Starting a conversation about smarter radio for everyone
Tag: podcasting
🎧 Podcast Directories | Why Can’t We … ?
Every year there are millions of podcasts published by tens of thousands of people in hundreds of languages, yet there are really just three podcast directories where people are able to go and look for new shows to enjoy. The vast majority of podcast players will read a directory listing from iTunes in order to provide the most comprehensive search, but none seem particularly good at recommending shows. Given how just about every other service we use online has some sort of algorithm in place to show us music, movies, TV shows, advertisements, and social accounts we might be interested in, why is podcast discovery still such a complicated endeavour?
There are obviously a lot of problems with the podcast ecosystem, and primary among them is podcast discovery and curation. I really wish there were more people working on this problem. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an indieweb solution?
It also makes me wonder what happened to audio platforms like Seesmic, Audioboo.fm, and Cinchcast which made uploading audio pretty simple, though I suppose that there wasn’t much of an audience for that type of audio, in part because the production value and actual content often wasn’t very good. Perhaps things like Soundcloud or streaming video/audio services like UStream have replaced them, but for any kind of bandwith, the cost of hosting goes up, but this also has the economic value of making the quality go up because it requires a bigger investment in production too.
Introducing Shortcut | This American Life
Have you ever heard a moment on the show that you wish you could share with your friends? Well, now you can! Shortcut is a new app we created that allows you to turn your favorite podcast moments into videos that you can post to social media. It’s kind of like making a gif, but for audio. Here’s how to use it.
@hypothes_is @judell s there a way to annotate mp3? I'd like to attach annotations to podcasts.
— Raymond Yee (@rdhyee) December 16, 2016
@rdhyee @hypothes_is @judell Something like this:https://t.co/2NEft9NbLY
— Michael Shook (@mshook) December 16, 2016
Yes, for any file-served mp3. https://t.co/1cm7OyXBfP did that, @dougkaye had a variant for ITConversations. @mshook @rdhyee
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 16, 2016
@judell @dougkaye @mshook @rdhyee check out @signlfm — they might work on an open spec with you for podcast annotation
— Boris Mann (@bmann) December 16, 2016
@signlfm @bmann @judell @dougkaye @mshook @rdhyee We're using WebVTT – already a standard. Could do some IndieWeb things with it.
— Jim Pick (@jimpick) December 16, 2016
@jimpick @signlfm hey @judell does @hypothes_is understand WebVTT? Maybe push tweets into Hypothesis as an annotation
— Boris Mann (@bmann) December 16, 2016
If text exists, cool. But bare MP3s are timecode-accessible, though we haven't leveraged that much. @bmann @jimpick @signlfm @hypothes_is
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 16, 2016
@judell @bmann @signlfm @hypothes_is Also the HTML5 Media Fragments URI, which I don't think many people know about https://t.co/Aok9KCYtn4
— Jim Pick (@jimpick) December 16, 2016