For those interested, here are the podcasts I’m subscribed to: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Podcasts
And here’s a running historical list of what I’ve actually listened to: https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/
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?
Recently we decided to keep better track of tweets, blog posts, and other web resources that mention and discuss our product. There are two common ways to do that: send links to a list maintainer, or co-edit a shared list of links. Here’s a third way, less common but arguably more powerful and flexible: tag the web resources in situ.
I use my personal website with several levels of taxonomy for tagging and categorizing a variety of things for later search and research.
Much like the example of the Public Radio International producer, I’ve created what I call a “faux-cast” because I tag everything I listen to online and save it to my website including the appropriate <audio> link to the.mp3 file so that anyone who wants to follow the feed of my listens can have a playlist of all the podcast and internet-related audio I’m listening to.
A visual version of my “listened to” tags can be found at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/ with the RSS feed at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/
As a public critic of social media, I’m often asked if my concerns extend to YouTube. This is a tricky question.
As I’ve written, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram didn’t offer something fundamentally different than the world wide web that preceded them. Their main contribution was to make this style of online life more accessible and convenient.
As an interesting aside, I’ll note that just a few months ago that YouTube allowed people to do embeds with several options, but they’re recently removed the option to prevent their player from recommending additional videos once you’re done. Thus the embedding site is still co-opted to some extent by YouTube and their vexing algorithmic recommendations.
In a similar vein audio is also an issue, but at least an easier and much lower bandwidth one. I’ve been running some experiments lately on my own website by posting what I’m listening to on a regular basis as a “faux-cast” and embedding the original audio. I’ve also been doing it pointedly as a means of helping others discover good content, because in some sense I can say I love the most recent NPR podcast or click like on it somewhere, but I’m definitely sure that doesn’t have as much weight or value as my tacitly saying, “I’ve actually put my time and attention on the line and actually listened to this particular episode.” I think having and indicating skin-in-the-game can make a tremendous difference in these areas. In a similar vein, sites like Twitter don’t really have a good bookmarking feature, so readers don’t know if the sharing user actually read any of an article or if it was just the headline. Posting these things separately on my own site as either reads or bookmarks allows me to differentiate between the two specifically and semantically, both for others’ benefit as well as, and possibly most importantly, for my own (future self).
Marco Arment on Twitter (Twitter)Podcast hosts and app makers: Let's make it easier for podcasters to surface donate/pay/membership links in our UIs with a standard semantic way to denote payment URLs in HTML show notes.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) August 11, 2018
Does such a thing exist already in any useful HTML spec? Maybe an <a rel="something">?Podcasters and CMS makers: Next version of Overcast looks for a link in every episode's show notes with <a rel="payment">.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) August 12, 2018
If present, Overcast adds a nice green "$" button on the Now Playing screen that opens up that donation/Patreon/membership URL of your choice.
In a recent article on the topic of Webmention for A List Apart, I covered the topic of listen posts and sending webmentions for them. In addition to people being able to post on their own website that they’ve listened to a particular episode, the hosting podcast site can receive these mentions and display them as social proof that the episode was actually listened to. In addition to individual websites being able to do this, it would be awesome if podcast players/apps could send webmentions on behalf of their users (either with user specific data like Name, website, avatar, etc. if it’s stored, without it, or anonymized by the player itself) so that the canonical page for the podcast could collect (and potentially display) them.
As a proof of concept, here’s a page for a podcast episode that can receive webmentions. Someone listens to it, makes a “listen post” on their site, and sends a webmention of that fact. The original page can then collect it on the backend or display it if it chooses. Just imagine what this could do for the podcast world at scale for providing actual listening statistics?
In addition to aggregate numbers of downloads a podcast is receiving, they could also begin to have direct data about actual listens. Naturally the app/player would have to set (or allow a configuration) some percentage threshold of how much was played before sending such a notification to the receiving site. Perhaps the webmention spec for listens could also include the data for the percentage listened and send that number in the payload?
The toughest part may be collecting the rel=”canonical” URL for the podcast’s post (to send the webmention there) rather than the audio file’s URL, though I suspect that the feed for the podcast may have this depending on the feed’s source.
If you want to go a step further, you could add Micropub support to Overcast, so that when people are done listening to episodes, the app could send a micropub request to their registered website (perhaps via authentication using IndieAuth?). This would allow people to automatically make “listen posts” to their websites using Overcast and thereby help those following them to discover new and interesting podcasts. (Naturally, you might need a setting for sites that support both micropub and webmention, so that the app doesn’t send a webmention when it does a micropub post for a site that will then send a second webmention as well.)
One could also have podcast players with Micropub support that would allow text entry for commenting on particular portions of podcasts (perhaps using media fragments)? Suddenly we’re closer to commenting on individual portions of audio content in a way that’s not too dissimilar to SoundCloud’s commenting interface, but done in a more open web way.
As further example, I maintain a list of listen posts on my personal website. Because it includes links to the original audio files, it also becomes a “faux-cast” that friends and colleagues can subscribe to everything I’m listening to (or sub-categorizations thereof) via RSS. Perhaps this also works toward helping to fix some of the discovery problem as well?
Thanks, as always, for your dedication to building one of the best podcast tools out there!
I wonder if there’s a way for more posts to display the inline audio player without being hosted directly by micro.blog?
Here’s the link you can use to subscribe in your favorite podcatcher: http://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/
Perhaps one day I’ll do more with feed validation and submit it to various distribution channels to make searching/subscribing easier, but since I’m not really “promoting” it as anything other than a means of discovery (or extreme stalker behavior) I won’t take the time now.
As I think about creating “want” posts in the near term, perhaps I’ll create a feed of want-to-listen-to items as another discovery channel option as well. In some sense, this is how I use my Huffduffer.com account. It has a subscribe-able list of audio items I want to listen to at some point in the future. Since I can add my Huffduffer feed (or those of others) to my podcatcher, it helps enable me to easily get the content to my phone or other devices to listen to a variety of new things. There’s no reason not to do all of this on my own site explicitly.
Now if only podcatchers could support micropub for more easily creating scrobbles or “listens”…
Image credit: Text imposed on original photo: Tilt_Shift_Wallpaper_24_by_leiyagami flickr photo by Ray Che shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license.
