Super Chapters: Extra Credit

Claire: 00:00:06

There's just so much potential for what you could do. I'm even proposing certain interactive types of chapters, like imagine being able to pop up a poll during your episode.

I'm just so excited about what we can do with this.

If you can't tell, because we can make podcasts more than only listening, but doing something, looking at something in, engaging with something, interacting, sending feedback, getting more value from the podcaster, being able to take action on what you want to do. These are the things that can be really exciting that I think super chapters will enable us to do. Ask for these things from your providers.

Let them know which things are most important. If you're really excited about super chapters coming up soon, then ask them to support super chapters.

Tell them where on your list of priorities that is, so that they can know this is really important to a lot of people.

Daniel: 00:01:06

Welcome back to Podcasting 2.0 in Practice. Daniel, you've been dying to tell us about this. Come on then, hit us. super chapters, what can we expect?

Claire: 00:01:19

Yeah, so with Podcasting 2.0 chapters and legacy chapters, they still, on the chapter level, do essentially the same thing. That is display a title that's based on some timeline point in your episode, and that chapter can have an optional link and an optional image.

That is the fundamental function of a chapter right now. super chapters, however, can do more. Now, there is not a specific standard for this yet.

It's still in discussion and planning and trying to figure out the best implementations of this.

But I want to give you the vision for this so that you can get excited about super chapters too, knowing that chapters right now are that basic piece of information. An optional image, optional link, a title pointing somewhere in your episode. super chapters, however, take that beyond.

Let's say with the photography podcast, the host is talking about their trip to somewhere, say New York City, and they're talking about all of these beautiful photos that they've taken in New York City. And they took 500 photos and they want to share them all with you. Well, let's make this a little more reasonable. 30. 30 of their best photos.

I'll say 530 of their best photos and they'd like to share them with you. They might mention a couple of them or highlight them.

They might briefly say, I took a photo of the Statue of Liberty, of the World Trade Center Tower monument section there, and I took a photo of the cool, coolest subway that I found. I took a photo of the New York pizza and a photo of a rat that I found somewhere. A photo of garbage on the streets.

I took a photo of this and that and that. So you're like really running through these things very quickly.

You could create a chapter for each one of those moments, like a one second long chapter or so. So when someone is listening to your podcast, they look down and they see the images changing very quickly as you're talking through these things.

But photographers like to look at images.

So if you are forcing the images to change based on the timeline, what they have to do if they want to see that image that displays for only one second, they have to pause your episode. So they can't keep listening while they're looking at the image, they have to pause it.

And especially if that image goes by really quickly, they have to try and pause it at just that exact millisecond to be able to see that image. Enter super chapters.

One of the proposals would be for a gallery chapter type, where then you have a single chapter, which you could say, like my trip to New York City. And inside that chapter are the multiple images inside of it.

So then for that chapter, which might be a five minute long chapter, it has all of those 30 images in it.

And while someone is listening to you go on for about five minutes, talking about different things in New York City, maybe talking specifically about these Images for only 30 seconds while they're listening, they could swipe through like a gallery and look at those images and see, oh yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a really neat one. Oh, that's cool. I wonder what he's going to say about that.

And you can swipe through to see those different things at your own pace until the chapter changes to the next thing. So then it's more engaging. I mean, podcast app developers too love people to be engaged with their podcast app, so that's a big boon for them.

The other thing that you could do is what if you have a whole bunch of links that you wanted to share? You could try and make a chapter for each one of those links, but that starts to get difficult for the user.

Instead, make a list or a text based chapter where it is still a chapter with a headline. It could be my top recommendations. But then when they look at the chapter, they can see text there.

Maybe it also has an optional image with it, but with that text it's showing a portion of text that's specific to that time in your episode and they could take action on that. Maybe that just contains a list. Maybe it's your recipe that you're talking about during that portion of your episode.

Maybe it's the Actual settings that you use or recommend for a particular type of photograph. Maybe it is those separate links.

But the point is it's a block of text that could contain some basic formatting, like paragraphs, lists, ordered and unordered lists and hyperlinks, maybe some bold and italic formatting to it. But think of it like a section of your show notes, but the most actionable part of your show notes or your article.

So instead of it being paragraphs of text, which is basically your content in written form, it could be the actionable parts of your content.

So you're talking about your top podcast hosting providers for chapters, and you comment a little bit on Captivate uses AI to do this, and it's really cool. And buzzsprout Auto populates the Spotify proprietary stupid format that they do for their chapters. And so I'm commenting on each of these things.

But then in my chapter, I could say, here are the podcast hosting providers that already support chapters, Captivate, buzzbrow, Bluberry, and then you can just tap on one of those specific links inside of that chapter, because the chapter contains multiple links.

Going back to the example of if you have a podcast about programming, you could display some of that code inside the chapter, so people could look at the code in a more accessible format too, than just an image. You could just paste the code into the chapter so they could read it.

They could even copy it and paste that into their own applications to play with that code or anything that they're doing there. There's just so much potential for what you could do.

I'm even proposing certain interactive types of chapters, like imagine being able to pop up a poll during your episode. You're talking about an episode of a TV show, and you ask everyone, do you think so and so is going to die? Yes or no.

And then they can vote right there in that chapter.

While you're talking about whether you think that character is going to die, they could just tap a simple button in their podcast app to put in their vote. Or maybe you give them a ranking system. On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate this episode of the TV show?

So you can get some interactivity in there, all kinds of cool things like that, and other things that we could do with these chapters too.

We didn't even talk about advertisers, the potential for advertisers here, where you could put the link to the advertiser in the chapter so that it's really actionable for your audience. But also with this idea of super chapters, if There's a promo code that someone needs to use.

Maybe you put that in a text block with the chapter, so people can very easily copy that promo code, click the link. Now they've got the link. They're on the sponsor's website, They've already copied the promo code.

So you're reducing these friction points for your audience to take action on whatever it is for the advertisers, for something on your website, for some level of engagement for you.

There's so much great potential here that I'm just so excited about what we can do with this, if you can't tell, because we can make podcasts more than only, and I would say even in a sense, blindly listening, but doing something, looking at something, engaging with something, interacting, sending feedback back to the podcaster, getting more value from the podcaster, being able to take action on what you want to do. These are the things that can be really exciting that I think super chapters will enable us to do.

Daniel: 00:09:25

What will it take to make this happen in the future? And when will I be inviting you back to say, hey, this is all here now? You know, why isn't it here now? Why have we got to wait?

Claire: 00:09:37

Well, right now, some of the stuff, like with the super chapters, it's just a matter of the developers have to all agree on things or not all of them agree. It's just pretty much a standard has to be set, it has to be demonstrated, and then people start adopting it.

That's the way much of the Podcasting 2.0 stuff has happened and really caught on is that someone built it, they demonstrated how it could work, someone implemented it, other people caught the vision of it and they started doing similar things. So for the podcaster, though, thinking about how am I going to leverage this stuff when it's supported, it goes back to the tools.

Because as these things become formalized into a standard, then more of the tools will start supporting them.

So that your Buzzsprout, Captivate, Blueberry or whoever will support these new chapter formats to the point that maybe it comes to you get to that chapter that you're making and you're just presented with a dropdown of what kind of chapter would you like to create? Well, I want to create a gallery, or I want to create a text block, or I want it to be a classic chapter with just an image or a link.

So the user interface here from these different apps and services are going to make this easier for the podcasters, because I don't think podcasters need to worry about the code.

I think the technology aspect of it needs to just disappear to the point that all we're doing is we're entering the information we know that we have and that our audience wants and making it that simple. And that's the way it's going to be. So watch for that in your podcast publishing tool. Watch for support for those things.

And as standards come out and are formalized in the coding sense, ask for these things from your providers. Let them know why you want these things, which things are most important.

So if you're really excited about Podcasting 2.0 Cloud chapters, ask them to support the Cloud chapters. If you're really excited about super chapters coming up soon, then ask them to support super chapters.

Tell them where on your list of priorities that is, so that they can know this is really important to a lot of people. So we're going to support this feature because a lot of people want it.

Daniel: 00:11:50

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 why we should want to do it. So thank you so much, Daniel.

Claire: 00:12:08

Thank you, Claire.

Daniel: 00:12:10

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