Read Podcasting, RSS, Openness, and Choice by Michael MignanoMichael Mignano (Medium)
In the coming months and years, we’ll be working to further enable choice for creators, including giving them the power to choose not only how someone wants to create or monetize audio, but also where specific content is able to be consumed, ensuring creators have an opportunity to decide if they are aligned with the platforms distributing their content.

The open RSS standard has provided immense value to the growth of the podcasting ecosystem over the past few decades. 

Why do I get the sinking feeling that the remainder of this article will be maniacally saying, “and all of that ends today!”
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 09:34AM

We also believe that in order to democratize audio and achieve Spotify’s mission of enabling a million creators to live off of their art, we must work to enable greater choice for creators. This choice becomes increasingly important as audio becomes even easier to create and share. 

Dear Anchor/Spotify, please remember that “democratize” DOES NOT equal surveillance capitalism. In fact, Facebook and others have shown that doing what you’re probably currently planning for the podcasting space will most likely work against democracy.
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 09:13AM

In the coming months and years, we’ll be working to further enable choice for creators, including giving them the power to choose not only how someone wants to create or monetize audio, but also where specific content is able to be consumed, ensuring creators have an opportunity to decide if they are aligned with the platforms distributing their content. 

So this means you’re going to use simple, open standards and tooling so that not only Anchor and Spotify will benefit?

Or are you going to build closed systems that require the use of proprietary software and thus force subscriptions?

Are you going to Balkanize the audio space to force consumers into your product and only your product? Or will producers be able to have a broad selection of platforms to which they could easily export and distribute their content?
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 08:57AM

Thus, the creative freedom of creators is limited. 

And thus draconian methods for making the distribution unnecessarily complicated, siloed, surveillance capitalized, and over-monitized beyond all comprehension are beyond the reach of one or two for profit companies who want to own the entire market like monopolistic giants are similarly limited. (But let’s just stick with the creators we’re pretending to champion, shall we?)
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 09:07AM

tl;dr: Anchor: We’re doing this not so much because creators say they want it, but because we really, really want it. P.S.: We don’t care at all what our listeners think, and so have nothing to say about their freedom.

Read Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads (The Verge)
New ad technology for Spotify-exclusive podcasts is coming
This is exactly the sort of silo-ization of our data and attention we’ve come to expect from big tech. My friend Kim Hansen, in particular, saw this coming several years ago and was very worried about it.

Dawn Ostroff, Spotify chief content officer

Former President of the UPN and the CW and under Les Moonves at Viacom/CBS.
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 12:35PM

Listened to Episode 400: With The Help Of Mark Zuckerberg by Manton Reece, Daniel Jalkut from Core Intuition

Manton and Daniel celebrate episode 400 by inviting Oisín Prendiville to join them for a conversation ranging from Oisín’s podcasting app Castro and the virtues of selling it to Tiny, to the state of the podcasting industry, to a story of bicycle theft and recovery.

Coverart for Core Intuition

Discovery feature: Podcast Shuffle – Manton’s 2005 blog post announcing a hack for listening to a random podcast episode. (Sadly this link seems to be gone from the web and isn’t on archive.org.)

–Originally bookmarked December 21, 2019 at 10:51AM

👓 Deplatforming Works | Motherboard

Read Social Media Bans Actually Work (Motherboard)
Alex Jones says getting banned by YouTube and Facebook will only make him stronger. The research says that's not true.

🎵 Yah-Mo Be There by James Ingram

Listened to Yah-Mo Be There by James Ingram from Stand (in the Light)
An R&B song by American singers James Ingram and Michael McDonald. It was written by Ingram, McDonald, Rod Temperton, and producer Quincy Jones. The song originally appeared on Ingram's 1983 album It's Your Night, released on Jones's Qwest Records label. It was released as a single in late 1983, peaking at No. 19 on the U.S. charts in 1984, and No. 44 on the UK charts also in 1984, (the remixed version by John Jellybean Benitez hit No. 12 in the Spring of 1985 in the UK), and has subsequently appeared on several of Ingram and McDonald's greatest hits albums as well as various 1980s compilation albums. The performance earned the duo a 1985 Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It was one of a series of very successful duets involving Ingram. It also received a nomination for Best R&B Song, losing to "I Feel for You" (Prince).
I was listening to Yacht Rock (channel 70) on Sirius/XM this afternoon. I can’t help but wonder if Yah-Mo is the younger brother to Yahweh?

https://open.spotify.com/track/5DcRDETkCSILfPTX02Bw6D

🎵 Answering Machine by Rupert Holmes

Listened to Answering Machine by Rupert Holmes from Partners In Crime
Listening to Yacht Rock on Sirius/XM I ran across this Holmes track. The modern day image of him makes me wonder that he ever could have been a musician, much less the one who spawned the hit
Escape (The Pina Colada Song). The cover image of his album also makes me wonder what kind of influence the album can only have had on the movie Flashdance? Are these really the photo of the same man?

https://open.spotify.com/track/5Qo14bQqTK9iGbf2g6JUjL

👓 The Songs That Bind | The New York Times

Read Opinion | The Songs That Bind by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (New York Times)
Data drawn from Spotify listeners reveal that we are all teenagers in love.
Apparently our musical tastes are firmed up in our early teens… this explains a lot for me.

🎵 “Natural Blues” by Moby feat. Vera Hall

Listened to Natural Blues by Moby feat. Vera Hall from Play (on Mute, V2)
"Natural Blues" is a song by American electronica musician Moby, released as the fifth single from his 1999 studio album Play. It samples "Trouble So Hard" by American folk singer Vera Hall. It was first released in the United Kingdom, where it peaked at number 11. The song received remixes by Paul Oakenfold, Mike D, Peace Division, Katcha and the Olmec Heads.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6hmtNel4OKlBpBcTO7ao3o

🎵 “Find My Baby” by Moby

Listened to Find My Baby by Moby from V2, Mute, EMI
"Find My Baby" is a song by American musician Moby, released as the ninth and final single from his 1999 studio album Play. It features samples from the song "Joe Lee's Rock" by Boy Blue.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0dI4mHGU5PgjoU4Ogay1Bp

🎵 “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye, Kimbra

Listened to Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye, Kimbra from Making Mirrors (Eleven)
A song written by Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter Gotye, featuring New Zealand singer Kimbra. The song was released in Australia and New Zealand by Eleven Music on 5 July 2011 as the second single from Gotye's third studio album, Making Mirrors (2011). It was later released by Universal Music in December 2011 in the United Kingdom, and in January 2012 in the United States and Ireland. "Somebody That I Used To Know" was written and recorded by Gotye at his parents' house on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria and is lyrically related to the experiences he has had with relationships.
https://open.spotify.com/track/4wCmqSrbyCgxEXROQE6vtV

🎵 “I Need You” by America

Listened to I Need You by America from Warner Bros.
"I Need You," released in 1972, is the second single by the band America from their eponymous debut album America. The song was written by Gerry Beckley. It appears on the live albums Live (1977), In Concert (1985), In Concert (King Biscuit), Horse With No Name - Live! (1995), and The Grand Cayman Concert (2002). The studio version is included on the compilation albums Highway (2000) and The Complete Greatest Hits (2001). George Martin remixed the studio recording for inclusion on History: America's Greatest Hits (1975). An alternate mix from 1971 appears on the 2015 release Archives, Vol. 1.
https://open.spotify.com/track/4Anh5Ti55P6SXG3H94QLqV

Reply to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service

Replied to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don't Need Another Third Party Clown Service by Alan LevineAlan Levine (CogDogBlog)
How many more times do people have to get stiffed by a free web service that just bites the dust and leaves you bubkas? A monster post, some ranting on companies like Storify who offer free services that leverage our effort to get worth enough to get sold – when they do they just yank our content, an approach for local archiving your storify dying content, a new home spun tool for extracting all embeddable content links and how to use it to create your own archives in WordPress. Storify Is Nuking, for no credible reason, All Your Content Okay there are two kinds of people or organizations that create things for the web. One is looking to make money or fame and cares not what happens once they get either (or none and go back to flipping burgers). The other has an understanding and care for the history and future of the web, and makes every effort to make archived content live on, to not leave trails of dead links.
I like Alan Levine’s take on type one and type two silo services. Adobe/Storify definitely seems to be doing things the wrong way for shutting down a service. He does a great job of laying out some thought on how to create collection posts, particularly on WordPress, though I suspect the user interface could easily be recreated on other platforms.

I would add some caution to some of his methods as he suggests using WordPress’s embed capabilities by using raw URLs to services like Twitter. While this can be a reasonable short term solution and the output looks nice, if the original tweet or content at that URL is deleted (or Twitter shuts down and 86s it the same way Storify has just done), then you’re out of luck again!

Better than relying on the auto-embed handled by WordPress, actually copy the entire embed from Twitter to capture the text and content from the original.

There’s a big difference in the following two pieces of data:

https://twitter.com/judell/status/940973536675471360

and

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hope <a href="https://twitter.com/Storify?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@storify</a> will follow the example set by <a href="https://twitter.com/dougkaye?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@dougkaye</a> when he shut down ITConversations: <a href="https://t.co/oBTWmR5M3A">https://t.co/oBTWmR5M3A</a>.</p>
My shows there are now preserved (<a href="https://t.co/IuIUMvMXi3">https://t.co/IuIUMvMXi3</a>) in a way that none of my magazine writing was.
— Jon Udell (@judell) <a href="https://twitter.com/judell/status/940973536675471360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2017</a>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

While WordPress ostensibly displays them the same, one will work as long as Twitter lives, and the other lives as long as your own site lives and actually maintains the original content.

Now there are certainly bigger issues for saving video content this way from places like YouTube given copyright issues as well as bandwidth and other technical concerns. In these cases, perhaps embedding the URLs only within WordPress is the way to go. But keep in mind what it is you’re actually copying/archiving when you use the method he discusses.

Incidentally, I use both Broken Link Checker and Post Archival in the Internet Archive plugins to save a copy of content as well as to help fix broken links on my site when services or sites go down unexpectedly.

Those who are interested in better saving/archiving their content might appreciate the following links/resources:

Side note: I prefer the closer Yiddish spelling of bupkis. It is however a great term for what you often end up receiving from social silos that provide you with services that you can usually pretty easily maintain yourself.

An Information Theory Playlist on Spotify

In honor of tomorrow’s release of Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s book A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, I’ve created an Information Theory playlist on Spotify.

Songs about communication, telephones, conversation, satellites, love, auto-tune and even one about a typewriter! They all relate at least tangentially to the topic at hand. To up the ante, everyone should realize that digital music would be impossible without Shannon’s seminal work.

Let me know in the comments or by replying to one of the syndicated copies listed below if there are any great tunes that the list is missing.

Enjoy the list and the book!