose. And then lose influence.

But on the other hand, having that direct relationship might mean that I produce better stuff. That's targeted at a very specific set of individuals. So I'm conflicted. I understand that you can do a hybrid approach and that's what I'm exploring. I have my own creator coin on the rally platform, which is a side chain and I'm exploring things where, you know, maybe I have a private discord and, people can join that to have more direct interaction with me.

But I just, I want to be very cautious and thoughtful and mindful about the nature of how that relationship evolves. I have enough people that don't pay me anything that expect and demand my time that if suddenly I put a price tag on my time, it's got to be very expensive. And then that sort of limits the number of people who can interact with me. And that friction may or may not be actually in my best interest.

You could grab an RSS feed of anybody's Twitter updates. And, it's interesting to see how quite a lot of that has been pulled out of all of those services. So they're much less interoperable. So I thought it was a, a really interesting look back at how things were, and also, his color on why the Podcast index exists, what Adam and Dave might be planning on doing. I'm not necessarily sure is entirely. But on the other hand, it's really interesting to hear his point of view on that.

really interesting interview. I think with Facebook and Twitter, he was talking about, Blaine cook and, Dave recording. who'd worked with him on the open standards a lot, along with several other people. and so those people were, there was a very tight knit group and they had just happened to be working in those big behemoths at the same time. So that's why I think a lot of the open standards were creeping in, but as he said, and open standards take forever to implement.

And commercial pressure means that you probably have to bypass the open standards if you're going to progress as a business, which is probably what Twitter and Facebook had to do. But I do think. Open standards can take an awfully long time or open standards can be really fast. And I think that's probably one of the big differences between Podcast index and virtually. Anything else that I have been working on is that, you get an interesting idea in the Podcast index social group within a week.

there are already examples out there they're already, people are playing around with it, seeing if it works, seeing if it doesn't. And that's why one of the things that I'm excited about with the whole Podcast namespace is that probably 80% of the new namespace tags will fail and will die. And that's fine because the 20% of the tags that do go on to be really well supported. Is going to be, a game changer we're already seeing, I think on the studio rolled out their transcript tag this week.

So Omni studio now supporting transcripts alongside a bunch of other Podcast, hosts, including Buzzsprout. And of course, including captivate as well, who have said that they are going to be supporting it very shortly too. I think all of that is really good. And that's probably the big difference between the open standards that Chris has worked on in the past, which are. Behemoths that you have to spend months and months on.

And the acquaint nimble way that, Adam and Dave have been working through. I think a good example in that interview was when Chris was talking about pub sub hubbub, which, took forever to implement because it was a standard that didn't exist before that, that people then had to find servers to keep on permanently and the cost.

And now, you've got Dave Jones bringing out popping, which, I don't know how much that's costing Dave and Adam to run, but I'm sure it's not on the scale that it would have done 10 years ago. Everything that David Adam are trying to do, particularly around the Podcast, namespace is make everything as decentralized as possible.

So the interesting thing around pod ping is that it differs from, pub sub hubbub or website, as it's now called, in that you don't have to have big hubs that are sitting there in the middle, everything, around the whole pod ping thing is all open based in a blockchain. And that seems to work quite well.

again, there's been quite a lot of thinking and it's easy now because obviously we've got quite a lot more tools that we can go away and use, but I'm now really fascinating, interview with a proper, you know, gee of how the internet was actually developed and came to be. I would love to get Dave's take on this because he's dealing at the coalface with all of this, things like atom. If I recall, cause I had to look it up why it was partly because Dave Weiner wasn't moving stuff forward.

Unsurprisingly, he'd got himself to 0.92, and that was it. I'm very happy with RSS. And I think it was the need to move stuff forward with RSS that led to atom then led to activity stream. But also I think Christmas scene and the other guys were trying to reinvent the web. they were doing open ID and OAuth and they were doing all sorts of other standards, not just moving RSS forward. That was the problem. I think now Spotify has still been busy. So apart from the. ads that they've released.

last week before we went, they came out with Q and a, um, polls. Now I think this is interesting on the one hand, because I've been advocating that. More need now for listener interactivity within podcasting. So they've done something but what are your thoughts on what they've done? the idea of Q and a, the idea of polls is great. They're not the first company to end up doing this. There's been really quite a lot of these companies. Great.

And clever company called guide G I D E, which is offering Q and a. And I think polls as well within its own system. But you need the guide SDK in your podcast app, or you need to link to a webpage on, It's really meant for internal training and internal papers Then obviously you've got Spotify doing their own Q and a and their own polls. Bullhorn has had polls in it for some time. Podbean has as well. Dory labs, has both of these things.

It's been a while since I've seen a Dory, there's entail of course, which is doing some of this type of things as well. And all of these are proprietary owned brand systems that don't interconnect with each other. So it's not very easy for us to tell somebody how to take part in a. Because we need to talk about, open this app and, and have a listen and blah, blah, blah.

my kind of argument with all of these things is wouldn't it be easier just to say, visit Podland dot news slash poll, if you want to take part in our poll today, because everybody has access to a web browser. So, you know, I'm unkind of there going, oh, brilliant. It's another one of these proprietary standards. Of course.

The other side of it is that if 20% of people are currently listening to their shows on Spotify, then maybe the proprietary standard will be the only standard that we actually talk about. When you look back at what Martin and, Benjamin are doing with cross commenting, using the activity pub, standard. If you roll that forward, you could see that becoming a way of also doing polls and Q and a, that is cross applicant. Yes, I think so.

And I think what I'm quite excited by is that we don't just look at this fully as just here's a system that does Q and a, it will be great if this was an interactive system, which allowed you to do all that kind of thing. And perhaps we should. Benjamin on in the next few weeks to end up talking about that sort of thing. He's already on the rosters coming on, but you see, I was saying that so you could go, that's a great idea.

Why don't we do that next week, but no. break the, break the third wall. Why don't you? It's a secret now. The forward out of the Spotify land and moving on with what else happened at the end of last week show you had a secret that you couldn't reveal. Cause it was embargoed until five o'clock it's from captivate. So let's talk about it now. What did captivate announced last week?

Yes. So they made a surprise announcement, on international Podcast day, which was a guest booking and interview management system, which is really cool. This is the first one that is actually built into a podcast host. there's bits of Calendly in there in terms of diary management and stuff like that.

There's bits of Google forms in there, in terms of getting the right information from your guests, importing this information automatically into your episode notes, all of that kind of stuff is built in, and there's also integration with a squad cast, which I believe is a bit like Riverside, in terms of the system, I think such a clever idea to bring all of those disparate bits together and to produce something which is, going to be a really helpful tool for many Podcast, as one

of the reasons that quite a lot of Podcast has stopped podcasting is just the stress of finding guests, of getting their information of, booking times, all of that kind of stuff. So any sets of tools, which make that easier for people is I think a great plan. and it's good to see people adding more and more features into the product at the same price point, right? Yes, indeed. At the same price point and to everybody, I should point out I'm an advisor.

If you don't normally have a listen to this podcast. So yes. So I think, it's the captivate way. To add more features in there and make it available to everybody as much as possible. They did that with Podcast networks, in the last, couple of months. I think it's a bright move now. you wrote a really good piece. Who invented the word Podcast. if you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. We'll have it in the show notes, a link to it as well.

Now, going through that, did you find out anything you didn't know? I we all assume that it was done by Ben Hammersley and Dave was involved in blah, blah, blah. But did you find anything interesting? as a fellow Brit, I was there going Ben Hammersley. He invented the word Podcast and that's it. And actually, it's not as simple as that.

somebody else, tweeted to me that Ben Hammersley is the, was, and Danny Gregoire who ended up using it in the iPod, mailing list at the, exactly the right time was the Steve jobs. he was the person that basically ended up, using the word at the right time to get other people really excited about it.

And, how excited about it is this is a little audio clip of the first time the word Podcast was used in a Podcast, what I'm doing right here and what Adam's doing and what Dave Weiner is doing and what it conversations are doing. That's podcasting. I think that is. I so excited, Dave Slusher, so excited, about the new term and starts talking about, we're podcasting, he's a podcaster, you have downloaded a Podcast and get so thrilled and excited.

But what I really enjoyed doing is going through the timeline and basically going, okay, what really happened here because there's lots of ways that people have been talking about how the word Podcast came to be. And it was really interesting actually seeing all of the different timelines and everything else. The one thing that I can't yet work out is why the domain. Podcast dot com was registered in 2000. Nobody was talking about podcasting in 2000.

I'm still a little bit curious about that one, but certainly seeing all of these other things, it was just really interesting. So I'd like to do more of these sorts of history things every now and again. it's a good piece of, education for me and education for many other people, including for Spotify.

that will be a good thing, to, end up doing, I think a few more of those feels like Thomas Edison's light bulb, it was Humphrey Davey who actually invented the light bulb, but it was Edison who actually patented it first. And that's why we think it's Edison. Ah, there you go. And Danny J Greg guar, he may or may not have invented the word Podcast, but he certainly got it up and running. And I think that's the really exciting thing I did reach out to Dave was.

Uh, to come on to Podland for an interview and for a nanosecond, I actually thought he was going to do it. I genuinely thought he was going to do it until I got the one-line response of, I know I was there. that was it. there is a very good interview though, with. talking to guy Kawasaki, which was only earlier on this year. And he talks a lot about how, podcasting came to be and everything else.

And I get the feeling that both Dave Weiner and, Adam Curry there are other things that both of those folks have done in their lives. And I think having well-meaning folk like us going, go on, tell us the story again. I don't think he's really going to help too much. but I must say by the way, the exciting thing has been going into the web archive, pulling out lots of.

Audio clips such as that, knowing that I can use them under fair use rules anyway, and being able to not just read about the history of the word Podcast, but actually see the blogs in their old fashioned glory and listen to quite a lot of the audio that's been a real thrill and real excitement. the web archive is a wonderful tool. It is indeed.

Now moving on 13 to 20 three-year-olds James D do you think we should be targeting them for, I can't think of any 13 to 23 year old, who would be interested in what we're talking about? So talk about personal. There you go. When it seems that the gen Zed age group, if you want to target them, prefer Spotify and apple. How do we know this?

Well, uh, this was compiled by gen Z. I think it's gen Z. I don't think he, even that Brits can say Jen said, because we would just call them 13 to 23 year olds as I did, in the piece. But yes, a gen Z, which is, just in Jackson's daughter has compiled a, survey all about how gen Z. Uh, listening to podcasts and basically she says, a number of really interesting things. The main, obviously interesting thing is that, it's way more popular in terms of Spotify than apple, for podcasts listening.

And Sadie Jackson also says that, this might not be necessarily a good thing for the future of podcasting because, gen Z has don't necessarily care about RSS. They don't necessarily care about the open ecosystem. All they care about is something easy and simple for them to get their content. And so is that a concern that, Spotify is edging its way towards a closed system. It's offering exclusive shows to its platform and now Q and a and polls and all this advertising stuff.

Is this a good thing for the future of the industry? And, say asks. good question. And I don't know what the answer is. I once tried to teach my children how to do HTML and JavaScript with a little bit of CSS, you might as well ask them to pull their wisdom teeth out. There was zero interest in understanding how the internet worked or what was underlying it. They just wanted to get back to what they were doing on social media. My daughter, even asking her to brush her hair is a difficulty.

So exactly. But I do think I get what she's saying, because if you look at. My children who are in their late teens or just out of it, Facebook is granddad or mum and dad's network for social media. they're on Instagram or Insta. or, they're looking at Tik TOK. They're not going to Facebook. And Facebook actually admits they're struggling to understand how to get the audience back. No, indeed. And they're also.

Old versions of iOS devices, what typically happens is that mum or dad gets a new iPhone and then gives their old iPhone to the kids. And certainly what's happened in terms of, the iPad, here as well. so that obviously means that they're not getting the latest and greatest versions of the apps. an apple podcasts case, they're actually getting a version of the app that works better, but let's not go there.

but I think, in terms of, in terms of the hardware that kids normally have, it's normally nowhere near as good as the rest of us. I appreciate, I am calling somebody who is 23, a kid here, in terms of the upper age limit of gen Z. And perhaps that's the other thing here, maybe a 13 to 16 year old is a very different person to a 23 year old. And so the whole concept of gen Z is not particularly helpful in this case. No, So James YouTube. Now you're a big fan of YouTube.

You listen to your music on YouTube. I do. Well, I use YouTube music, which is a separate app. you're paying attention, Spotify. Yes. you might be listening to all your podcasts on there as well because they've hired an executive to look after Podcast, according to Bloomberg, the company, which is owned of course by Google and has its own Google Podcast seems to be now pushing for a person to go and run YouTube podcasts. And he sent in this one.

the maybe sense in trying to get people who are producing audio first episodic content, the Joe Rogan show onto YouTube, there may be some sense in helping people do that. There's clearly an awful lot of people who use YouTube to listen to podcasts. I would hope that what they don't do is that they don't make a, another product to compete with Google podcasts.

Cause that would be silly, but there again, Google have done this in the past, they have managed to run 16 different messaging apps of which I think four of them are still working as different messaging apps on the system.

They, Google are a weird company and they keep on dropping things and, it's a, it's an interesting old thing, but, In terms of focusing on content and getting more content if they're going after the Joe Rogan's of this world who make a very good TV show, then you know, why not? I think that's not necessarily such a bad idea. I think that'd be asking as if I was the executive going in, how many years they plan on using this, because as you said, they get bored of a product.

It doesn't make a billion quid in a week and they drop it. So I'm not a fan of Google's products. I don't use any of them now. Yes. I think that's a real concern that Google has. And, they have, dropped and changed many of the products that they end up using, and also just done a bad job with it as well. We're a relatively Google-y household here, but, my partner uses a Google apps account and Google apps accounts are kind of Google accounts, but not.

And they do some things, but they don't do other things. And you can share with a Google account, or you can't share with a Google apps account. It's just all a bit of a mess. yes, I would probably agree with. Now, last night, Andrew Mason, this CEO of descript script held an online, a video chat with, I think about 380 people joined it. It was to launch a new version of the platform. they called it season one and there'll be launching a season two in three or six months time.

Now I'm a big fan of de script. It's what I like to use for when I'm editing podcasts. you don't use a as something else. Don't use James. I do. I use Hindenburg cause I'm old fashioned and I like wave patterns, but yes, these scripts, with all of this, season one updates that they're doing, they're making it much more capable. It was already pretty capable to be honest, but they've made it much more so better studio sound with an intensity dial to control the effect.

I heard studio sound being used on the. Bubble trouble Podcast, which I'm on this week, that was astonishing. when, Eric Newsom who's the producer of that show, showed me the difference. It was making to the audio that we were recording at that point. But anyway, that's now getting better. They've got better artificial voices and they've added a number of sound effects like compression and limiting and noise gates and ducking. It's a very cool thing.

Very interesting to see what they're working on there. And you can well see that as being something that might be the de facto audio editing tool for radio newsrooms and things like that in the future as well, also improved, overdub, which is a tool that I've had access to it for over a year. And I've never found a use case for it. that's the artificial voice, isn't it? It's amazing. So I did a half hour read it, then transcribed my voice and turned it into my voice.

I could drop it in so I could type anything and then ask it to take what I typed and then turn it into my voice. And it worked and it was fine. And we did a fun trial on the BBC to work out, which was me and live and which was me with overdub, but I've never, ever yet found a use case in real times, other than. Demoing to show all use overdub. I think I have found a use case for it.

Certainly when I'm editing this show, as I do, there are some times where I go, oh, I wish your inflection was a bit different there because I've had to edit, X, Y, and Z, and you have heard the edits. And or, oh, you referenced something that we actually edited out. So I wonder whether I could have got you to have said something slightly different. it could have been useful in those sorts of ways, but there again, I've managed for the last 30 years of my. audio, correct.

not doing that sort of thing. I can probably continue to manage that, And the other thing that they have also integrated is they have a integration for Podcast. So you can automatically upload your audio, from, the de script, platform into Podcast hosts. Buzzsprout our sponsor is there, which is excellent. And they've also added a bunch more including transistor this time around. So that's really good. Time for our favorite part of the week. It's booster grim corner, James Foster Graham corner.

Yes, it is. It's booster Graham corner. And I have the booster grams in front of me. And you can't see them this week? Sam, because I haven't actually organized myself correctly. My will very quickly, whisk through them. There aren't too many this week, which is. Big shame, but still there we are. Kyra in mere mortals, has sent us one, two to three sets using fountain. He says interesting that you've got a score out of four with vibes. Oh yes.

Do you remember, this was the tool that told you how good your Podcast was in terms of sound quality? Karen says I tried it with mine and got 3.5, even though I'm outdoors with all the noise. I got a zero for the noise category. What was the breakdown for Podland? I, believe that, over the last couple of days, vibes has tweaked their algorithm. I think partially because I was a bit grumpy that I only got through 3.5, I think.

For pod news and they've tweaked that category and I believe that the scores are now different. So give it another go and see what you can find out there. and, the other boost that we got was from the pod Sage himself, Dave Jones, who said that the interview with the A-class guys was great. Thank you, Dave. I selfishly wish that Stacy was in that interview as well. Stacy goes, yes, a friend of the show. She listens. She was very excited that I gave her a shout out. so there you go.

And he also says, I still owe you that pod ping explainer article. To do list. Dave has a very big to do list at the moment. Lots of things. But anyway, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2 SATs sent using fountain, which must be a numerology thing. thank you very much, Dave, for that, both of those through fountain I notice and fountain has just had an upgrade with, loads of, additional things including, and this is interesting. So including value for value episode based splits.

So for example, if, Chris was accepting SATs, then we could, if we were using a compatible host, we could have added crit in as, somebody to get a share of our boosts for this week. So that is now I believe built into fountain, which is very cool. So thank you Oscar for doing that. what's happening now. Every guest is that'll be it. There'll be contacting us with a LN D hub address and that'll be a thrill. But anyway, so that's voice, that's currently where we were. thank you very much for that.

what do I normally say? I normally. Things like you can get us a message by pressing the boost button in your podcast app. And if you don't have a boost button in your Podcast, if you need to get a [email protected], if you want a jingle as well, I was listening to the pod father. He's now got a bank of them and he's going to make them available. So you'll be able to download your own booster, Graham jingle, if you want. Yes. Which will be very exciting.

You get all of the ones that you've heard and love so much in podcasting to point. Oh, I like this one. So you'll be able to download that and everything else in a GitHub repo on the pod cast index, get hub. It may already be there. I have not looked, but, there we go. So I think that's, bright plan. The more people that Talks. the more that we're going to get them.

that's a good thing, father, things that I was listening to this week, I highly recommend catching up on episode 56 of podcasting, two dot oh, with Adam and Dave. They had a great interview with Graham Krizek. He's the founder of voltage, which is critical to the value for value and the way that you're doing booster grams. So you really want to understand how that all works. I go and listen to Graham.

It's a good listen as is the media Podcast, which is a Podcast that goes into the media industry in the UK. It's got a brand new host and the new host is friend of the show, Matt Degan. I would recommend that he, this week on Matt degan.com has taken a look at the apple podcast subscriptions chart that a pod news published last week and he has picked up and. kicking myself for not realizing this, but then that is normally what happens when I read Matt stuff.

He has suggested that, it demonstrates that the subscription functionality is just not being used that much. At the moment. He looked particularly looking at the bottom two in the Podcast, subscriptions chart, one of them German and the other one, the handoff from CNN, which is frankly only available in the U S by the looks of things. And he's basically saying that, probably not working. One reason why he suggests is that subscriptions are proprietary.

To each platform, as of course, they are a news today from super cast soup Podcast that they are the first, company. what do they call themselves the first subscription platform to offer these Spotify open access integration to all of its users. So now if you pay for a Podcast using super cast, you can also get it within the Spotify app, which is a first for them. So many congratulations to Jason and, all of the team there. Congratulate.

Now the other thing we've been reading, you actually co-edited, which was a way to invest in advertising the Latino Podcast segment. This was in sounds profitable with Brian ballots. I did notice your name was on the top of the list as well. my name is on there because I do, I lay that newsletter out and make it look pretty and everything else. And this particular week, Ariel Nissen, Blatt, writes a recommendation of a Podcast and the language and the terms that she was using.

It's a podcast about sex. And, there were all kinds of things that she was talking about in terms of technique and things. And I'm afraid, I said all of that because, one of my jobs is to make sure that we don't get blocked by every single, corporate mail server out there. And I tell you what if I had put in what she was writing about, no one would've got sounds profitable last week, but anyway, yes, it's a good piece other than, Ariel's smart.

it's a good piece about the Latino Podcast segments put together by Gabrielle, Santo who works for Edison research and has done a bunch of research into that. so a good guest post there from sounds profitable. You'll find out it sounds profitable.com. My word area looks like butter. Wouldn't melt. There you go. now I know, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe. The language that she was using, young lady, I had to Google one of these things. I wish I had a right. Come on.

You all fought like me. Let's move on. couple of things that you wrote about this week that I thought were quite interesting, just to highlight a fireside, your favorite live audio chat service has made a few changes to the terms and conditions, or they're trying to court you James, or they're trying to get you back on board. no. They have banned me from using fireside chat.

because I said that the company, in their terms and conditions said that they didn't allow you to do all kinds of stuff with your own content, which is very different to what they've been saying on stage. Weirdly enough, fireside chat has made changes to its terms and conditions this week. the main change is actually that they copied and pasted some texts wrongly, but let's bypass that bit. The other change is that they now ask you to use commercially reasonable efforts to notify Pharcyde.

If you plan to commercialize content you make on the service, which again is weird because the company has always been at pains to point out that you own your content anyway. So why would you have to contact fireside chat to ask permission to commercialize the content that you've made on Farside when it's your content anyway, but still though we are, I've linked to a. So you can see exactly what has changed.

It turns out that inner reader, which is the RSS reader that I use, also does, changes to webpages, which is excellent. so I caught that pretty well as it went live. So that was good. And clubhouse talking about Pharcyde clubhouse has announced forthcoming feature, which will be very exciting. It's called replays. It'll allow you to download your audio and make it available on demand in the app as well. So you can make podcasts out of that just as you can with fireside chat.

so clubhouse is a jumping onto the bandwagon there. What club has also announced today is they've announced private chat rooms. So if you, and I want to use clubhouse or other lesser good, services, and then we can use a private chat room within clubhouse, and we can share that private link with other people to invite them into our private room. it all sounds very strange, but, that's another thing that they've gone ahead and launched this week.

I have high suspicions on that one, as I said, my wife used to run MSN UK, and they used to have chat rooms in MSN in the good old days. So did ya'll who in AOL? They all closed down to them. They were closed down because Peter files and various other racist groups took hold of them and they couldn't moderate them at scale. And the police basically said, if you can't do it at scale, you got to bring them down. And that's what they did. Okay. Yes, indeed.

Candidate a and the other one is that's missing from that list. I guess we should expect there isn't a record function yet. Is there in Twitter? Uh, there isn't a record function, interests or spaces, although you can run Twitter spaces on new apple Macs. So if you have an apple Mac, then of course you can run the iOS app on your desktop. So you can essentially sit there and use that as if it's another desktop app and pipe that into your, audio editor.

you can probably do quite a lot of that quite nicely anyway, so arguably they don't necessarily need it so much. So that's the. A live audio. Now let's look at some of the video stuff that's been going on. cost. It has launched costed video what's costed video games. Carstead, if you remember, we spoke to Lindsey chap comer, who is a friend of the show quite some time ago now on Podland.

they have launched costed video, which allows marketers to manage video as well as audio now, all in the one place. And, basically it allows you, if you are marketing a particular product to have all of your video in one place, as well as audio, and just basically closes that loop. So it's a good, enhancement of that particular tool. Same as everyone's on jumping on that bandwagon. Cause pod page has added a new feature to import all your videos as well from your YouTube channel into.

Polk page website. So pod page being a Podcast website, a tool, if you are with a podcast host, which has a rubbish website, bass pro has a beautiful one. but if you are with a one that has a more rubbish one, then you can use pod page, which allows you to do all kinds of stuff that now allows you to import all videos as well from YouTube into that too. which is very clever. I would suspect that we will see more pod page integration with YouTube on the way.

and given certainly that, in, Germany and in Latvia as we'll find out tomorrow, That, YouTube is a real number one in terms of Podcast consumption, you can see that pod page would probably do quite nicely, in terms of that too. And there's another platform coming out. It's in India this time called pod tube. Have you tried it? I haven't tried it. I took a look at it. It basically looks as if it's, I'm not sure it's video so much as just another platform and social network, just for Podcast.

We need another one of those. We've not got enough of them. it was highlighted in the times of India and, it seems very closed. I couldn't find any RSS feeds. I couldn't find, I found some podcasts that were on that particular, service. but I couldn't actually find any, RSS feeds or anything else, from that there is an app though that you can download. but, there's, always going to be another one of these tools launched and, always interesting to see what people do with it.

I'm finally a new online podcasting studio and all in one studio called Podcast has just raised a $7 million in funding and we will have the CEO on next week. We will indeed. We'll also have Genevieve Hassan who managed to get her independent Podcast, celebrity catch-up life.

After that thing I did to be put exclusively on Virgin Atlantic airplanes from a well from October the first from now, if you jump on a Virgin Atlantic airplane, if you can fly anywhere, then, you will find that Podcast on there. If you'd like to find out how that all works, then Genevieve will be on this very Podcast. Next time. Okay, James. And what else has been happening for you and Podland this week?

I'll tell you, one of the exciting things that's happened, I'm looking forward to getting some building work done. I've been basically looking at that over the last, couple of days and you're also on bubbled trouble. I am I'm on bubble trouble. Thank you for reminding me I'm on the bubble trouble Podcast. This week finds the bubble trouble Podcast in all of your favorite podcast apps so what's happening for you in Parkland over the next few weeks?

having been castigated by the pod, Sage and various others, I have now added all of my 25 Podcast from river radio into the Podcast index. and I did that. Thank you to you by going by pod news and doing a search and then adding them. I also added them and made them all value value ready. So I followed your guide, which was very painful to do and not your guide, but the actual process is very painful. I know it didn't take a cup of tea in 10 minutes, like he said, but.

Yes. sorry about that, but if they're all value for value ready, then that is excellent. And I'm looking forward to you seeing some boosts and seeing some PSATs flowing in. So my. Somebody please send money. anything will do. And that's it for this week. Thank you to our guests Christmas center. And next week we are joined by the CEO and founder of Podcast who will be telling us how to pronounce his name and Genevieve Hassan. Talking about getting her Podcast onto Virgin Atlanta.

Please follow us in your podcast app and on Twitter, we are at Podland news where you can tweet a comment about this week's show or tweet us a question for next week. Share if you'd like, you could also find all our previous shows on the web at www dot Podland dot news. And I should point out that the rest of them are slightly less lengthy than this one, but if you would like daily news, you should get pod news, the newsletters free APOD news.net.

The Podcast can be found in your podcast app and all the stories we've discussed on Podland today are taken from this week's pod news or the links. I'm in the show notes. Our music is from ignite jingles, and we're hosted and sponsored by our good friends. Buzzsprout and Riverside FM. Keep listening.