Podcast discovery, Huffduffer, and listen feeds

As I was reading through some of the subscriptions in Aaron Davis’ well-curated blogroll which I’m subscribed to via OPML Subscription in Inoreader, I was reminded that I should be following my own Huffduffer Collective. This is a feed of audio that comes from all of the accounts I’m following on Jeremy Keith’s awesome Huffduffer audio service. For those looking for a great method for discovering new and interesting audio content and podcasts, this is by far the best discovery service I know.

While finding content which others have bookmarked is an excellent discovery mechanism, I think that finding it by means of things they’ve actually listened to would be even more powerful. By saying you’ve listened to something, it means you’ve put some skin in the game and spent some of your own valuable time actually consuming the content and then separately posting about it. I wonder how Huffduffer might incorporate this sort of “listen” functionality in addition to their bookmarking functionality? I can’t help but thinking that more audio applications should have Micropub functionality for posting listens.

Here I’ll remind people that my website provides just such a feed of my own listens, so if you want to hear exactly what I’ve been listening to, you can have your own feed of it, which I call my faux-cast and you should be able to subscribe to it in most podcatchers. I do roughly the same thing for all the things I read online and off as well. I may bookmark something as interesting, but you know it was even more valuable to me when I’ve spent the time to actually listen to or read it from start to finish.

Do you have a listen feed I could subscribe to?  Perhaps a Huffduffer account I should follow? How do you discover audio content online? How could this be used in the education technology space?

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

9 thoughts on “Podcast discovery, Huffduffer, and listen feeds”

    1. I too always liked the idea of Wavelist, but Ben and Erin Jo seemed to have stopped iterating on Wavelist some time in 2015. I also like the idea of playlists, but we may be lacking a simple, open format means of creating them however. I seem to recall Kevin Marks pointing me to http://www.xspf.org/ (aka “Spiff”) once as a standard, but I haven’t experimented with it yet.

  1. I used to use Huffduffer a lot when I started listening to podcasts. But over time, I think I stopped listening to podcasts once I started listening to audiobooks on my commute and walks. Recently, i’ve started to listening to podcasts again and you can find my listens and the feed here.

    Right now, I either add the listen feeds manually from my podcatcher or use an IFTTT flow to import items from my huffduffer feed to the blog.

  2. That is a really good point about Huffduffer Chris, I had not really thought of that aspect. Personally speaking, I like the serendipity of the collection feed, even if somebody has not listened or liked a particular podcast.
    I completely agree about the micropub point. I currently use Podcast Addict on Android to listen. Although it has a lot of functions I find useful, I get rather frustrated with workflow for creating listen posts. I am wondering if you have a particular workflow?

    1. I’ll have to write up something longer and more detailed eventually, but here’s a quick overview:
      For many types of posting, particularly doing so quickly and on-the-fly, I’ll use my mobile phone’s share functionality to send an email to a third party service (like reading.am) which includes the title and URL of a particular piece of content. Then I’ll use IFTTT.com (or Zapier or one of the many other automation solutions) to scrape the RSS from the service’s feed at regular intervals. These are then set to import the RSS data (or even email data depending on the automation service) to my website, typically as a draft. For things that aren’t real-time dependent, I can then go into my site at my leisure, modify any meta data, make any notes (this is also a good thing for review/leanring purposes) and then publish it (or perhaps keep it private if necessary.)

      For the past several years I’ve been using Antenna Pod as my podcatcher on Android. I used to use PocketCast, but it only shared custom short URLs and not the episode URL or the media URL the way Antenna Pod does. For audio posts, I most often share the audio file directly from Antenna Pod this way as it’s usually more difficult to extract the media link from a web page if it’s even available, especially since many podcasts hide their media behind third party apps. Embedding the original audio file on my site allows me to provide enclosures for the RSS Feed of my listen posts versus embedding some third party widgets as well.

  3. The other day, Chris Aldrich brought up an interesting point in decentralised systems: How to discover each other?I have some ideas on this (and likely write some code in the future to explore their feasibility).The easiest one would be: manually.I believe, since the very beginning, bloggers curated blogrolls to point to blogs they follow. This way you can build a social graph with a certain degree of confidence.Personally I would combine that with some kind of trust. How favorable is it to follow an other blogger?You could look at the links she gets. Ideally over time, so you could handle hypes or similiar.Recently I discovered FoaF. From what I understood it is a file you put on the root on your server and point to via <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="/foaf.rdf" />.The structure lookslike this:<rdf:RDF
    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
    xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
    xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
    <foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
    <foaf:maker rdf:resource="#me"/>
    <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="#me"/>
    <admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/>
    <admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/>
    </foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>
    <foaf:Person rdf:ID="me">
    <foaf:name>Full name</foaf:name>
    <foaf:givenname>First name</foaf:givenname>
    <foaf:family_name>Family name</foaf:family_name>
    <foaf:nick>Nickname</foaf:nick>
    <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>obfuscated mail address</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
    <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="FQDN"/>
    <foaf:depiction rdf:resource="FQDN with path"/>
    </foaf:Person>
    </rdf:RDF>
    This code was generated using FOAF-a-matic.You could list your contacts there, too. I haven’t decided on whether I want this, though. My concerns are about privacy and respect:What does it tell about them and me if they show up there? Could people feel offended if they don’t make it on this list? Since you have to pick a predicate to describe the relationship, which one is the most appropiate?Another approach I discovered is called XFN. It is also XML-based.By using XML you express the semantics (like “A follows B”) in a machine readable way.This could be used by programs tohelp you discover more people.What I find more challenging is to parse podcasts for interesting people. This requires manual work from what I can say right now.

  4. Aaron Davis says:

    My favourite ideas was the suggestion to use Huffduffer to create a custom playlist:

    You can create a specific topic-based playlist to share. Like a “best-of” list on any interest you have. Curate a list from many different podcasts and content creators in one place and share under a specific tag or account.
    It’s like the old fashioned mixtape on steroids, but for other things than music.

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