Is Silofication a Word?
It looks like podcasts have become popular enough now that territories are being carved out with exclusive shows per platform, removal or deprecation of public rss feeds, account-required player applications, and so on, seem like a mirror of the streaming services game being played on your cut-cord television (or monitor, or mobile device… what a world!).
Add to this troubling direction, the fact that services such as Anchor.fm, while useful to a point, are useful only to that point. Something as basic as a formatted episode description block that displays as we hope it might (on their profile pages per show and episode, like the one for this show) is maybe too much to ask for?
Starting up a new podcast show on Anchor is not unreasoable to whet the appetite, to test the waters, to hone the production workflow, but ultimately it makes far more sense to own the publishing point of origin, the way the associated human-readable views (ie Web pages) look and feel, and what your feeds look like. Should they be atom and rss? Should they support the Podcasting 2.0 extensions that Adam Curry et al are driving via PodcastIndex.org? Do you want to support Schema.org structured data? Do you want to support, well, what you want to support?
This is an interesting time, to be sure, and no better time than to be able to hack your own creations to do what you want them to do, and that includes your publishing platform and the way your audio, video, textual, photographic, and maybe some other form of creativity is exposed for the world (or some fraction of it) to consume.
This Episode
Dropping Anchor via Anchor.fm (ironic, yes, and not changing…)
Recorded 23 June 2021, Published 23 June 2021
Slight delay due to holiday travel over the June 18-21 weekend!
Podcasting 2.0 Episode
I mentioned this episode of the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, which it turns out is not so easy to share. This is sort of troubling, but that is the nature of change (it is not always pretty and it certainly isn’t completely functional out the gate).
Podcasting 2.0: All a Flutter via PodcastIndex.org (see Note)
Podcasting 2.0: All a Flutter Show Notes via adam.curry.com
Note: It doesn’t seem that there’s an easy way to link directly to one episode (the one named here, the most recent episode as of this newsletter publication date), and the show notes page via Adam Curry’s website does not appear to link to the podcast (but to an mp3 file for downloading or, presumably, playing within your browser, or other). This is odd?
Aside from the various rambling bits (I’m one to talk, I know), the take-homes regard the deprecation or removal of RSS from various podcast publishing platforms (and Podcast vs Netcast) and the growing acceptance of the podcasting namespace for the so-called Podcasting 2.0 extensions to rss.
Just given my attempt to share this episode of their podcast is yet more evidence to me (Dan Hugo) that the well-established (if not always perfect) sharing notions that have become commonplace, supported by copy-paste or other transmission of URLs that point to html pages which include OpenGraph meta tags, possibly Twitter Card meta tags, a link tag to an associated rss feed, media links to associated files, cover art, semantic html that is human-readable, and then as I would suggest, detailed use of Schema.org structured data to tie it all together.
Why can the feed-reading software of today not consume the schema.org metadata (for example) which would be contained in the document I’m hinting at? RSS is extensible and does a job, but does it do The Job well? That’s my contention, that it does a passable job but it’s a bygone path to reaching open sharability. Maybe for the subsequent Podcasting 3.0 standard…
Projects and Other Fun
The profile page on Buy Me a Coffee is a handy place to maintain a list of links to projects, including newsletters, podcasts, and other things as they become accessible. Yes, it’s also a place where anyone can, literally, buy Dan coffee (proceeds, if any, go towards coffee, including beans, brewing tools, etc) to fuel the cause. Software engineers run on caffeine, there are very few documented cases of that not being true.
That’s where to find the accessible stuff. Quoggling Sand is about what we’re working on (aside from finding some guests who want to talk about what they’re working on), so I’ll rattle off a few things here:
Tightening up the PostgreSQL schema for rct_core_pgsql, including auto-generated pgsql functions and json schema definitions and whatnot.
Quick build of rct_core_starter, a simple “coming soon” website ball that can be deployed with various site customizations (eg ownership verification tags, site-specific contact information, or any other minimalize features) to enable a basic presence within an automation workflow.
Basic automation tool that can take user-programmable actions not unlike what you see more and more on github/gitlab/bitbucket/etc and beyond. Your basic yaml file describing what to do when certain triggers fire. I like pypyr as an example runner, but there are many ideas.
Migrate rct_core_iac once again, this time to Terraform 1.0, and get to work on hybrid cloud considerations (presently rct_core_iac is AWS-ish, which is what some call TechDebt).
Get a prototype Schema.org podcast show/episode scheme up and running so we can migrate from Anchor.fm primary to Anchor.fm secondary, with primary publishing via the respective platform domain (ie HugoFloss, QuoggingSand, FFSTalk, and others coming soon…).
Other stuff.
What is this “rct_core_*” business? That’s the ReallyCool Technologies Core component set… my consolidation of various ideas into something that I can build other ideas upon, with all of the productivity gains implied.
I will mention here, briefly, that we had a nice mini meetup for potential founding board members of the CasaNunzia Foundation (that’s the working name) while I was in Phoenix for the Father’s Day/Birthday weekend visis in Phoenix. If you think the development of assitive and life-improving products, services, and technologies would benefit from a co-creation ecosystem, well that’s the idea.
Support the Show!
As you may have gathered, we’ll be heading in to a much-needed cross-over period, where self-hosting (ie a cloud deployment at the project domain) of podcast episodes, show notes, and other interesting stuff will eventually become the primary origin of these components. That is, this newsletter will not go away in the near term, but original content will be found at the QuogglingSand domain, for example, and will appear in the newsletter(s) and elsewhere with that single, authoritative point of origin. Bring agency back to the internets!
Supporting this show and the other projects on my Buy Me a Coffee profile linked above, might be a simple matter of listening to podcast episodes, reading this newsletter and the Weekender Newsletter (via Revue), sharing with friends and colleagues, linking from your own publications, and perhaps being a guest on one of the shows I’ve mentioned (or perhaps some of the future shows which I haven’t).
It woud really be great if you (YOU!) could join in the discussion about what you’re up to, or comment on anything that someone else is up to lately. Participation is part of the coolness of podcasting, join in!