The Tech Stuff

Sam Sethi: 00:00:06

RSS is a data file with pointers to places. So it can have a pointer to where your MP3 file, your audio file is.

It can have a pointer to where a video file, maybe it can have a pointer to your value tag. So where your money element is within the feed.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:00:24

Our hosting company makes that RSS feed for us.

So as podcasters, we have a lovely, simple way of going to a website and popping our audio file on there, popping the transcript on there, putting in the chapters, and all of that information gets in the RSS. And that's how apps like TrueFans then reads the information we've given.

But we get to do it in a really easy way without having to know what is going on in the actual feed. Welcome back to Podcasting 2.0

In Practice. We have been talking about all the features, and we've been concentrating on why these features are good for the podcaster, for the listener, for discovery, monetization, interactivity. We've looked at that kind of human side of it, and during that time, you will have heard terms such as RSS and open source.

And for this episode, I'm going to dig deeper into the tech stuff. So I've asked Sam Sethi back to talk to us about the tech stuff. How are you, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 00:01:40

Very well. Thank you, Claire, for inviting me back.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:01:42

You're very welcome. So start with RSS feed. What is that?

Sam Sethi: 00:01:51

Let's start off with what RSS stands for, Really Simple Syndication. That's what it was originally called. That's what it meant.

And the idea was originally from Netscape to bring content in from multiple different parts of the web to a single page, a portal. And it was syndicating content from other pages into this portal page. That was its original reasoning.

It was then adapted by Dave Weiner and used for blogging. And that was its next iteration, use.

And the idea was that you could then take a blog post and multiple blog posts, put it into an RSS feed, and other people could syndicate your blogs and then read about them in a blog reader like Google Reader, which was very popular in the day. And then Adam came along and said, hey, can we put this into an enclosure tab, put MP3s and audio files? And that was the birth of podcasting.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:02:48

Sam is referring to Adam Curry, who James Gridland told us more about in the 101 and 2.0 Podcast Basics Extra Credit episode.

Sam Sethi: 00:03:02

So RSS is a data file with pointers to places. So it can have a pointer to where your MP3 file, your audio file is. It can have a pointer to where a video file may be.

It can have a pointer to your value tag. So where your money element is within the feedback.

So the RSS is a way for apps like Fountain, TrueFans, Podverse to read what a podcast creator has said.

I'm going to tell you who I am, I'm going to tell you where I'm located, I'm going to tell you what's in my wallet, I'm going to tell you what other podcasts I recommend, and I'm going to tell you who's my host and where you can get the audio and video of my podcast, if you have it. And that's really the epiphany moment that RSS is really a pointer to all the places where you can get information in one file.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:03:50

Our hosting company makes that RSS feed for us.

So as podcasters, we have a lovely simple way of going to a website and popping our audio file on there, popping the transcript on there, putting in the chapters, and all of that information gets in the RSS. And that's how apps like TrueFans then reads the information we've given.

But we get to do it in a really easy way without having to know what is going on in the actual feed. So we hear the term tags. Are those the pointers? What does that mean?

Sam Sethi: 00:04:26

Yeah, so you mentioned chapters and transcripts. So chapters is, is a tag. Basic RSS simply requires you to have a title, maybe even a just a description and an enclosure.

You could have the world's simplest RSS feed with just those three tags and you could publish that and that would be great. And podcast apps would read it. I would still be able to find your MP3 enclosure file from the host within the URL of that.

And I would find the title of the podcast and I'd find the description. Nothing else would be needed.

The extensions, these tags, these new features that we've been talking about in podcasting 2.0 are just other little pointers within the RSS.

So now I've got a tag called chapters, and a chapter says, oh, if you look at this file here, you can go and get the file that gives me all the information about the chapters for this podcast. And if you point here, I'll tell you where my podroll is. And you can now see all the recommendations of other podcasts I like.

And if you point here, you can get my wallet with all the ways you can pay me. So that's really what the tags are. They are just extensions within the RSS beyond the basic Three tags you need that allow you to,

then I guess why it's called Podcasting 2.0, enhance the experience of podcasting without enhancing the audio itself.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:05:49

Got it. I understand. It makes absolute sense. I just want to mention another term because I hear this a lot as well.

When people are talking in their techy terms about Podcasting 2.0 and they talk about the namespace. What's that?

Sam Sethi: 00:06:03

So the namespace is really just the collective name for all the tags. If you called it the group of tags, if you called it the collection of tags, it's just called a namespace.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:06:14

Brilliant. What it comes down to, and we've talked about this at the very beginning of this whole series, is who supports what? So your hosting company.

I've explained where you can go to see which hosting companies support which tags, and the same with the apps as well. So it's all kind of a matter of your hosting company saying, yes, we can make chapters, et cetera, et cetera. We can put that in your RSS for you.

And then which listening apps are saying, yes, I can read those tags. I'll choose to read those tags 100%.

Sam Sethi: 00:06:51

That's all it is.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:06:52

Perfect. Another thing I've heard you talk about, Sam, is the Podcast Standards Project. What is that?

Sam Sethi: 00:07:02

So the Podcast Standards Project is a group of companies within the podcasting 2.0 space that got together, and the idea is to be the marketing and PR arm of podcasting.

So if you think of the work that Adam Curry and Dave Jones and many of the geek techs, like myself and others like Oscar at Fountain, we come up with the crazy new tags. We are the ones that say, hey, you know, we need a tag that does X. And that's the technology arm of Podcasting 2.0.

The Podcast Standards Project's goal and aim is to then take those and ratify the ones they think make most sense to most hosts and apps. So the lowest hanging fruit.

So they'll say, you know, we're not quite ready yet for this, you know, very brand new tag that you guys have come up with. But we think that the early ones, like chapters and transcripts and those sorts of tags make a lot of sense.

All of the hosts have now implemented it, all of the apps are now implemented. So we'll ratify those as a standard, and we will then promote market and PR those to the wider community.

And that's the goal of the Podcast Standards Project.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:08:18

Right, got it. Thank you so much for that, Sam. Insightful as always.

Sam Sethi: 00:08:24

No worries.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:08:26

Thanks so much for listening. Visit creativityfound.co.uk/podcasting to access lots of useful podcasts resources and find out more about my guests.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can send a comment, boost or super comment using any of the modern podcast apps we talk about in this podcast series. Or feel free to reach out to me on my Instagram account @podcasting2.0inpractice.