Podcasting 2.0

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The Podcast Index presents Podcasting 2.0 - Upgrading Podcasting

  1. 2d ago

    Episode 269: Verbal Pollution

    Podcasting 2.0 August 28th 2026 Episode 269 - "Verbal Pollution" Shownotes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - DATABASE SURGERY WEEK — AND THE THIRD EMERGENCY OF THE MONTH The lead, and it's Dave's: Saturday 22 Aug — "#api I'm in the middle of a big refactor with the Podcast Index database schema. If I do my job right, nobody will notice it. But, the side effect will be an overall huge increase in the consistency of the data (duplicates, url change lag, etc)." @dave — the big schema refactor (22 Aug) Wednesday night: "Podcast Index database surgery will begin in the morning." Thursday: "Step 1. Expect a brief api outage. It should last just a few minutes." — then "Done" — then "#api Adding a very large table index..." — and finally, Thursday evening: "Finished. Butt is intact." (6 favourites. The board's favourite status update of the month.) What Adam should ask: what actually changed under the hood, what does "consistency" buy an app developer in practice, and is there anything a host or an app should do differently now that duplicates and url-change lag are being cleaned up? 🔥 The other half of the week — the third emergency. Tuesday 25 Aug: "#api Linode emergency maintenance on our db host. API is down." Then: "No update as of yet. Just hard down." Then the line that is really the story: "This is the third 'emergency maintenance' event that has affected us this month. Getting kind of old." And, dryly: "I guess a reboot every few years isn't too much to ask." @dave — Linode emergency maintenance, API is down (25 Aug) Board question: three unplanned outages in one month on the host that carries the Index. Is it time to talk publicly about where the database lives, and what the fallback is? The Index is infrastructure now — other people's products go down when it does. Podping shipped twice. v0.13.0 across gossip writer, watcher and monitor — "a dynamic memory cap to address the Iroh bug" (that is last week's memory leak, now capped). Then v0.14.0 the same day — "cpu architecture in the mesh announcement messages to make determining what hardware a node is running on easier." Monitor updated too: ppmonitor.podcastindex.org. @dave — podping v0.13.0, dynamic memory cap for the Iroh bug Podping monitor Podcast Index API docs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - 📌 PODCASTING'S GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: HUMAN SPEECH Your PREP note, verbatim: "For PC2.0 - Podcasting's Golden opportunity! Human speech!" — filed against a piece on how to spot AI writing. Can you learn how to detect AI writing? Here are some clues The argument: text is now cheap to fake, images are cheap to fake, and as of this year so is a voice. What is not cheap to fake is a specific human, speaking unscripted, for three hours, with a transcript and a signature chain attached. Podcasting is the only medium that ships that by default — and the namespace already carries the provenance parts. 🔥 Evidence from this week, and it is stacked: 1. Apple Music is about to start labelling. @js: "more than a third of the music Apple receives monthly is '100% AI' + usage — presumably what other humanoids would call 'listening' — of AI music on Apple Music is below 0.5%. = yes they are going to have to do something about it, starting with labelling." Read that ratio again: a third of the supply, half a percent of the demand. Billboard — Apple Music to label AI-generated music 2. Nobody can hear the difference in podcasting either. @jaybrunet, 22 Aug: "I listened to a voice clone podcast last night ('Stark Reflections') and it was surprisingly more concise and easier to follow than his previous episodes that tend to meander off in too many directions. If he hadn't said it was ElevenLabs, I wouldn't have cared or noticed the difference." 3. The scale of the flood, measured. Marco Arment said Overcast transcribes about 30,000 hours of audio per day. @js checked it against his own index: "taking a look at my 'all new episodes published' internal db for last month, the world published at least 1.4m hours of new mp3 episodes for the month, or about 46k hours a day... so if your 30k hours are unduplicated then you have excellent coverage — the long tail is very long and, these days, full of generated audio." @js — 1.4m hours of new mp3 in July, full of generated audio 4. The shame is gone. Stanley Druckenmiller, on his WSJ op-ed: "I'm not embarrassed by it... I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems. I don't know why this is relevant. My name is on the piece. It's my message." Notus — Druckenmiller's WSJ op-ed 5. And somebody is already building the counter-stack. Japanese publishers' Originator Profile: "OP uses cryptographic digital signature technology to create tamper-proof credentials for websites. Each ID card confirms who published the content, whether professional organizations vouch for that publisher, and information about the publisher's editorial and ethical standards." — that is a person tag with a signature on it. Nieman Lab — Japanese publishers and Originator Profile ⭐ The namespace question this asks: we have person (who), location (where), transcript (what was said, word-level, timestamped). That is three quarters of a provenance stack that no AI feed can forge cheaply. Do we need a fourth — a signed claim of human origin — or is the honest move the opposite: an AI-disclosure tag, because the liars won't use either one and the honest shows will? The V4V angle: if a third of the supply is synthetic and gets half a percent of the listening, then attention is already voting for humans. Value-for-value is the only monetisation model that pays for that directly — you cannot boost a bot you don't believe in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - THE LOCATION TAG, WEEK TWO — IT IS INSIDE PRODUCTS NOW Last week we watched a dataset become a globe in 48 hours. This week the apps shipped it. Podhome, this morning: "New feature: Add a location to your show and to your episodes, and modern podcast apps can put your podcast on the map. You can also see your show on @alberto's fantastic radar.rss.io." — note show AND episode level, which is exactly the gap James flagged on the globe. @podhome — location on shows and episodes (28 Aug) Podhome location docs 😊 The demand was already there — @rgblack316, 26 Aug: "@podhome I was just about to send you a feature request to add the Location tag and logged in this morning to find it already there. 😁" TrueFans shipped search off it — @samsethi, this morning: "New location search for discovery based on @alberto radar now added to TrueFans. truefans.fm/search/" TrueFans location search 😏 And @silas had it first and said nothing — 22 Aug: "Listening to the episode and hearing them talk about radar. I have had a map thing showing podcast locations for actually like two months. Both on web and on mobile. Not yet on tv. Would be cool if I were happy with it and not still a perfectionist. I'm in the car and I actually pulled over to write this." ...and he already solved the flaw everyone else is about to hit: "I ran into that s****y browser location thing and I solved it by, on the web version, just not giving you a search near me button. Only on the phone app because that is guaranteed to have gps and an actual location — not just wherever the heck a desktop computer seemingly randomly guesses where it might be located." @silas — two months of a podcast location map The granularity problem, now with the definitive example — James Cridland on PNWR this week: "You can put a building in there, a business in there, you can put everything from the state of Queensland to Brisbane City Post Office. If you do a podcast with a pastor — as you know, somebody who used to be on MTV with big hair does — then don't just put the city where you are, put..." (← that is you and Pastor Jimmy, on air, in Australia.) ⭐ Sam Sethi's line, and it is the best summary of the project anyone gave this week: "What we're beginning to see is all the hard work from the people in the podcast 2.0 community is beginning to bear fruit now, because I see them as building blocks. The person tag, the location tag, the transcript. All of these were fundamental building blocks that now you can start to build services around, which is what we've been waiting for. And of course, the lag was waiting for the data to be filled in once the tags were available." Board question: the globe is channel-level. Podhome now writes episode-level. Does Radar (and the dataset behind it) pick up item-level locations next — and does the Index want a recommended granularity in the spec, so we stop getting podcasts located in an area 2.6x the size of Texas? radar.rss.io — the globe Podcast Index — public datasets ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03 - THE PERSON TAG GETS AN ENDPOINT Dave, 22 Aug: "#api The new episodes by person endpoint: /api/1.0/episodes/byperson?q=James+Cridland&max=5. It reports directly what the [item] level [person] tags dictate." @dave — the episodes/byperson endpoint (22 Aug) James wired it into Pod News, and said so on this week's PNWR: "a very simple, possibly too simple, but a very simple person tag search, which is now integrated into the Pod News website. The first time I integrated it I didn't do it very well, but it's much better now, because I've actually followed the spec." 😄 And he name-dropped you on purpose: "if you're listening to Ad

  2. Aug 21

    Episode 268: Dead Hanging Safari

    Podcasting 2.0 August 21st 2026 Episode 268 - "Dead Hanging Safari" It's always DNS or CORS - and how your right brain is gating bad robots Show Notes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - THE LOCATION TAG — SPEC TO DATASET TO GLOBE IN 48 HOURS The lead, and it's yours: Wednesday afternoon Dave posted — "There is a new locations data set on the public datasets page... The db tables are still back-filling since I updated the db and aggregators to support the new tag format. After a couple of days it should be mostly complete." He cc'd @james, @alberto, @js and then @DavidMarzalC. That cc list is the whole story — within 48 hours all four had done something with it. @dave — the locations dataset post (20 Aug) The shipping trail: web-ui PR #608, "add locations export to public data sets," branch public_datasets → merged to master the same afternoon. This is the first public dataset built on the new location tag format rather than the old one. Then somebody built the map. By Friday morning Alberto had radar.rss.io/#globe up — a spinning globe of podcasts made in or about places on earth, drawn from the free dataset, most entries carrying full OpenStreetMap references. James put it in front of the OpenStreetMap community directly: "One for excellent people using @openstreetmap." James's review, and the two asks: "This is so cool. Really shows the power of the location tag. The globe — would be nice to add filters to that (made in vs about). Or maybe just colour the dots differently? The next trick would be some OSM lookups on the IDs to work out what the places are." 🔥 The flaw he found, and it's a good one: "One drawback is that some people have chosen 'Queensland' as a location, which is 2.6x larger than Texas." — the granularity problem in one line. A location tag is only as useful as the smallest box someone is willing to put themselves in. Dave, on seeing it — and he is in Birmingham, Alabama: "Wow, this is incredible. I already see a podcast from Birmingham that I didn't know was based here." ❤️ ❤️ Dave, Friday: "It's beautiful. I can see this data powering so many cool app and platform features." @dave — Wow, this is incredible / Birmingham (20 Aug) @dave — It's beautiful (21 Aug) The bug found by using it: @alberto and @james noticed the rel property missing from the export. Dave: "That column is in there but I had to add it. I bet I left it out when I copied over the episode level response build code." Then: "I found the issue. I had made the change but not deployed the new export script to production. The 'rel' property should be in there now." Also confirmed: channel-level only in that dataset, not episode-level. @dave — that column is in there but I had to add it @dave — channel level only / rel now deployed 😂 Community request of the week — @ChadF: "we need someone to add the FEMA regions to this so I can add FEMA region 3 to my podcast location." (Board: FEMA Region 6 is already broadcasting from the Heart of the Texas Hill Country.) @ChadF — add the FEMA regions Board questions: does made in vs about want to be two tags or one tag with a rel? Do we want a recommended granularity (city, not state)? And is an OSM ID lookup something the Index should do once, centrally, so every app doesn't do it badly? Podcast Index — public datasets radar.rss.io — the globe web-ui PR #608 — add locations export to public data sets James on Mastodon — one for the OpenStreetMap people ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - DAVE'S WORLD — THE MEMORY LEAK, THE REFACTOR, AND A WEBKIT WIN Podping / Iroh is eating RAM since DHT came out. @suorcd and @alecksgates reported it; @ericpp confirmed on a Raspberry Pi 4: "It's strange because it works fine for about a day and then ramps up the memory usage hard." Dave: "Previously it was v0.97. Maybe there was a memory use regression when I removed DHT/DTT. There were memory problems before that. I'll investigate." @dave — memory use regression when I removed DHT/DTT @ericpp — same on a Raspberry Pi 4 @dave — might have been an Iroh reload The target, stated: "1 gig should be way more than I want it to need. I'd love it to run on less than 500 MB of ram. I'm in the middle of a PI pretty big refactor. Let me finish that up and I'll do this next on the list. Feel free to explore things yourself though if you are so inclined." @dave — 1 gig should be way more than I want it to need And the suspect: "I'm positive it's QUIC. I just don't know why." — with Dave asking what debugging would actually trace it. Board: this is last week's "DHT is out and podping is go" meeting its first bill. @dave — I'm positive it's QUIC 🏆 The WebKit fix landed. Dave, Friday: "It's merged!" — a WebKit bug where a CORS preflight hangs forever if the server answers OPTIONS with valid Access-Control-Allow-* headers but a body that never terminates. WebKit was gating the preflight on the body finishing; Chrome and Firefox conclude it from the headers. So this was a Safari-only hang: fetch() never settles, bytes stream and get discarded until the page gives up. Fixed by concluding the preflight from status + headers as soon as they arrive. (Reported against bug 320657, reviewed by Youenn Fablet.) @dave — It's merged! Why it matters here: every browser-based podcast app and every web player that talks to an API cross-origin was one badly-behaved OPTIONS response away from hanging in Safari, with no error to show for it. Worth asking Dave what he was building when he hit it. Dave on the supply-chain attacks: "These supply chain attacks are going to bite vibe coders hard. I'm sure agents are installing packages like crazy all the time behind the scenes without any visibility from the user." @dave — supply chain attacks and vibe coders And the one-liner: Dave, over a screenshot — "Does this seem like a system you would let do your taxes?" @dave — would you let this system do your taxes? WebKit commit — CORS preflight hang, merged WebKit bug 320657 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - SPURLOCK'S DESK 😂 The callback to last week's show. @js on YouTube's own skip button: "youtube nearly always gives me a 'was this helpful?' dialog when I hit the skip ahead button. I don't usually give product feedback, but I make it a point to answer this one every single time: 5 out of 5 stars ★★★★★." — We spent all of 267 on Spotify's Skip Ahead. Google has been asking permission for theirs. @js — 5 out of 5 stars, every single time Google ordered to stop making side-loading hard. Judge Donato ruled Google added unnecessary "anticompetitive friction" and ordered it rectified — easier downloads of alternative Android app stores. Directly relevant to anyone shipping a podcast app outside Play. @js — Donato on anticompetitive friction Google is buying Spirit Airlines' data. "The data on the block includes Spirit Airlines' employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars, as well as marketing, productivity, and operations data. Google plans to use the data for product development and training its AI models." A bankrupt company's internal comms are now a training-set asset. @js — Spirit Airlines data for AI training The AI-host business, described without embarrassment (NYT): at Inception AI, "Everyone paused to admire Lila Walker, a new knitting- and craft-focused persona... who had a chunky wool sweater, long, wavy tresses of red hair... 'Man, I'm crushing on her,' [the] chief production officer said." (See also §05 — that company has just rebranded.) @js — Lila Walker and the crushing-on-her quote MrBeast as a product of the metric — Kevin Munger: "his videos do not have any point except to maximize viewership... He is a creator without creative vision, and is in fact better understood as a creation of audience feedback filtered through the YouTube Apparatus." Pairs with §03. @js — a creation of audience feedback The AI-authorship dodge (Nature): "What I reject is the leap from 'AI wrote the sentences' to 'the expertise and thought leadership behind them must also be artificial'." @js's response is the better take: "the 'I-am-a-fraud'-inducing moment for him was not in fact doing it, but getting caught by the nice editor. Why so defensive? Why aren't you proud of it? Don't bury it in a footnote, make Claude first author." @js — the Nature piece @js — make Claude first author Dave Winer, on agents in production: "So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end. Really f****d up." @js — FeedLand was down for over an hour Apple, per Spurlock: beta 5 and 6 still "slamming features into beta... not in fixes-removals-only mode yet." And on the new design language: "I feel like Apple has really jumped the shark — this 'new design' is not winning any medals." Also spotted: AppManagedFeatures, possibly the groundwork for restricting leased devices after missed payments. @js — more churn than I expected (beta 5) @js — Apple has jumped the shark @js — AppManagedFeatures Cursed news item of the week: "LinkedIn Has Accidentally Become a Dating Site — Despite Its No-Romance Rules." @js — LinkedIn has accidentally become a dating site Ars Technica — Google ordered to make alternative Android app stores easier Reuters — court delays hearing on Google's purchase of Spirit Airlines data NYT — AI podcasts, fashion, pop avatars Kevin Munger — We Need to Talk Nature — AI wrote the sentences Scr

  3. Aug 14

    Episode 267: Chocolove

    Podcasting 2.0 August 14th 2026 Episode 267 - "Chocolove" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - THE SPOTIFY "SKIP AHEAD" BUTTON — THE BIG ONE What it is: Spotify is testing a button that appears on the playback screen the moment it thinks you'd want to skip — an intro, a sponsorship message, or an entire ad break. It is bigger than everything else on screen. One tap drops you at the end of the break, back in the show. Premium subscribers only, selected markets including US and UK, and only when the app is in the foreground. Who broke it: James Cridland at Pod News, 4 August 2026 — an exclusive. Spotify never announced it. Semafor and most of the trade press picked it up afterwards; Cridland noted on air this week that some of them ran it without credit. The number that makes it different from a skip button: Cridland's arithmetic — skipping a typical ad break by hand is nine presses of the 15-second button, plus a correction tap when you overshoot. Skip Ahead is one. "Some people have said, oh, but you've been able to skip for years and this is no different. But a button that only appears when it's stuff that Spotify thinks you should be skipping is a start." It skips other people's money: the button fires on third-party ads — Acast, Odyssey, the New York Times — and on ads inside Spotify's own shows. It even skipped Search Engine's read for its own paid tier, PJ Vogt pitching Incognito Mode. One half of Spotify sells advertisers reach; the other half hands listeners a button to leave. Spotify's answer, and the trapdoor in it: Spotify told Cridland it is "not affecting ad delivery." True only if delivery means to the device. Cridland: "If ad delivery is to the listener's ear, which is actually what people are paying for..." — the download still counts, the ad still gets billed, the human never hears it. Spotify's other defence: the button merely shows where other listeners already skip. Cridland: "I'm not entirely sold on that, but if that's what Spotify say, I mean they wouldn't lie." 🔥 THE LINE FOR THE BOARDROOM — read the terms of service: "What's to stop them from going, you know what, people are using that skip ahead button, why don't we just turn that on automatically? I went to have a look at the terms and conditions of Spotify. There is nothing to stop them from doing that. Nothing at all. And let's be clear, that would destroy the ad-supported ecosystem that podcasting is." Why the scale makes it existential: Spotify is 72% of all podcast downloads in the Philippines, 47% in Mexico, about a third in Australia, 75%+ in some markets. ~300 million paying subscribers plus 500 million free. Cridland on the smaller ad-strippers: "Podtastic will never be that big... they're not going to materially harm the podcast industry. This is." And it sets the precedent — if Spotify does it, every other app can say the same. The YouTube comparison, and why it fails: YouTube also lets you skip some sponsor reads — but YouTube pays creators to be there. Spotify pays nothing for an RSS show to be on Spotify. Same behaviour, opposite deal. Board question (Adam): if the ad is baked into the file and the file is fully downloaded, who exactly is the injured party — and is that an argument for the download metric or the final proof it's worthless? Timing, for the cynics: Spotify's Q2 report credited "favorable podcast impacts" with pushing its profit margin to an all-time high — in the same window it built a button to strip other people's ads. Pod News — Spotify threatens industry with ad-skipping tool Semafor — Spotify's new 'skip' button could end the podcast business as we know it Forbes — Spotify tests ad-skip button that could upend podcast advertising Gizmodo — very cool for listeners, not for podcast businesspeople Digital Music News — Spotify appears to be testing a 'Skip Ahead' button ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Make the Funding Tag Buttom Prevelant! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - THE DEAFENING SILENCE — WHO ACTUALLY PUT THEIR HEAD UP Cridland's charge, this week: "I find it fascinating, although not altogether unsurprising, that so many people who rely on podcast advertising for a living have sat on their hands and said bugger all on this." His read on why: nobody wants to go on the naughty step with Spotify or Apple and lose promotion. Acast — Greg Glenday, given only after a week's thought (he declined to comment for the original story): "We do have some creators on the Acast platform who are not happy about this, and we will support them completely as they evaluate any recourse. Acast is working privately with Spotify to understand if we could have collaborated more on the rollout or positioning." Cridland's read: a hand-slap for not consulting partners, not a condemnation. Adopter Media — Glenn Rubinstein calls it "fundamentally wrong." One of the very few naming it plainly. Ben Richardson — interviewed on PNWR, sat squarely on the fence, neither for nor against. 👀 Watch this space: Cridland said on air this week he is publishing another story next week — "because I've discovered even more." There is a second shoe. Cridland on Spotify's character: "I would hope that Spotify respects the creators. All of the history of that company suggests that they don't." And on the replies he got: "the responses I've got from Spotify seem to show just a total misunderstanding of how the podcast industry works, which is more concerning to be honest." The endgame he sketches: "The advertisers will notice when the ads don't work as well as they used to. And if the ads stop working, the advertisers will walk away. And we will have no opportunity to bring them back — they'll say, we've tried podcasting and it doesn't work for us anymore." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - THE APPS THAT GOT THERE FIRST — AD-STRIPPING AS A CATEGORY The framing worth having: this is not one rogue app. In the space of about three weeks there are at least half a dozen shipping products whose entire pitch is removing the ads. Spotify didn't invent the behaviour — it industrialised it. 🥇 PODTASTIC — the one Pod News covered (22 July 2026). Publisher: Freewheel Group Ltd. $2.99/month billed annually ($34.99/yr), or $9.99 monthly, 14-day trial. None of it goes to creators; up to 30% goes to Apple or Google. It "automatically skips past the interruptions other listeners skip" — crowd-sourced from aggregated listener behaviour rather than transcription. Plus AI summaries. 🥷 Podtastic's real trick — it is nearly unblockable: the app downloads the MP3 straight to the phone and identifies itself in server logs as a web browser (Safari v604.1). To block it you'd have to block every web browser. The developer deliberately never mentions ad-skipping in the store listing and never names specific podcasts. Same developer previously ran PodcastAdBlock, which stripped ads and sold ad-free versions — shut down May 2026. 🆕 CASTRIA — the one Adam is thinking of, and it's FREE. iOS, iPad, Android, plus an installable web app, one account syncing across all of them. It transcribes the episode and pinpoints every ad, sponsor read and commercial break — including host-read ads, which crowd-sourcing misses — and skips them hands-free. One tap to switch it off or keep a sponsor you actually want. Ships AI summaries, searchable transcripts, tap-to-jump topics. 🎯 Castria's defence is the interesting part — they've pre-argued your side: "Does this hurt podcast creators? No. Castria downloads the complete episode straight from the publisher using your phone, so it registers as a genuine download and the ad impressions count just as the creator intended — we never re-host or alter the file." That is the download metric being used as a moral alibi. If the number is all anyone measures, stripping the ads is victimless by definition. Same trapdoor as Spotify's "we're not affecting ad delivery." Also in the wild: ZeroAds (zeroads.ai) — "remove ads from any podcast, keep your app"; AdSkipPro; PurerPodcasts. There is now a comparison-shopping blog post ranking podcast apps by ad-skip quality. Neil Vellio's voicemail to PNWR, which is the whole argument in ten seconds: "You can measure an ad to the end of its days, and it's still going to be an ad that someone's gonna pay to get shot of. Fix why people are paying to skip the ads, and half your measurement problem evaporates." And on the AMP Accords putting Spotify and YouTube on the committee: "a bit like inviting the two biggest meatheads to the anti-bullying committee." Pod News — Another app promises to cut out the ads (Podtastic) Castria Podtastic ZeroAds ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - DAVE'S WORLD — PODPING v0.12.0, AND THE ONE-LINER OF THE WEEK 🎯 DAVE'S POST ON THIS EXACT STORY (7 Aug), the line to open with: "I look at what AMP wants podcast app developers to do in support of advertisers. Then I look at what podcast app developers are actually doing with advert skipping. One of those will win out. And it isn't the one that requires tons of first-party data collection/reporting and the taking on of privacy liabilities." #podping v0.12.0 shipped (7 Aug) — writer, watcher and monitor, source and docker. DHT is gone: bootstrap peer discovery now uses the 5 stable, never-changing podping.cloud writer IDs as a pre-seeded list. Dave, 3 Aug: "It adds nothing but redu

  4. Jul 24

    Episode 266: Research Velocity

    Podcasting 2.0 July 24th 2026 Episode 266 - "Research Velocity" Show Notes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 📌 FROM PREP.md — Adam's PC20 items Pod News — podcast app revenue (source for 'cut the apps into the money') Pod News — the ad-skipping player Board Q (Adam): "If you go to another chapter, is that a new play?" — for the AMP play=30s definition. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - DAVE'S WORLD: THE ALTERNATE ENCLOSURE FINALLY GETS PICKED UP + HLS-IN-RSS SURGE Take the lap: Podbean and Buzzsprout are now testing/supporting the alternate enclosure — letting other apps (Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, iHeart, TrueFans) reach the video/alt versions instead of everything vanishing into the Apple-only void. Lead the boardroom with the namespace win. HLS video in RSS is accelerating: @js — "the rate of podcast hosts publishing high-quality video in podcast feeds using HLS has gone up quite a bit, thanks mostly to Transistor and Flightcast." The open path is winning adoption; watch it live. Namespace repo status: attribution bylines merged for the block and alternate enclosure tags (PRs #772/#773). Quiet week on commits — the plumbing is holding. Dave in the wild: on the LLM-vs-tags thread — "A 'weight' is just a form of heuristic. Regression is literally built into the LLM at a fundamental level. Re-weighting a model will always regress other weights." (Continues the on-device-AI vs authored-tags fight from 265.) Also: Hover auto-renews domains 2 days out — @genebean's alert script gets a Dave thumbs-up. HLS-in-RSS tracker (livewire) Dave Winer — distributable is not distributed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BM - FROM THE TIMELINE — podcastindex.social this week (JS & Dave) @js: "the rate of podcast hosts publishing high-quality video in podcast feeds using HLS has gone up quite a bit — thanks mostly to Transistor and Flightcast." (tracker: hls.livewire.io) @js: "Waves of new podcast listeners may exist, but they aren't downloading episodes via RSS, no matter how many podcast apps are being vibe-coded." @js shared Castro's "Podcast apps: a framework for dying" — his read: "well thought-out, but a bit too pessimistic imo — the next few years are going to be interesting." (Steven B: "anyone interested in the PC2.0 namespace read and consider this.") @js on Patreon's "painful update" (Conte, layoffs): "I'd love to know what change Patreon's operational market has undergone in the last six months." @js on the scraping wars: a court ruled aggregated search data (URLs, snippets, index facts) are "publicly accessible facts," not copyrightable — relevant to index/crawler rights. @js (amplifying Dave Winer): "Threads and Bluesky are not distributed. Distributable is not the same as being distributed." @dave: "A 'weight' is just a form of heuristic. Regression is literally built into the LLM at a fundamental level… one slider." — the on-device-abstraction vs authored-tags thread, continued from 265. @dave, namespace repo: merged the block-tag + alternate-enclosure attribution PRs (mid-May); no new commits this week — the action is in adoption, not spec. @csb → @dave @adam: "bros, I've just sent you $15.55 via bitcoin gram and amazingly only one split failed" — boosts still flow on-network (counter to 'streaming sats is over'). @mgdell (Mike Dell): "21 years of podcasting: the thing I don't want us to lose." Mike Dell — 21 years of podcasting Castro — Podcast apps: a framework for dying ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - "WHAT IS A PODCAST?" — THE AMP ACCORDS PUT A FORMAL DEFINITION ON IT The AMP Accords landed this week (Oxford Road's Dan Granger + Giles Martin), a year-long, commercial-end-of-the-industry group defining what a podcast IS, what a "play" is, and building exposure/attribution standards to replace the download. Note: the definition still names open RSS feeds. The formal definition: "an on-demand show rooted in the spoken word and fully intelligible as audio… accessed as audio or video via open RSS feeds and other distribution methods." The commercial world catching up to what this room has said for years. The play = 30 consecutive seconds (audio OR video); Spotify already adopting it, YouTube ~same ballpark. No time-window qualifier yet. Downloads called "a faith-based metric" (Tom Webster). "Amen," says James. It's in the air everywhere: Mike Dell (@mgdell) — "21 years of podcasting: the thing I don't want us to lose." And @js flagged Castro's @dabluck must-read "Podcast apps: a framework for dying" (@StevenB: "anyone interested in the PC2.0 namespace should read it") — @js pushes back: too pessimistic, "the next few years are going to be interesting." Mike Dell — 21 years of podcasting Castro — Podcast apps: a framework for dying ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 06 - QUIPS / TRANSITIONS / LINK DUMP ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Modified 07/24/2026 14:52:27 by Freedom Controller

  5. Jul 17

    Episode 265: Jihobbyist

    Podcasting 2.0 July 17th 2026 Episode 265 - "Jihobbyist" Slop or Not! Lightning or Frightening! Adam and Dave go deep with the Boardroom after a 2 week break ShowNotes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - PODPING GOSSIP-WRITER → PRODUCTION + INDEX PLUMBING ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - THE OPEN INDEX TURNS UP INSIDE AN AI SCRAPER (SUNO) @js flagged it: a hack at Suno reveals the AI music generator used PodcastIndex to do its targeting — "with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts." Board question: the Index exists to be "free, for any use" — and here "any use" is an AI company bulk-harvesting a million hours to train on. Is that the deal working as designed, or does anything change? A live test of the open-index ethos. Ties straight to the on-device/namespace fight below and to the spam/AI-slop lane — the same extraction pressure from three directions. Hack reveals Suno scraped via PodcastIndex (404 Media) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - ON-DEVICE AI vs NAMESPACE TAGS — "DIDN'T YOU INVENT THE NAMESPACE?" Your own post set it off: Adam — Apple in talks to run a startup's compressed AI models on-device (PrisMML) — "More fodder for on-device features vs new tags." The core board fight of the week. 🎧 CLIPS TO PLAY — a 3-part PNWR sequence (Cridland and Sethi discussing your position; your own SOT is NOT in their show, so play + respond): 1. The jab (44.5s): recap of the Car Curious "podcast annotations" (≈ Apple timed links) debate — Nathan Gathright: LLM-from-transcript data stays the purview of players, not publishers; Sam Sethi: "Adam Curry also came in… he sees LLMs as the way for on-device abstraction of data rather than tags. And I'm like — didn't you come up with the namespace?" File: 01 - Cridland Sethi - Adam annotations, didnt you invent the namespace - PNWR.mp3 2. Sethi's thesis (55s): his actual position — fine, copy Apple, let LLMs do transcripts as a FALLBACK "if you can't be bothered," but if a creator wants to put real data in the feed, respect what the creator wants FIRST. "An LLM is a fancy autocomplete system… I'd much rather the creator is given the opportunity to do something good first." The publisher-vs-LLM argument, self-contained. File: 02 - Sethi - an LLM is a fancy autocomplete, creator first - PNWR.mp3 3. The Spurlock correction (36s): Sam apologizes for mischaracterizing @js — "I don't think we should leave it up to LLMs at all… but in practice it's going to be the app crawlers that mark shows up using hard work and drive for differentiation, not the publishers themselves." It might not be an AI LLM, but someone still has to mark the metadata up. File: 03 - Sethi - Spurlock correction, app crawlers not publishers - PNWR.mp3 Ammo for your side: @manton — his daughter's voicemail "Hi dad, this isn't an emergency" was transcribed by Apple as "this is an emergency." Player-side LLM inference is lossy; publisher-authored tags are authoritative. The case for the namespace in one anecdote. Cultural backdrop (@js, Atlantic "The End of Reading"): a postliterate generation that treats reading the source as "arbitrarily withholding information" — if the phone abstracts everything for you, who ever touches the feed? Apple + on-device AI compression (CNBC) The End of Reading Is Here (Atlantic) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03 - FUNDING NAMESPACE: STREAMING SATS COLLAPSE → APPLE CASH IN podcast:funding? Streaming sats fell off a cliff: PNWR — Sam Sethi says boosts/streaming sats are "down to pretty well zero" in July: only TrueFans and one from Podcast Guru, NOTHING from Fountain. "Streaming sats is going away quite fast now… a real shame." A direct V4V gut-check for the room. They're quoting you: James Cridland cites "Adam Curry is talking about splitting the funding from the advertiser with the app or host developers" — app devs are otherwise "cut out of the entire economic chain." Your funding-split idea is now on the record on their show. 🎧 CLIPS TO PLAY — PNWR V4V audio (hosts discussing V4V; your SOT is not in their show, so play + respond): 1. Streaming sats collapse (47s): Sam Sethi — boosts/streaming sats "down to pretty well zero" in July; only TrueFans + one Podcast Guru, nothing from Fountain. "Going away quite fast now… a real shame. TrueFans is the place keeping it alive." File: 04 - Sethi - streaming sats down to near zero, TrueFans keeping it alive - PNWR.mp3 2. V4V economics (80s): James — app developers "weirdly cut off from the entire economic chain"; Sam cites your fix: "Adam Curry is talking about splitting the funding from the advertiser with the app or host developers… the ecosystem needs to have a way." File: 05 - Cridland Sethi - app devs cut out of the money chain, Adam funding-split - PNWR.mp3 Dave's concrete move: "Is an 'Apple Cash' request just a specially formatted IRI of some sort? I'm wondering if there's some way to do an open-ended AC request and plug that into the podcast:funding tag." A fiat on-ramp in the namespace as boosts fade — real board business. Quip that fits here: Adam — "Try depositing $10k cash into someone else's bank account. They will surround you with armed guards within minutes." The banking-rails friction V4V was built to route around. ADAM'S THOUGHTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - CONTENT HIJACKING + AI-SLOP: SOL GOOD NETWORK AND THE SPAM-COP LANE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 05 - MEASUREMENT: AMP'S "WHAT IS A PODCAST" PAPER DROPS NEXT THURSDAY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  6. Jun 19

    Episode 264: Podcast Plebicide

    Podcasting 2.0 June 19th 2026 Episode 264 - "Podcast Plebicide" ShowNotes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Justin Jackson's post: We Have A Communication Problem ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - PODPING.ALPHA STABLE + INDEX / PV-ALPHA HYGIENE Milestone: Dave — "I think we can safely say that podping.alpha is stable now. It's been many weeks of 100% uptime." Lead the boardroom with the win. PV-alpha 500s: @mitch + Dave debugging the "get a list of feeds that have updates over the last X" endpoint throwing 500s; @mitch adding a delay between paginated requests in case it's a too-many-requests block. Feed de-listing puzzle: Dave to @ChadF — a feed marked dead with no spam flag; aggregators de-listing it for some other reason. Open question. Iroh 1.0 — Dave flagged it: "Dialing keys instead of IP addresses." p2p networking, boardroom catnip — worth a riff with Dave. Discussion: also surface your own snags — Sovereignfeeds webhook "Unknown Error sending to Server" and ladder.podcastindex.org appearing down (to @StevenB / Dave). Iroh 1.0 Release ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - SPAM + AI-SLOP — TOWARD A "SPAM-COP SCORE" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - MEASUREMENT: AMP'S 30-SECOND "PLAY," ROUND TWO AMP defined a "play" as 30 seconds; Spotify immediately adopted it. You and Dave already called 30s "b******t" last week — push total listen time + percent-completed as the real metrics. The walkback: AMP's original press release said "30 seconds of content played… once per user per session" — and quietly DELETED "once per user per session," leaving a woolier definition. James flagged it on-page with the HTML5 del tag. YouTube is in AMP: Google confirmed YouTube "has been participating in the AMP-led conversations" — implies YouTube uses a 30s play. Apple's stance still unknown. RSS.com test (Alberto): moving the DOWNLOAD threshold 60s to 30s changed totals by ~1% — negligible. So 30s for both plays and downloads is just simpler. The HLS gotcha: playing 10s of an HLS video podcast still downloads ~60-72s, so server logs can't tell real play — only player-side instrumentation (Spotify, future Apple) can. James: it's all too "cloak and dagger." Watch July: AMP's implementation doc is due July and the group is light on technical people — needs to be real technical work, "not a sales press release." Understanding podcast stats (PodNews) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03 - BEYOND CPM — INDIE + MISSION-DRIVEN ECONOMICS Losh Moodaley ("Beyond CPM"): the indie middle class (5k-25k downloads = only ~1-1.5% of all podcasts) can't survive on CPMs. Roadmap: audience-as-economy, sell exclusivity not inventory, scale outcomes not audiences, "owners of trust, not renters of attention." Pure V4V-adjacent framing — Sam Sethi tied it straight to TrueFans activity-based value (a share or comment is value, not just dollars) and "creator portals." Easy on-ramp to your worldview. Vox Topica (Richard Fall): full-stack agency for nonprofits/mission-driven orgs — speaks engagement/reach/"depth of message," not downloads. Nonprofits resist AI voices (authenticity) but use AI for scripts/cleanup/show notes; now recommends video to ALL clients. Beyond CPM: Surviving the New Measurement Era (PodNews Daily) Vox Topica ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - NUMBERS + MONEY MOVES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 05 - AI BUBBLE / EDGE COMPUTE — DATACENTER WATER ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 06 - CROSS-STORY: COMMODORE FLIP-PHONE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 07 - QUIPS / TRANSITIONS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                   Last Modified 06/19/2026 14:30:08 by Freedom Controller

  7. Jun 12

    Episode 263: Chat is Dead

    Podcasting 2.0 June 12th 2026 Episode 263 - "Chat is Dead" ShowNotes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DG Editor - Building an idiot proof recording system for Bridge Church ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - THE USER-AGENT WAR — SPOOF vs. SIGN ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - THE PODCAST DATA COLLECTIVE (PCDC) — and Pod News reacts ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - MEASUREMENT RECKONING — AMP's 30-SECOND "PLAY" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03 - PODCAST STANDARDS PROJECT vs 2.0 — and Index hygiene ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - APPLE WWDC — VIDEO PODCASTS EVERYWHERE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 05 - AI BUBBLE — FINANCIAL ENGINEERING + LOCAL/EDGE COMPUTE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 06 - INDUSTRY — AD-SKIPPING, AI LIABILITY, GROWTH ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Modified 06/12/2026 14:21:15 by Freedom Controller

  8. Jun 5

    Episode 262: Podcleanse

    Podcasting 2.0 June 5th 2026 Episode 262 - "Podcleanse" Dave and Adam are joined by John Spurlock and throw a big idea into the boardroom: The Podcast Data Collective Shownotes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Spurlock - Guest The man behind op3.dev and Livewire.io - From the Great State of New Jersey! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - THE IMPRESSION HEIST — AMP TASK FORCE RATIFIES 4 EXPOSURE DEFINITIONS, NO DISSENTING VOTES Podnews press release Jun 4: AMP Task Force Introduces Cross-Platform Alternative to the Podcast "Download" — "unified impression guidance for audio and video, advancing impression-based measurement as the medium's primary transaction currency." Four exposure definitions ratified. JS Jun 4 quote: "the AMP Task Force ratified a new framework with four exposure definitions, with no dissenting votes." Podcast Play: 30 seconds of content played, audio or video, once per user per session. Podcast Audience: The number of unique users who had a Podcast Play. Ad Impression: A commercial begins playing for the user. Ad Audience: The number of users exposed to an Ad Impression. They wanted to 'hasten the demand' Backstory: AMP first emerged May 29 (Podnews) — same day PC20-261 aired — "to confront podcasting's measurement dilemma." @dave reaction Jun 4 16:12: "RE: [Podnews AMP story] More secretive, back room podcast 'industry' nonsense." PNWR Jun 5 confirms the cabal-composition critique — James and Sam open the show debating AMP. James: "they also want to define what an impression is" + "we don't have a definition of podcast." Sam: "I don't think podcasting is [defined], we can measure consumption." PNWR catches the gaps [0:09:00-0:09:30]: "Spotify yes, Acast no, Art19 missing… Apple is already doing that. Apple is already being cut [out]." Same observation @dave made — who's in the room and who isn't. @js replies @dave on AMP Jun 4: "@dave Dave there were no dissenting votes" — Mastodon-thread confirmation that JS + Dave are on the same page about the consensus-by-cabal red flag. Discussion: V4V counter-thesis — No Agenda is value-for-value (no impressions, no exposures). Open standards vs industry cabals. PNWR is independent-podcaster-aligned; AMP is platform-aligned. Podnews AMP Jun 4 press release Podnews AMP origin May 29 @dave Jun 4 reaction post JS Jun 4 quote post PNWR this week (Pod News Weekly Review) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - THE OPEN COUNTERPART — PODCAST INDEX ISSUE #775 (PNWR + @DAVE BOTH ON IT) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03 - THE WHY BEHIND IMPRESSIONS — "THE FIRST FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - THE PODCASTING 2.0 DATA COLLECTIVE — THE OPEN ANSWER TO AMP The Podcasting 2.0 Data Collective — the open, V4V-aligned answer to the AMP cabal. Not a consortium with ratified definitions and trade-press releases. A collective of open tools and honest sentinels: OP3 for analytics, Podverse + newpodcasts.net for corpus data, Podcast Index for the namespace, Issue #775 for client identification done right. Matthew 5:6 (KJV): "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." The verse that frames the work. Open data, transparent measurement, value-for-value — righteousness in podcast governance. Those who hunger for it are the ones who'll be filled. The AMP cabal trades righteousness for an ad-tech seat at the table; the Data Collective just keeps the lights on. THE CHARTER — Adam's working document, June 5 2026 We hold more power than we give ourselves credit for. Definition of a Podcast: Syndicated delivery of media files with precise consumption data for all stakeholders. What we brought in (the Podcasting 2.0 namespace contributions): Transcripts Chapters Funding (V4V) Person Location …etc. Statistical relevance: Advertising is based on percentages. Collectively we have about 10% of all apps — statistically enough to be relevant. Godcaster app tracing proves we can measure important metrics. Data to aggregate and display: Follows Plays per episode Completion rate by time Strategy: Become the authoritative source by publishing open stats Monetize We will not be loved initially by the industry, because we will have the truth. Advertisers will love us though, as will Podcasters. Monetization: Data subscriptions Resellers (DJL) Ad Networks Podcasters themselves (consideration) Podcast Index has built the trust needed to house this data. We already have a data exchange relationship with the apps. op3.dev is critical in this equation to offset the old system for correlation. OP3 full podcast support landed this week [PNWR 1:53:00-1:54:30] — OP3.dev now has full episode-level + show-level analytics support for podcasts. Spec work also moving on private feeds (insecure feeds spec). Direct relevance to V4V infrastructure. @dave → @james Jun 5 11:50: "Do you have the daily lists that show up on newpodcasts.net available anywhere as a download? I'd love the full, historical list of feed urls that have appeared there if possible." Open-data request — corpus curation theme. @dave → @mitch May 30: "Would you be able to send me a flat list of all the feed urls in Podverse which have more than X number of subscribers/followers? Let's say more than 5?" Podverse data request — corpus quality. Anchor FM RSS restoration request — Fri 11:01 email to NA inbox (Lusso Lets). Listener can't retrieve feed data from Podcast Index. Adjacent infra beat — the unsung user-facing pain of corpus indexing. Discussion: corpus curation as a steady-state job (Dave's sentinel work) vs measurement standards (the AMP cabal) — which one keeps the ecosystem honest? The Data Collective doesn't ratify, it just shows up to maintain. Hunger and thirst. They shall be filled. OP3.dev — open podcast analytics ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 05 - CAPTIVATE LAUNCHES DAX US — THE IMPRESSION ECONOMY IRL ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 06 - BBC GOES ALL-IN ON CROSSED WIRES YEAR 3 — IPLAYER DEAL + "EDINBURGH OF PODCASTING" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 07 - STREAMING CONSOLIDATION — YOUTUBE MUSIC + TUBI + NETFLIX ALL WANT "PODCAST" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 08 - SUPPLY CHAIN SECURITY — VS CODE DELAYS, PHP FOUNDATION, SLSA LEVEL 3 IS NOT ENOUGH ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 09 - AI BUBBLE PC20-FLAVOR — TOTO CHUCKS, MOTHER COMPUTERS, "NO 'I', ONLY MATH" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 - QUIPS / TRANSITIONS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Modified 06/05/2026 14:38:09 by Freedom Controller

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About

The Podcast Index presents Podcasting 2.0 - Upgrading Podcasting

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  • Creator
    Podcast Index LLC
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    207
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Podcasting 2.0

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