101 and 2.0: Podcast Basics

Dave Jackson: 00:00:06

There are all sorts of these new features that just make it a better experience for the listener. And so the beauty of podcasting is you can listen, as we mentioned, all these different apps. You don't have to listen on this app, like with YouTube.

You have to watch YouTube on YouTube. With podcasting, it's open. We put the power in the listener's hand, and we were all just giddy.

When Apple launched transcripts in Apple Podcast, and they used the 2.0 feature, that was kind of a little stamp of approval, like, hey, we see what you're doing over there. And that looks kind of handy. But that's what Podcasting 2.0 is. It's kind of like an old car that's been souped up for a better experience.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:00:53

Welcome back to Podcasting 2.0 in Practice. We are going to be going to the basics for this episode with regards to terminology around podcasting in general and Podcasting 2.0.

And I have asked Dave Jackson to come and talk to me about this topic. How are you, Dave?

Dave Jackson: 00:01:16

I'm doing great. Glad to be here.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:01:18

Thank you so much. Can you introduce yourself and let us know about your podcast expertise?

Dave Jackson: 00:01:24

ackson. Been podcasting since: 2005

You can find that at schoolofpodcasting.com over the 18 years, I've been the head of podcasting at Libsyn. I was there for eight years, and then this year I switched, and now I'm the head of podcasting at Pod Page. My background's in teaching.

en I discovered podcasting in: 2005

I was in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, and here in the States, out with the cows, and I got a voicemail from Germany, and I went, oh, wait a minute. This is global. So I just grabbed my flag and I'm like, I claim podcasting in the name of Dave, you know, and it's been a fun ride ever since.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:02:12

Yeah, I completely agree. I've had people from Australia, and you're like, what? This is brilliant. Yeah, right.

Let's get down to this terminology then, because I've been doing this for four years with my own show, Creativity Found, but I've been listening for longer than that, and I do listen to podcasts about podcasting, because that's what all good Podcasters do. There are terms that I hear that overlap or they seem very similar to other terms. So I'm going to start with what is a podcast app?

And is it the same thing as a podcast listening app or a podcast player? Those are all terms.

Dave Jackson: 00:02:56

I've heard the first two. Yes, a podcast app and a podcast listening app. Because a podcast app is an app for you to listen to podcasts.

And so the way it works, just without getting too geeky, we all kind of. If you have gray hair, remember radio. And radio used to have a signal. So here in the states, it's 97.5.

You turn your radio to that, and music came out.

Well, in podcasting, you have this thing called an RSS feed, and if you were to click on it in Chrome, you get a face full of code and you're like, ugh. But if you take that code and put it into a podcast app, it kind of translates it and goes, oh, wait, here's a play button, here's some show notes.

And when you click play, you know, this comes out. But a podcast player, that's one of those kind of gray things. Typically when I hear that, I think of a player on your website.

So you've gone to your web. So it's not really an app. It's on your website. When I can click play, I can listen to it right there.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:03:55

That makes absolute sense because I embed some of the episodes of shows I've been on on my website. You can listen to them on my website. That's in your player. Yep, got it. Okay, so podcast app then is you'll be on your phone, you choose your app.

There are different apps.

We're going to talk about that in a bit and choose the one you like and then get used to it and listen to all your podcasts on your phone on that app. So when I listen to podcasts about podcasting and not just about podcasting, other people will say this as well.

Somebody would say, if your app doesn't support Podcasting 2.0, to go get another one. Or they might say that I need to listen on a modern podcast app. Those are two phrases I've heard. So is this a whole different thing?

Is it the same thing but different? What are they talking about?

Dave Jackson: 00:04:49

ent. If we look at a car from: 1950

You know, maybe if you're lucky, you had a radio. But if we fast forward now, we've got, holy cow. We've got air conditioning, we've got heated seats.

All these additional features still the car, but it does more stuff suited towards, you know, the driver. Well, Podcasting 2.0, there were people that were like, we should ditch this whole RSS thing and make a new one. Well, that's kind of silly.

We're already here. Somebody just said, what if we just made that better? Then we went, hey, that's an idea.

And so we've added things like it used to be chapters, which is where you can kind of skip to a section of an episode. It used to be in the MP3 file, which made it kind of bloated. And only certain apps would do this.

And so somebody said, well, wait, what if we added them to where they're in the cloud? And the beauty of this is because, not that this ever happens, of course, but you look up and you're like, oh, I have a typo in one of my chapters.

It used to be you had to go back to your computer, you had to re export your file and then re upload it. Now you can just go to the cloud and go, oh, hey, take this a and make it a whatever.

A lot of people get excited because there's ability now to receive Bitcoin. There are all sorts of these new features that just make it a better experience for the listener.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:06:21

Hopefully.

eat. We are recording in late: 2024

I'm sure that apps and hosting companies, more on that later too, will be keen to let you know as soon as they implement new features or an easier way for you to do things.

So do pay attention to any communications from them and please back up what you are taught here with your own research, since you may be listening in the future.

Dave Jackson: 00:07:12

And so that's what kind of what Podcasting 2.0. It's still, you know, still the same old podcasting. We've just got new features now that make it a better experience.

So, I mean, it's a bunch of giant nerds. And I love them all because they're doing this for free. We're all just like, we love podcasting, we want it to be better.

And so you have this giant global group of technicians and people that are putting this together. So it's going to be fun to see how it goes. So what happens first is we make these new features that kind of sit there and get dusty.

And then apps go, oh, that's kind of neat. Let's add that to our app.

And when enough apps added, then the actual people where you upload your MP3 file, that's called a media host, they will add it.

So it's kind of this weird trickle down thing, and it's going to take a couple years till all this gets put in place, but that's what Podcasting 2.0 is. It's kind of like an old car that's been souped up for a better experience.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:08:07

You nearly got onto my secret question that I was going to ask you later. Almost, nearly. But we will get to that because I want to move on to the hosting company.

Okay, and what that means how podcasters use a hosting company to get their show delivered to all of these listening apps that we're talking about. So what is a hosting company?

Dave Jackson: 00:08:33

Yeah, a hosting company is someplace where you upload your media file. Now, right now, podcasting is primarily audio, but it can be video. It could also be a PDF if you wanted to.

And there are companies like Captivate and Buzzsprout and Libsyn and Blueberry, there's a bunch of them. And they all kind of do the same thing. Then that is you upload your file.

And then I mentioned that kind of radio wave, your RSS feed, they provide one of those. And one of those S's in RSS stands for syndication.

And so the beauty of podcasting is you can listen, as we mentioned, all these different apps, you don't have to listen on this app. Like with YouTube, you have to watch YouTube on YouTube. And so with podcasting, it's open. We put the power in the listener's hand.

And so you upload this file and one time you have to take this RSS feed and submit it to Apple and Spotify and Iheart and Amazon and all these other places. And you do that once. And from that point forward, what you've basically done, let's just go with Apple.

You said, hey, Apple, I'm kind of putting out this podcast. Here's my RSS feed. Watch this. And then it does. It never stops looking at it.

So every time you put out a new episode, Apple goes, hey, Dave, put out a new episode. Let's show that in the app.

And so the media host provides that RSS feed, but they also provide Things like statistics, so you can see how many downloads you got. And then that's where things start to vary. Some media hosts show you things like what country is the listener in?

Then others can actually drill down to kind of the city. From there, we're back to the car analogy. Some of them have tools to help you plan your episode.

Some of them have what's called dynamic content insertion. So that's where, if you want to, like I do on my show, I have a segment called the Question of the Month.

And so if I said, hey, as we record this, it's November, the November question of the month is blah, blah, blah. Well, that's great. But six months from now, when somebody's in June, they don't want to hear about the November question of the month.

So I have that dynamically inserted. And so that when you listen in June, you're listening to the June question of the month.

So those are just some of the tools that your media host will give you. But it's the central place.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:10:49

Yeah, perfect. Thank you.

And when listeners, and I'm going to give the homework for this for listeners and podcasters to have a look around and look at the modern apps and have a play with, you know, find out which ones they like, will they be able to say, right, I'm going to try this app, say Fountain, and I'm going to look for creativity Found Will, which is my show. Will Creativity Found be there? Or does the podcaster or anybody have to do anything special to get their show onto these modern apps?

Dave Jackson: 00:11:26

The theory is it should be there. I know if you're an Apple podcast, you're in so many different places because a lot of apps will use the back end of Apple to just.

They're like, hey, you've already got a database. Let me use that over here.

But you would Want to check podcast index.org and it's super simple to submit your show over there, because there are some of these 2.0 apps that use that directory.

And the reason for that, one of the things part of the podcasting kind of 2.0 movement is it's all about making sure that your show never gets taken down. You know, if you say booger, some apps will be like, oh, he's talking about his nose again. That's it.

And they pull you out of it because they don't like any kind of nose talk. Well, the podcast index.org is basically said, no, no, we're never going to pull you out of this. So, yeah, you could submit your show over there.

And so these apps are listening and they pull the index, and again, it gets kind of nerdy, but it's all there.

And so, yeah, that would be the place where you'd want to submit your show, podcastindex.org and the Beauty of that is, whether it's to Apple or Spotify or Podcast Index, you do that once and it takes all of, I don't know, maybe five minutes, if that. It's literally copy and paste.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:12:40

Hey, podcasters, I'm going to be explaining exactly how to submit your show to the podcast index in the homework section of this module. For now, simply sit back and enjoy learning more about it. I'm going to ask you for a little history lesson now.

Dave Jackson: 00:12:58

All right.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:12:59

Why, how, and who was the Podcast Index created?

Dave Jackson: 00:13:05

Well, the one was to ensure freedom of speech. Like, we don't want people to pull my show out because you don't like that I said this. So that's why.

And then also we said, well, wait, while we're doing this, let's make it better through that. The whole. Is Dave Jones and Adam Curry. Now, Adam Curry is one of the guys that basically invented podcasting. And so he's also the guy, if you're.

Again, if you have gray hair like me, you might remember him from mtv. Brilliant guy. And he is. You know how you need, like, an idea guy? Adam is the idea guy, and Dave is this brilliant programmer.

But the beauty of it is, through podcasting, we have a community of developers going, what if we tried it this way? Because usually a great idea is not the first thing out of your mouth. It's like, what if we tried this? And somebody goes, ooh.

And then what if we did this? And somebody else goes, oh, but what if we did this? And so there's a lot of that going on.

So, yes, Dave Jones and Ann McCurry are kind of heading it, but it's really. It's a whole giant community of developers and app developers. We're all kind of working together on that.

You know, it's been around for three years, so we're still fairly new, but we've had some things. There is a transcript feature, and we were all just giddy when Apple launched transcripts in Apple Podcast and they used the 2.0 feature.

That was kind of a little stamp of approval of like, hey, we see what you're doing over there, and that looks kind of handy. And so they're using a 2.0 feature behind the scenes. So that was pretty exciting when that happened.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:14:46

Yeah, you've premonitioned everything. I was going to ask you that. I didn't tell you, I was going to ask you. So the next bit, this is leading onto it.

When someone has an idea, as you were talking about, and then you fiddle around with it, how does that get. Where are you?

Dave Jackson: 00:15:05

Where are they doing it? Yeah.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:15:07

Who are you, where are you and how do you do it?

Dave Jackson: 00:15:10

Yeah. This is actually a little bit outside of my expertise, because I am. I love software and I teach people software, but I do not write software.

And so there's a thing called GitHub, and from what I understand, it's an online tool and somebody will say, I think we should do such and such, and they'll post that and then all the developers will be like, that's silly. And then somebody else will go, that's brilliant. And then they argue it out.

And then eventually, in this case, Dave Jones is kind of the head of development.

And Dave comes down from the mountain and says, all right, we're working on, you know, version 8 or whatever it is, and from now, for the next couple months, we're going to work on this feature. And so at that point everyone gets focused. He's kind of decided where we're going, and he's really good at saying, this is why we're doing this.

You know, this is the intended feature. You need somebody to kind of keep the scope of the. The idea because otherwise it just goes everywhere and it just becomes a giant mess.

So, yeah, it's. It's kind of brainstormed online at a thing called GitHub.

And then Dave basically comes down and says, okay, here's the next couple of things we're going to be working at. And then that focuses all this, this giant group of developers to take that one feature and make it the best it can be.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:16:30

Got it. Thank you so much. That is really useful.

I'm going to set my listeners the homework to just go and have a little nosy around at this stage, because we're not getting into any of the features just yet.

Where do you suggest they go to find the apps that they want to play with and maybe have a look at the hosting companies, see what their hosting company offers.

Dave Jackson: 00:16:54

Yeah, you can go to newpodcastapps.com is a great website that shows at the top. It has kind of a filter. You can say, okay, show me hosting companies that use these features. And so you can kind of filter out the ones that don't.

You can look at different apps. And it's a great place to just see, because I just went to it right now, and I'm like, oh, there's.

There's new stuff here that, you know, more and more people are getting into. They're like, oh, this sounds like fun.

And so, like, right now, musicians are really excited about this because of the, hey, you can pay me as you listen. There are people now making podcasts that feature music. Now, this is not, you know, AC DC and Elton John.

It's independent people that have said, yes, you can play my music. And they're building directories, and it's. Again, this is. It gets really nerdy.

But if you understand this when I'm talking, if you were giving me money, it would go to me, but when I play the band, it goes to the band.

And there are artists that are actually getting kind of popular in our own little bubble, and they've said, wow, I made more money in, like, two months using this kind of monetization than I have on something like Spotify, where they get paid a pittance per play. So it's. We started going this direction, and a different industry said, hey, hey, can we borrow that over here?

And so some of the apps now, like Fountain, you mentioned, that has a music tab, and that's really just been less than a year that that has been started to be adapted by that particular industry. So it's exciting.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:18:31

Yeah, fascinating. Thank you. Tell me again how people can connect with you, Dave.

Dave Jackson: 00:18:37

Yeah, My main website is schoolofpodcasting.com that's where I help people plan, launch, grow. And if you want to monetize, I have a book called Profit from your Podcast.

So if you're trying to make money with your podcast, remember, you don't monetize a podcast. You monetize an audience. And that's kind of the gist of that book. But, yeah.

So school of podcasting.com and if you're like, but, Dave, you do so much more than that. I got one swipe. It's just a list of everything I do, and that's at power of podcasting.com fabulous.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:19:06

Thank you so much.

Dave Jackson: 00:19:07

Thank you. This has been Great. Great.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:19:10

Visit creativityfound.co.uk/podcasting to find out more about my guests and access lots of useful podcast resources.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can send a boost, but if you haven't got to that lesson yet, feel free to reach out to me on my Instagram account at Podcasting 2.0. In Practice.