Chapters

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:00:06

chapters add a little bit more to that by enhancing the experience. So think of it almost like a slideshow that could go along with the audio of the podcast, but it's more actionable than that.

People might think, oh, that lets people skip around in my episode. But you know what it's great about that. It lets people skip around in your episode. And that's actually a good thing.

If you're talking about something that that's visual, instead of sending them off to a website or somewhere else where they have to look at the thing, you can then say, just look at the episode artwork. You should see this in your player.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:00:46

Welcome back to Podcasting 2.0 in Practice. I'm here with Daniel J. Lewis. Hi, Daniel. How are you?

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:00:56

Very well, Claire. It's good to talk with you.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:00:59

Thank you. And you start by introducing yourself and giving us a bit of your podcasting background.

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:01:06

h, I've been podcasting since: 2007

rted listening to podcasts in: 2005

So everything I've done in the podcasting industry, like my podcast about podcasting, my Podgagement product that I sell, a service and other things are all to help podcasters make that change in someone else's life, even if it's just one person at a time.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:01:58

Well, thank you very much for that. So we're talking today about the Podcasting 2.0 feature called chapters, and you were very keen to talk to me on this particular topic.

So tell me first of all, what are chapters in the podcasting terms?

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:02:17

Yeah, typically when we think of a podcast now, there's all kind of debate right now about what is a podcast. But typically we think of podcasts as being audio. In the podcast apps, it's the audio podcasts that are really dominating.

So we're used to a listening only experience. chapters add a little bit more to that by enhancing the experience.

So think of it almost like a slideshow that could go along with the audio of the podcast, but it's more actionable than that we've had this ability in podcasting for years before Podcasting 2.0, originally it was called Enhanced Podcasts, where I remember a podcast that I listened to for the TV show Chuck and one of my favorite TV shows. And what they would do is they're discussing different scenes of each episode.

They would change the chapter for that section of their audio so that the image you would see, you could look at your podcast player and see an image at that time, and it would be an image from that scene in the episode. Now, they changed the images out very frequently, every few seconds.

But you could make it very simple where it's just, this is a scene and it's represented by this single image during these several minutes. So a chapter, just think of it like a book, is divided up into chapters. A podcast episode can also be divided up into chapters.

And what we've had for years before Podcasting 2.0 is that those chapters were embedded in the media file themselves. And they could contain only an optional image, an optional link, and a mandatory title.

So you could divide your episode up into the different outline points for your episode, and those could be your individual chapters with titles for each of those. You could add an image if you want. You could add a link if you want. That's what it's been for years.

The big problem with that is that it was for years in the media file itself. So if you ever wanted to change those chapters, you had to re upload your media file and edit that media file first and re upload it.

And then that also meant that anyone who has already downloaded your media file or started playing the episode would not get your updated chapters. And that could be for all kinds of reasons that you might want to update them, not just because there's a mistake.

Maybe you get your episode published quickly, quickly, and you add the chapters later. Well, anyone who's already downloaded it wouldn't get those chapters ever.

Or maybe something changes, like you're using dynamic content insertion to switch something out, like an announcement or a sponsor or a promotion or an announcement of where you're going to be, a signup page or anything like that. Well, you can't change that once it's out there. You would have to plan ahead for certain things like that.

Like instead of linking directly to something, link to it through a redirect. Or if you ever change it in the future, you could change, change where that redirect goes. You can see, it starts to get complicated.

If you wanted to have the ability to change something, but you could Only do that if you really planned ahead, or else any changes you would make in the chapters wouldn't come down. Except for people who download the episode later. That was chapters. We could say legacy chapters. That's what I call them.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:05:42

I'm only glazing over because the thought of the media file is just like, oh, gosh, that sounds really techy. So we can pass over that, because you're going to tell me now it's much easier to do that.

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:05:56

Yes.

Podcasting 2.0, which, as you're learning all through this, contains so many great innovations making things easier and better for podcasters, audiences, developers, even advertisers. And one of those things that I'm really passionate about is chapters in Podcasting 2.0.

So the biggest problem that they solve right now with what we're calling cloud chapters is that it moves the chapters out of the media file into a separate file. Just like transcripts are a separate file, your RSS feed is technically a separate file from your media file.

Images are often separate as well, so the chapters are moved out.

Legacy apps will still need them inside the MP3 file, but Podcasting 2.0 apps will read them from this external file, which, if you want the geeky details, it's a JSON formatted file. But you. You don't have to understand JSON. You don't have to look at the code or anything like that.

But it moves it into this external file that is then hosted by your podcast hosting provider. Or maybe you host it somewhere else if you want to do it manually.

And by having them in this separate file now, that means you can edit those chapters without having to ever touch the media file. For example, if you want to publish your episode right away and put the chapters up later, you can do that.

There's a podcast I listen to called No Agenda. It's by one of the guys who created podcasting. And that's what he does, is he live streams his episodes.

He publishes it within minutes after finishing recording, but it doesn't have chapters.

One of the audience members volunteers episode after episode, and he goes in and adds all of the chapters, and he adds images and links where necessary, and the chapter titles and all of this, he adds that to the podcast after the fact. So for someone like me, I use a podcast app called Podcast Guru, and it downloads the episode right away when it's come out.

But I wait about a day to listen to the episode because I want the chapters so I don't have to do anything. The chapters just show up automatically.

Because the podcast app knows to look for that separate chapters file and download them when there's a change. So the chapters are there for me by the time that I press play, even though I downloaded the episode before the chapters were available.

And then with the chapters as a separate file, it means you can do all kinds of new things.

Now, what a chapter itself can do for right now, this first version of Podcasting 2.0 chapters, the chapter itself can still do the same things it could do before. That is a title, and it's the chapter is based on a time range or a start point.

So a title, a link optionally, and an optional image, that's still what a chapter can do. That has fundamentally not changed, at least not yet. There are some proposals for changing that, which we'll get into in a moment.

But still, by having the chapters as a separate file, you can do a lot more interesting stuff with that. Like, for example, you could change the artwork for a chapter based on something that changes time wise.

For example, if you're doing a special promotion that you say, hey, everyone who joins, by the end of this month, you're going to get this free bonus and you put a nice little image with that chapter as you're talking about that and the link, well, then after that month is over, if you don't want to edit your episode or you haven't used dynamic content insertion or anything to change the content of the episode, you could still change that image, the title and the URL so that the image could say, this is no longer available, but click below for our current offer, or something like that. So you can change the chapter information dynamically.

With cloud chapters, we call them cloud chapters because now the chapters live in the cloud, right, instead of in the file.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:10:03

Right.

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:10:04

But then coming up, we have super chapters.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:10:09

Hiya. Yep, you guessed it. We'll be learning more about super chapters in a future episode. Okay, so I'm gonna go back one step.

When I'm listening to a show on a modern podcast app, and if I'm just listening to it straight, you know, I just press play. When it gets to a chapter and someone's put in a different picture, that picture then comes up on my screen, doesn't it, that I'm listening on.

So as you're listening, even if you haven't chosen a chapter and you're going through those pictures, then show up on the screen and then, you know, a chapter in a book, it tells you what page to turn to. A chapter in a podcast app, you can click on that Chapter and it takes you straight to that piece of audio. Yes, that's how it works. Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:11:03

Yeah. And what's so great about that? People might think, oh, that lets people skip around in my episode. But you know what it's great about that.

It lets people skip around in your episode.

And that's actually a good thing because it means that maybe there is some content that your audience gets annoyed by and they really want to jump to a certain piece of content instead. That's the real meat in your episodes that they want.

Well, now you've made it easier for them to get exactly what they want from your episode instead of deciding, oh, I just get so annoyed that they do this other thing before they get to what I really want. I don't want to listen to the podcast anymore because they're wasting my time.

Well, now you're giving them the opportunity to shortcut to what they want. If they want to do that. You're also giving them the opportunity to engage with something more easily where you.

Especially since we're usually doing audio podcasts.

If you're talking about something that's visual, instead of sending them off to a website or somewhere else where they have to look at the thing, which I still recommend that you account for that, but you can then say, just look at the episode artwork.

You should see this in your player, since if you're doing both the Legacy chapters and Podcasting 2.0 chapters, a lot of the popular podcast apps support these things.

So you could assume that they can see the image, but also make sure that you tell them to visit your website if they need to see something, so they can look down at their podcast app and see that image.

Or if you're talking about something you want them to visit, which could be your sponsor, a promotion you're doing, even just your website, a link to your feedback page, or anything like that, you could, say, tap the link in your podcast app or go to. And then you give them your URL to go to.

So it's making it much more engaging for them, much quicker for them to get to what they need, whether that's some point in your episode or something that you're talking about from your episode.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:13:04

Yeah, why else might you think that I should be giving my listeners chapters? Why is it polite and can it help my podcast with regards to, I don't know, discovery or interactivity? Can chapters help me grow with that?

So why is it good for me and why is it good for my listeners?

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:13:25

For you and for your listeners, let's talk about your listeners first, because I think that's really the approach that we need to take. Everything we do, we need to focus on the benefit for the listeners. And chapters certainly help with that.

It makes things more accessible for them, it makes things more actionable for them. Sometimes it even simply enhances the experience for them. Like that podcast about Chuck that I mentioned. I don't have to see the image.

They're not talking about something that I have to see. They're not telling me to look at the image.

But it is just kind of nice that as I'm listening, I can glance over at the podcast app and see and be reminded of that particular scene from the episode or anything else that they're talking about.

You think of like a photographer podcast, even where they're doing something audio based, and then they can display the images during that time that they're talking about those pictures or techniques or anything, or even someone like a programmer could display code in an image. So, you know, trying to talk about code in an audio only format can be really difficult, especially for comprehension sometimes.

Like, I'm a programmer, so I need to just see the code. I don't want you telling me the open brackets and capitalization points and wasting all of that time. I just want to see the code.

So you could do that with an image, making it more accessible, more interesting, more engaging.

So it's all that for the audience, as well as some of the stuff that super chapters can do would be to really enhance that even more, giving the opportunity for the audience to more deeply engage or to see more of what they want to see, or to give feedback back to the podcaster. We'll get more into super chapters in a moment. But for you as the podcaster, some of the other benefits could be better. Serving your audience.

And the discovery aspect that you asked about right now, at the time of this recording, it doesn't help you with discovery now, that's right now.

The reason I'm being very particular to say right now is that what's exciting about this is simply by moving the chapters outside the file, that makes it so much easier for systems to scan that data.

So right now there are all of these apps and services out there that are trying to transcribe podcast episode files in order to know what's in the episode and where in the episode is that information. And all of that, that's really expensive for all of these systems to transcribe those things. You can provide a transcript.

That's one of the other Podcasting 2.0 features. I know you're talking about through the course here. You can provide that transcript, but that's still just a lot of information to process.

What I'd love to see is more apps indexing, specifically the chapters. And that's totally doable here.

Since the chapters are an external file, that means they don't have to download all of the megabytes of your audio file and then try and transcribe that and process that in different ways. They can just look at the chapters to know this is what you talked about and this is when you talked about it.

So that imagine a world like this where you get in your favorite search engine and you search for. You want to see stories about this particular event that just happened.

So it brings up all the podcast episodes that mention that event and you click on it and it takes you to the exact spot in that episode where they talk about that thing. So maybe it's like a news podcast where they're talking about 20 or 30 different stories and you care about only one.

You tap on that and it takes you to exactly that spot because you've provided that information through the chapters.

So I could would love to see a day too where certain things like chapters get more weight in the search results, just like headings and images in SEO website SEO get more weight than the actual body copy.

I think chapters should be treated like headings too, where you could see that this is very clearly what this episode covers, because that's what's in the headings. It's not just looking at the body text or the conversation that happens. So there is so much potential.

And being that chapters then are in this JSON format, that's all technical and stuff, machines, apps, developers love JSON. It is so usable. So it would be very easy for developers to implement that kind of thing. And those JSON files are only a few kilobytes, if that.

So it's really easy to process. They can be processed really quickly for these apps.

And with what chapters can do too, you could also look at a day where people are using chapters someday in the future to link to things that they talk about and that they recommend. And then someone could come along with a service that finds all of those chapters and all the podcast episodes out there that link to your product.

So then you can suddenly know, here's everyone linking to my product or service or podcast or whatever in their chapters. And you can see then networking opportunities, crops, promotion, advertising, all kinds of things that you can learn from that.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:18:53

Yeah, crikey. I like what you said.

About the photography, because my podcast is with artists, so it can be really nice to actually use the chapters to show paintings, for example, or their mosaics or what have you. So I really like that aspect of it. Future proofing as well is a good idea then to start thinking about doing chapters now, regardless.

What advice would you give? This is more theoretical. I'm going to ask about actual practice in a bit.

What kind of advice do you think you would give with regards to how many chapters you know you're not going to be wanting chapters every two minutes? And do you have any thoughts on a nice balanced way for a podcaster to plan their chapters?

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:19:38

This is one of the problems that I have with some of the AI generated chapter services out there because they tend to make way too many chapters. But I suggest look first at. Well, if you have an outline, any major point in the outline is a chapter.

Like I do that all the time with my own podcast, the Audacity to podcast, where maybe I'm saying five steps to make chapters and each step then is a chapter itself. I get very meta like that often, so think that way. What are the segments or sections of your episode?

If you do a podcast about news, then maybe each news story is a chapter.

If you do a podcast about a TV show, every scene could be a chapter, or every theme that you're covering, or every character that you're covering, depending on your approach. Because there are so many different approaches to even doing a podcast about a TV show. So think about where are the logical breaks in your episode.

How long should a chapter be? It's the same thing as how long should an episode be? As long as it needs to be. It's just like the same as a piece of tape.

How long is the perfect length of a piece of tape? It's however long it needs to be to cover the job. So your chapters should be that same way.

They should be as long as they need to be to include the information.

I don't recommend going crazy with your chapters, especially like if it gets to the point that you start mentioning a lot of links or showing a lot of images. That's where it can be tempting to make a chapter for every single link that you're quickly mentioning.

Like if I were to say, oh yeah, you can use Captivate, Libsyn Chartable. Well, you can't use them anymore. You can use Buzzsprout, you can use Transistor. Now I just gave a bunch of links.

Should each one of those that I just now said in rapid succession be A chapter? No, they should actually be a super chapter. But you could instead make that a chapter, a single chapter to say my recommended hosting providers.

And that then has the information or links to a portion of your page so that you can point people to that section where they get those multiple sub options inside of that. Ideally, I would say just as long as you're talking about that thing, make that the chapter. And some chapters. Yeah, might be only 30 seconds.

You look at a podcast like the Newsworthy, which is a daily News podcast, very US based, and it's about 10 minutes or so and she covers multiple stories and each story is sometimes only 30 seconds long. That's fine. That would be a great chapter. 30 seconds, no problem there.

If you have a longer podcast, think about those sections and even if you have a conversational podcast where you're not following a specific outline, look for those break points. And you can use AI to help you try to find some of these points, but really try to pick that spot where this is where someone might want to jump to.

This is where we definitely change course in the conversation and talk about this different thing. And you can put those in, you can give them numbers if you want.

There's a lot of flexibility for how you use these chapters and that's what I like, is that there's so much potential to them.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:23:07

Yeah. So I'm, I'm going to be using chapters and I'm going to have to be cleverly using chapters how.

And I will go into more detail with this in the future. But can you give me from a podcaster's point of view of now that these chapters aren't in the media file, how they get onto the listening apps.

And this is going to depend on your hosting company. But as a general rule, how do you usually put the chapters in?

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:23:38

Yeah, it does depend on the hosting provider and that's what I really suggest is pick a hosting provider who integrates this kind of stuff for you.

The best companies that I think do that right now, and this is not an exhaustive list, so I might be forgetting someone, but Captivate, Blubrry and Buzzsprout, I think do this really well. Maybe also Transistor, I can't quite remember their chapters interface, but like Captivate can use AI to help you add your chapters.

Now Buzzsprout puts your chapters in multiple formats and Blubrry, so they all three of them allow you some control to be able to put in your chapters, maybe even to be able to scrub through in your episode as you're Playing back to here, this is where that chapter will go, so you can make sure it's at the right point. So look first at your podcast hosting provider or whatever is making your RSS feed, because that's the logical place to try and do this.

That way, if you use the tools that they're providing, like Captivate, Blueberry and Buzzsprout, do they then make the chapters file and put the chapters into your MP3 file for the legacy podcast apps?

And they make it much easier for you to manage that all so you don't have to worry about the JSON file yourself and where you're going to host that and uploading it, downloading it, changing it, anything like that. Use your podcast hosting provider for that.

If you have a provider that doesn't support Podcasting 2.0 features or you want more manual control over this process, that's where you'd want to look into creating your chapters outside of the podcast hosting provider.

Or maybe your workflow is just such that you prefer to make your chapters somewhere else, like in Hindenburg, a great podcast editing app that I suggest because of all of the audio editing apps out there, Audacity, Audition and such, Hindenburg is really designed around editing spoken content.

And in Hindenburg 2.0, you can see the transcript in your editing and it can make chapters as well, and it can export the chapters in the right JSON format for you to use with Podcasting 2.0. So there's in your editing process for you or anyone that's working for you, you can let them know, here's my outline.

Anytime you hear that I switch to this point or any of these things, add a chapter there so then you can add it in your production process.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:26:10

Yeah, brilliant.

And I really hope that this show will help with that in so much as, like you said, we don't need to know about the code, but what we need to know is how cool this feature is and how it could be quite easy for us to do it and we should want to do it, which is why I'm kind of breaking everything down in this show. And you have definitely told me how cool chapters are and how good they can be for the listener and the creator. So thank you so much, Daniel.

How can people connect with you?

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:26:40

Yeah, my podcast about podcasting is@theaudacitytopodcast.com if you're interested in engaging your audience and growing your podcast for your own podcast, check out Podgagement. And I'm on most social networks as TheDanielJLewis.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:26:55

Brilliant. Thank you so much. I've had a brilliant chat.

Daniel J. Lewis: 00:26:58

Thank you, Claire.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:27:00

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.