Earlier today I filled out a survey for WNYC Studios’ podcasting. It was easy to fill out because I keep all the data on my website.

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/

Read Currently… Subscribed Podcasts 2019 by SerenaSerena (sleepyowl.ink)
So over a year ago I listed out all my subscribed podcasts. It’s been over a year, and there has been some changes. In case anyone is looking for new shows to listen to… Too New to Judge 7am – I want to try getting into some daily local news podcast (not tech news). However, I have yet to list...

👓 Tracking my podcast listening | Henrik Carlsson

Replied to Tracking my podcast listening by Henrik CarlssonHenrik Carlsson (Henrik Carlsson's Blog)

I’m going to try an experiment. From now and some time ahead I’m going to be tracking my podcast listening (scrobbling, if you prefer) on my blog. Every episode of every show that I listen to will be a blog post in my Listen-of category. Some posts will be nothing but the title of the podcast and episodes, others will contain short comments from me and some might even have really long comments.

The idea behind this is that I, like many other people, listen to a lot of podcasts. I often find food for thought in these and often find myself wanting to have a way of cataloging what I’ve listened to and what was interesting in the episodes. Up until now I haven’t had a good system for that and now, I have a system. Whether it’s a good one or not, time will tell.

For now I’ll let these posts syndicate to Micro.blog but if I feel like they fill my timeline there with noise I might make some tweaks to the backend on my blog to stop them from syndicating.

It’s interesting to see someone else tracking what they’re listening to. I try to include the .mp3 or other audio files in my post with proper markup to create a faux-cast of sorts that others can subscribe to. Somewhat like reading.am, I find that discovery of podcasts by seeing what others are actually listening to is far more valuable than what they simply say they’re listening to.

I’m hoping that podcast apps like Overcast by @marco might support technology like webmention and micropub in the future to make some of this stuff a bit easier as well as more valuable.

Blue sky sketch for Overcast

Replied to a tweet by Marco Arment on TwitterMarco Arment on Twitter (Twitter)
Marco, your post about supporting rel=”payment” for Overcast made me start thinking about other potential solve-able problems in the podcast space. Now that you’ve solved a piece of the support/payment problem, perhaps you can solve for a big part of the “who actually listened to my podcast” problem?

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!