podcasting 2.0 for August 28 2020, this is episode number
one. We're upgrading podcasting what other software tech podcast
starts like that? It's Adam curry coming to you from Austin,
Texas for the very first episode of podcasting. 2.0. We're going
to upgrade podcasting. And with me, podcasting is my friend and
partner Dave Jones. Dave, how you doing?
I'm good, man. What's up?
Great. This is it's we have you know, we've met once in person,
we've spoken on Skype and on phone calls for man. 10 years, I
guess is how long we've been?
Yes. The only time I've met you in person is we spent the night
at your house.
That's right. You were coming through town, you were on your
way somewhere else in transit? Yeah.
Yeah, you fed. You fed me and my wife, and it was awesome.
Now, what do I What did I make?
No, you took us to the restaurant? Oh, there you go.
You did not cook.
These days I might have. We're all southern boys. I'll take you
up on now all of a sudden, we're all for all Southerners. So I
think to explain what this podcast is about? Well, first,
I'd like to say that it really is intended for the three
stakeholders in podcasting, which is people who make
podcasts. And what that is, is interpretation we can get to
people who listen to podcasts, who also interact, of course,
with their favorite podcasters. And for this for the purposes of
this podcast, the software developers who either have ever
thought about making a podcast app about different ways of
presenting podcasts and making them more fun or more features
or things that just currently can't be done with the
ecosystem. And certainly not because of all the heavy lifting
that comes into play with the actual back end of what a
podcast player or podcast app has to be. And I think it'd be
handiest if, if Dave, if you and I talked a little bit about how
we met each other what we've been doing for the past 10
years. And then we'll talk about a bit of the backstory of how we
came to this point and what the heck we're doing. So yeah, when
I wasn't, if I can remember correctly, we were both in a
like a beta thing. One of Dave whiners. outliner
projects. Yeah, it was easy to for poets, that it was like a
melee kind of a mailing list. More than more than software
originally. And when I first started listening, I started
listening to your podcast, no agenda. I was I started
listening to that and heard that you were using the world
outline, which was like a module, so to speak of the OPML
editor, which itself was a descendant of was at Frontier,
different radio, user land and frontier, which all gave Dave
whiners lifelong project. Okay.
So that, you know, when when I saw that there was software
backing up the whole world outline. And that's how you were
doing your show notes. And all the publishing for the show. I
thought, well, that's really cool. And I don't know anything
about frontier, I don't know, any, you know, how any of this
stuff works. So I just dove in, like I typically do, you know,
with two feet and just started hacking on stuff. And I'm not a
programmer by profession. I'm a sysadmin. But I've been
programming for, you know, many, many years on the side and just
projects. So I thought, well, I'll just go ahead and, you
know, start hitting this. And of course, you know, making all
kinds of mistakes and screwing it up. But I got into the
mailing list. And we were in the Met you because you were in
there as well. We're all beta testing this stuff together. And
I think if my memory serves me correctly, I think the way that
it evolved was that you were had some ideas for a bigger project.
And I, myself had been thinking about moving the frontier and
the stuff that frontier was doing and us and world outline
was doing. I've been thinking about moving it to just a LAMP
stack based Linux application. Because what what had been
happening was that the frontier code base that OPML editor was
built on was showing his age, especially on the Windows side.
And back then we were all this stuff was done by by rote
spinning up an EC to Amazon instance, installing Windows on
it, and then installing the OPML editor in that and then starting
it serve content HTTP only at the time and all that kind of
jazz. So what was happening is, if you had like more than one
encore in your windows AC, two instance, Frontier would like
crash all the time. You know, it's just
the technical explanation to it just didn't scale well.
No. Like I even go as far as I have. Thank you, Maria. I'm sure
you remember Ted Howard? Sure, he was to you. I remember
working a little bit with Ted to try to fix the source. And of
course, the non downloading this, I'm downloading the source
code, the windows source code for frontier and trying to find
a multi CPU bug, which is like, multi threading, which is like
the hardest thing to do in the whole world, right? And you fish
I just said, Yeah, screw it, I may screw it. I'm just gonna
take all this stuff, that this that this thing does all the
stuff that I like, and just build another, just build my own
application from
it. Now, this is something you said here, which is really
critical. The origins of podcasting have different
different parts to the history, and one is really not discussed
at all. And that a lot of that's my my fault. Dave Weiner, of
course, being the creator of RSS and who I work with, when he, I
convinced him to come up with what became the enclosure
element. He's my outline guru, and I outlining is what everyone
knows when an outline is even a file folder, it can be an
outline. It really functions well, for my brain, it's the way
I think. And I'd like to fold up nodes and be able to move stuff
around. And it's how I write everything. And a very powerful
feature is the ability in an outline. So let's say you have a
node where you double click on it, it would expand and there's
something underneath it, it had something called the include,
and include node could mean you could do if you double click on
that node, it will issue an HTTP request to that OPML file, which
could reside anywhere else very similar to gopher back in the
day, which I'm very intimately familiar with, or obviously just
a hyperlink system, but without lines, and the original iPod
or.org index for all podcasts at the time was based on OPML,
which is standard. Another standard day they wind wrote, I
didn't know that, that he did the OPML standard.
No, no, I didn't know that I Potter was based on that. Yeah,
yeah.
And so what I would do is I'd have country identity by country
of countries up at the top. And then I'd have country managers
who just volunteers who were sniffing around who's doing the
podcast. And then they could include RSS feeds as an RSS
know, type in the outline. I know it's getting technical. But
I know I'm here to try and keep the non technical people
thinking. What so you really just had a a huge distributed
directory of nodes maintained by volunteers that really just
pointed to RSS feeds. And I could what was very rudimentary
and I have zero programming skills is really hacky. But I
could crawl this entire tree and then bring up most recently
updated, and I could see what was happening. And then category
started to form. And this was a beautiful project. And I was
hooked on the idea. I love the world outline project. And maybe
I'll just go let's, let's keep let's keep going here. So that
wasn't me. It
was glad you said that. Because I didn't know the history of I
Potter like, yeah, that was, that was probably what year was
that? Maybe 2000 2003 or four? Yeah. Okay, so yeah. And that
was way, you know, that was way before I started listening to
podcast at
the same time, the daily source code was the podcast, which I
made specifically for developers and completely an analogue to
what we're doing here to get them involved in this
conversation. And we need to build something. And those early
software developers were, in fact, building podcast apps, and
they had different names. They also use the iPod or moniker and
then we had iPod or lemon iPod or X for different operating
systems. And there was just a slew of stuff some connected to
mp3 players, others did the iTunes shuffle and others
different concepts, etc. And maybe I should just take I'll
just take down the Steve Jobs and we'll come around to this
since I'm already talking about the specific specific thing. So
podcast,
you get that whole thing the other thing relates to I mean,
that's directly a Steve Jobs thing. Yes.
And is the is directly related to my meeting with him. So this
was just building and I was doing the daily source code and
I was experimenting a lot with the mood for me. It was really
about programming. I was doing stuff with cars walking around
while I was flying. airplanes, all cool stuff, you know, but
certainly in those first hundreds of episodes, it was all
about this feedback loop with the developers. And we learned a
lot of things like, you know, if you subscribe to a new feed,
it's probably not a good idea to start auto downloading every
single element in the feed, you know, especially back in the day
with, you know, basically dial up still. So it's like
the html5 audio tag, when you have 75 on the page, you
probably want to set that
to yes, and you have an AWS and they send you a bill. Exactly.
Yeah. Very large bill. So things start to happen. Stuff starts to
heat up. I'm getting calls from I was living in Belgium at the
time, but actually, BBC was one of the first and the BBC was
very interested and did pieces on me on BBC, I think was radio
four or five and I but it was just great pieces
on just only on you or on iPod or
podcast. Yeah, podcast. And in general, because the focus was
not really on the directory. But everybody was using this
directory, this iPod or directory to pop either populate
their own idea of a directory in their own app, or just to pull
data from it in real time or cache it. So it was an important
piece. Then 2005 I get a call. It's Eddie Q, who now runs a lot
of the entertainment at at Apple and has kind of a cool name,
Eddie Q. EJ,
most Motown producer,
PDQ gonna give you a Cadillac, you record this, and he's kind
of in that business. Still. He says, Hey, Steve would like to
meet with you to do you have time? Like, Yeah, fuck, yeah.
Yes, of course. And it was a d3 conference. I think that was San
Diego. And I said, Okay, well come to d3. And Steve will meet
with you. And so this is kind of it's a big was a big place
exactly where it was, but kind of a venue. And so there's these
dressing rooms, whatever green room type setup, and I go back,
and he takes me back and Steve there. And right away, and it's
just the three of us right away, I noticed Steve Jobs is much
thinner at the time. 2005. So I don't know if he was sick or
not. And he had a list, which I'd never heard before. But he
was really personable. And you know, you said, well, actually,
he was he was yelling like guy that fucked up Wi Fi. He was
yelling something to Eddie.
I'm like, I may have yelled that this way.
And later, I realized, it dawned on me that they were probably
working on the iPhone. And it's now reasonably well known that
Steve Jobs never wanted it to be a cell phone. He wanted it all
to work on Wi Fi. And so something had happened with some
of the standards or, you know, to this day, I've never looked
into it. But I do recall very vividly being very angry. And I
even thought to myself, bro, you should calm down a bit. It's not
good for your health. But there was other things were just
chatting. And he's like, and all sudden, he said, Oh, how do you
record stuff? How do you do this, and I explained what tools
I'm using, because he had a big interest in how the Mac was
being used to record
in your mind and your total Mac 100% Mac
in fact, it turns out he told me in that meeting that I had been
publishing my my mp3 files on my I think it was called the MAC
MAC drive at the time, which now is probably with iCloud. So it
was like you mounted a drive on your desktop share. It's
literally drive and you paid for it. And it had limited. It was
limited by storage. No one was really concerned too much with
bandwidth. But I had all these developers testing the shit out
on my feed. And so it was just going crazy. And Steve said in
that meeting, he said, Yeah, we saw what was going on. And it
was so much bandwidth. But I just said let them go. Just
let's see what he's doing. Now, that's that's not the coolest
story. Isn't that cool? I love that.
I love it too. Because you can't imagine that anything like that
would happen today in big tech. Especially that the CEO would
know that one guy's using a lot of bandwidth. I mean, that's
crazy in and of itself, but to say, well, this guy's you know,
he's really hammering our system pretty hard. But he's kind of
doing something interesting. Don't Don't Don't shut that
down. Just let it yeah, let's just see what happens. And it
was cool.
And I'm not exactly sure who on the inside was looking at it and
brought it up to the higher up or how that went. I'd love to
know. There's several people on the podcast team who I'm very
friendly with. And super cool people and you know, they have
their limitations to what they can do with the corporation.
Everybody understands it.
They've been there like had they been there? Is there anybody
that's been there says that this whole time
this I met you? I don't really know from those early years
because not long after that with help from jobs who introduced me
to the big venture capitalist venture cap Bro investors. I
started pod show I started the first podcast network
that we had eventually became media, right. Yeah.
And that became me VO and it was a almost a decade long learning
of that. Podcast networks just don't work, which will be a
different episode, I'm sure. Yeah, sure. So we're, so we're
chatting away. And yeah, one other thing is, I was using
Audio Hijack Pro to record because you could set up a
little compression chain and stuff like that. So it was great
piece of software at Mac only. And Eddy Cue was still there
when that topic came up. And he says, Yeah, you know, Steve, the
RDA is really bitching about the ability to our OS to be able to
record direct sound, and they really want us to block that or
put some, and Steve interrupts them goes, fuck it. These guys
need it. Hold them off as long as we can.
So you're seeing the sausage made? Like right here?
Yeah, yeah. And it's just like, wow, this is Steve Jobs. He's on
my side, man. He's on my team. I love this. I love this. He said,
Okay, Adam. I really would like your call and blessing to put it
podcasting into iTunes. And I look at him and I go, Are you
fucking kidding me? I'm sorry. Yes. Realizing I'm talking to
Steve Jobs. Yes. And I've sat with a lot of people my most
impressive our, I think was Quincy Jones before this, where
we drank a bottle of his Latour while live on the radio talking
about his career. So, you know, I, I've met a lot of people at
jobs is still number one on the impressive list because he was
also he was wooing me, you know, this is what he does. He's
incredibly good at it, and read any history about how he, and I
think maybe not even dissimilar to President Trump, you know,
and if you fuck it up, then you're out within seconds. No,
he doesn't care. But he's very good at the ruling part.
It's like you're it's like you're, you know, like wanting
to marry. It's like, you're he's like, the dad wanted to marry
his daughter, you know, like, exactly, not please have podcast
now, but he made me feel real good about it. And I then said,
hey, you know what, I'll even give you a copy of the index. So
you can get started, we got categories and all that stuff.
Okay. Now, little did I know that Steve Jobs already had
everything set up, he you know, he does not go out on stage
unprepared. However, this is one of the best pieces of acting
I've ever seen from him, that I'm aware of. And this is when
he introduced podcasting in iTunes in 2005, at the d3
conference conference with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, just
if you were
to eventually get into selling
paid for your stuff,
well, you could, you could try to sell podcasts, but the whole
phenomenon is so great. It's free. And I think what we're
gonna see as an advertising supported model emerge, just
like Free Radio. Here's another Adam curry is one of the guys
that invented podcasting. And he has a podcast called The Daily
source. Let me go ahead and subscribe to that. And we can go
listen to his latest one. Just click on it daily
source code show number 180. something remarkable is
happening here.
Radio is springing free of the regulated gatekeepers who've
managed what you've been here, since radio was invented. It's
jumping into the hands of anyone at all with something or nothing
to say.
With $16 million worth of airplay strapped by
next generation radio content in my ears. I like to think testing
is right. It's show number 180. And it's Friday everybody.
I've actually had to restart the show three times my Mac has been
acting up like I think it says something to do with the
filesystem okay.
Do you control say dirty stuff?
I mean, we're gonna have an explicit flag on these, like we
do the music so you can know if it's explicit.
So I can find it easier. Yeah.
That's, that's, it's funny to see they to hear that and see,
like, immediately that's, you know, what people jump to is
get, you know, gatekeeping and, okay, how are you going to
control this? How are you going to control that
bingo, bingo. And Apple, their team reached out, because of
course, they saw the end. Just knowing about the whole Mac
drive backstory. They were working on this for a long time.
Of course, it wasn't just bless this and we'll put it out and
that was good to go. He knew exactly how he's going to
introduce it. And the team consulted with me If, throughout
the next six months or so, they they added they did patent their
changes to the basically the RSS namespace. So that's, that's
patented, yet still Oh, they they patent so the iTunes
namespace that I don't know if I'm saying the right thing that
the tags that are specific to iTunes, yeah, that's it then
they put Dave and I in the patent, you know, it's like
here's the history, etc. And I'm happy because I feel that iTunes
Apple has been a very good steward of podcasting. They've
they've allowed access to their, to their directory to their
index, they have tried very hard to just give a clean experience,
they have shown no desire to jump into an advertising model,
which is really not their business anyway, they just want
to make great experiences for people who use their products.
The thing that did disappoint after the release came out and
we and we kind of looked at what was the what was their podcast,
their pod catcher was their podcast app doing what it looked
like, is, it was pretty much all very safe. That was being
featured in PR mainly with big props to Tony Khan WGBH public
radio in Boston, who spearheaded getting NPR into the podcast
business from right from the get go. And I'm very happy because
it legitimized podcast as well, podcasting. But none of the
other stuff really made it to the top. And that was a source
of frustration. And then, of course, when you get popularity
lists, you know, what is it based on who was at helping? You
know, this is the same conversation, I'm sure they're
having always been going on about featured apps in the App
Store. So you know, they, but they they were at least building
on their index, then I always kept our copy. And throughout
the years, I think the the entire database. Well, when when
we're ready to really open it up, we'll have 100, and you've
been looking at a day what but like 1.7 1.8x and 1.8 podcasts
of which an X percentage is active? Yeah, there's
like, let's see, we are looking at I've got in front of me, it's
about it currently stands at about 1.0 8 million podcasts.
And we like if you go back and just look at what has up which
podcasts have updated in the last 90 days is a good round
number to look at. There's about 46, roughly 50,000 podcasts that
have updated in a 90 day period. So, you know, it's it's not like
the number of we don't know yet just from looking at at the
stats, like how many of these podcasts come and go like, like,
you may have one that's dormant for for a while and not publish
it yet. Right? Yeah, we don't know. But the ones that are that
seem to be actively publishing look to be, at least from what
we have so far about 50,000 Roughly, I would say.
Now, let's pause this here. And let's go back to when we first
met. And what I had seen what I had learned with the OPML with
the the iPod or directory is that you could separate the and
I have no design skills zero. And I mean, I can't even my
handwriting is barely even legible. It's horrible. I'm a
great reader. But writing is I can type and that's great, but
not any other way. I, I really enjoyed the separation of the
content creation and management and editing, and just saving and
then clicking over to the HTML version, which just as long as
it was clean, as long as it worked and give me some
flexibility in my outline. So I can use a particular type of
node that becomes a menu bar. You know, different things I can
fold down, tuck away. And so what
Yes, yeah, I wasn't an outline guy. When we when when I first
got involved with the OPML editor and all that stuff y'all
were doing, because I mean, like I just never really been in that
world. And like going into that. It kind of took I mean, it took
a few months to figure out like to make it feel natural. Now I
just think that way, but outlining and I guess.
Isn't there an analogy to coding within dense?
Yeah, there There really is I'm not, you know, I know, Dave
Winer hit me, he actually coded in the OPML
form. That was his whole his whole vision.
And I've never been able to do that. And I can't get, I can't
get my brain to think that way. But we, but as far as like
dumping ideas on the page, it's great. And so like I took when
you first contacted me is like, handsome, you're like, hey, you
just email me out of the blue one day and you're like, Hey,
you want to do a project. And I've got some ideas.
And this is the core of our 10 year relationship is, Hey, you
want to do a project? Might they might become something after all
podcasting works.
Just throw as much crap at the wall as you can, like, Okay, so
at least at least once every six months, yeah, I get an email
from you, that says, Hey, call me I've got a great idea. It's
like, we've done, we've abandoned so many projects.
Well, this is the beauty, we haven't actually abandoned any
of them. What
what what form they were aborted.
What formed was a, a system. That is, to be honest, is really
100%. custom tailored to my needs for production of the no
agenda show. And for other important pieces of my life,
that includes a very important piece is an RSS aggregator, that
you're talking about the freedom controller, yeah, we just talked
about all the different bits that that we put together,
because while I was happy playing around with, with the
outliner capabilities that you put together for me, which was
enabling me to not only maintain my, my show notes and stories
that I need to talk about in each episode, but you know, one
click of the button pretty much turns it into a web page. And
the same for the RSS feed. And it's all it's a beautifully
connected system. It's a great workflow. But you were really
building an entire platform. And I would say, really built around
the RSS aggregator, and I just want to, I want to, I want
people to understand your expertise in this particular
field, because it's fucking voodoo, when it comes to RSS
feeds, and how they're how correct they are, and just to
get something working, you know, your 10 years has been well
spent.
Yeah, I mean, that you're being kind on on the on the voodoo
stuff. But I mean, like, what it's basically what we, what I
had started building before you ever even contacted me started
as a as a clone of the OPML editor and what it was doing,
but with one thing that I had always wanted, and that was the
ability to save an article that you anywhere on the internet,
like a readability type thing and just scrape the article
content and save it in a database. Because if you know me
for very long, you will know that I'm always like, at least
once in every conversation, I'm like, Hey, I read this article
the other day, and I cannot for the life of me remember where it
is where I read it or anything like that. So I wanted to
basically be constantly creating a paper trail as I went. So in
order to do that, cobbling together all this readability
stuff into this end of this app X but
just explain readability for people who who don't know, that
is,
like Instapaper, or the readability product, where it
basically just scrapes the just the text out and renders it in
an in a nice, clean format. Or like,
Apple's they have a read review even.
Exactly, yeah, exactly that. So basically built a microblog
platform, an RSS aggregator and a readability tool into one
single product. So you just log into it, and you know, and you
go, you got an account, all your stuff, searchable, all that kind
of jazz. And then, so that's, that's kind of where we started.
And so I was like, oh, yeah, I want to do this, this project
with you. Because originally you were thinking like, something
like, different your thing, almost like a social network,
social network. Yeah, exactly. You were like, Hey, can we build
a social network based on OPML feeds and that kind of thing?
Sounds like we have, I've actually got this other cool
thing. So I set you up an account on my server, and you're
like, hey, this could be a cool show notes thing. And so because
you're you're reading, you're reading the, as you're reading
articles, you're click in the RSS feed aggregator screen,
you're just you're clicking to expand them into readability
view, and it's saving them automatically as you go. So as
you're reading articles, it's building an article database,
and then you later go back and export those articles that you
read on show day into an OPML outline, and it just dumps it
all into one big show, no script.
And just so everyone understands. It's, by the way
when you're in the information routing business, which is what
I truly am taking information from email Stories, media,
blobs, all kinds of information coming in, I have to organize
it. And I have to be able to build a show out of it, which
lasts three hours. And and so my system is I have bookmarklets.
And I can we call it capitalizing carding, and boom,
it'll it'll create that readable page and put it in the database
in my database so that my system knows about it. And then I'm
done with it. Now, this is also very handy for I have to say for
paywalls, yes, 90% of all paywalls. Okay, so it's a great
little system, when people send me stuff behind paywalls all the
time. So I'm very happy that this exists. Emails, I just drop
into a certain folder that's connected, didn't connect my
IMAP and put that in the preface, my email preferences,
and they can suck in that whole folder, and also put them into
an outline. So I have all the emails I need, and I can just
shuffle it around. And it truly is a matter of reorganizing, and
putting stuff in little sub nodes, and then I'm done and
then start the show. And when after that, just hit HTML, and
there's your page.
And when you talk, when you talk about it like that, it sounds
like Man, this is awesome. There is I'm just gonna go install it
right now. And that's where the whole thing.
Yeah, it's really awesome. But you kind of have to have a
little more. I mean, you gotta be you gotta really want it. And
then we create these dynamite ideas. And we've done I think,
mainly, my problem is I'm like, I don't want it to suck. I don't
want to be advertising, anything that that I'm not interested in,
and can it be decentralized? And we, you know, I'm a fan of IPFS.
And, you know, there's all kinds of integrated so many things
over the years. And just, I just want to say about Dave. Yeah,
he's, he's like, I'm not really a programmer, but you're a crack
programmer. But you program as I as envisioned a sysadmin does.
It's like, no matter what happens, if you got a customer
who's working with it, and there's a problem, you wave your
wand, and something comes back immediately. Don't worry about
it, I got you covered. Okay, it's good. And whatever,
whatever needs fixing, I'll work on that.
You know, sis admins used to be, that's the difference between an
IT guy or an in the network administrator, and a SIS admin
is back in the day. I mean, if you're a sysadmin, you had to be
a programmer to I mean, you, you may not be a great one. But you
had to have programming skills, because you couldn't get your
job done without it. Oh, yeah, you said, a lot of sysadmin
stuff. It's all very practically, the programming
stuff that sis admins do and learn how to do is all very,
it's just, it may not, it's not what you see coming out of your
computer science courses in college, it's like, you know,
just make it work, peer, you know, period and make it not
break in the middle of the night where I had to fix it. That's,
you know, those are two, those are two things. That's what
you're talking about with kind of throwing everything in here
is another Achilles heel. This product we built over the years
is that it does like okay, I don't know if you remember this
at one point in the on the editor page, it had a Morse code
interpreter on it, you could just type into it. And it would
spit out Morse code. I mean, that's some crazy crap.
I remember, you know, why wasn't I working on like a Morse code
translator through audio or something? I know that none of
what I've added was crazy projects
through it. You were like you were wanting to you were wanting
to distribute Show Notes through the relay network. Ham radios,
repeaters, and I'll send like, okay, Morse code bit by bit Neo
done. At one point I just took it took all that crap out. I'm
like, it's just not even useful anymore. So I don't even know
what it does. You have to
it's like, it's like having all the elves at Santas workshop on
call. Dave, I want to I want the train with the truck and the
ladder on it. But it has to have, you know, the tank tracks.
And he goes into the shed and comes back look at it. So we've,
we've had a wonderful working relationship that has never been
about money. Never been about anything but building cool
stuff. And we just kept in touch about stuff we friends, you
know, even though we don't live near each other, and was like
one of those you don't have to talk to each other for half a
year and then come pick it right up.
Yeah. And I think you know, I think that's really what, what
made. I think that's really what's made the whole thing
rewarding for me over the years is just the, you know, the no
pressure aspect of it. And it's always been fun and challenging.
And those two things like, you know, meaning meaningful work. I
don't know where I heard they do meaningful work and, and
meaningful relationships are like the two most important
things in here in human life. And like that's, that's what
this project has been like Like taking it back to aggregators
for a minute, like, the first thing that we realized or, you
know, I realized immediately is that, like, you see a bunch of
like starter app stuff. So whenever you have a new
programming languages, you know, one of the first starter apps
besides the world, build an RSS reader. So you think, Okay, this
must be easy, oh, my God, it is the most not easy thing in the
world to be. So to build an RSS reader, a feed reader, when you
are looking at maybe 10 example feeds. Now, that's fine. When
you start to get up into something that's actually useful
in the real world of the way feeds really look and the way
they're really broken. And you're talking about potentially
10s of 1000s, or hundreds of 1000s of feeds, it becomes a
complete crap show immediately, like this. So you start to see
all kinds of broken XML, things, think crazy stuff like, like one
thing that I saw early on was feeds that did not have an XML
open tag, at the beginning of them, you would have, you would
have an item in the tag that would have three pub date tags
in it. What do you even do with that? I mean, like which ones
right, right? Or you would have a feed that had two channel
tags? Well, I mean, that's completely. So the whole world
of RSS is a complete chaotic mess. And I think it's
beautiful, but it's chaos.
To add one thing to that, I think to this day, I do not put
an ampersand in the title of any podcast, because I believe that
breaks the apple podcast app, at least it may break others, but
Oh, does it Yeah. And you know, so before I can, I will often
say how about this tonight? No ampersand man, no, no, add sign.
No, don't don't don't do anything weird exclamation mark.
We can do we know we get away with that. But otherwise, it's
really open or close. Don't put none of that. Exactly. None of
those things in there. Yeah. So that experience that you have is
is astronomical in the business, I would say.
And I would say this, that what what I think me and you both
wanted from the very beginning, is because because you can
handle that problem. Two ways. You can say, well, probably more
than that. But you can you can, you can take a hard line, or you
can say you don't validate fu Yeah, exactly. This feed, if
there's something wrong or goofy in this feed, I just digit. Oh,
you know, and, and I will, I will begin to parse it again,
five months from now when you actually fix it. Or you can say,
which was the old like UNIX mindset of be liberal with what
you accept right? And conservative with what you give.
So like, you can, you can say, and this is the approach that
we've taken, is, we're going to do everything humanly possible
in code to fix this feed what we think is broken about it, and
then parse it, right. So that like, what you end up with, is
over a corpus of let's say, 6000 feeds news feeds, you end up
with maybe the 15% of them that are completely broken. But if
you can fix, you know, if you can fix 10% of that 15 Of those,
then you get, you may see content that ends up being
really important that you don't miss.
And this is so now we're at the spot where I made one of my
famous calls to Dave, and said, let me talk to you about this. I
have an idea.
And I was like yeah,
sure. What are we gonna do? Okay, what is it? So there's a
little history to it. Obviously, I actually in March, I went on
the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and which was in I
mean, it's like being invited on to tonight's show. It's, it's,
I've never even been invited on The Tonight Show. Cuz I don't I
don't think I'm a great guest for short term. yucks. You know,
with the, with the pre produced setup lines, longer things I'm
quite okay with. But Joe was also super nice guy. And he was
very, he wanted to hear the story, the story of podcasting.
And he was, it was just an incredibly nice experience. Now,
it's a great show. Yeah, it was, it was really fun. And we've
kept in touch actually, since then, and I've helped him with
his move with his move to Austin. And, but his Spotify
deal was announced, maybe two weeks after that, and he told me
about on the phone and we chatted and what it meant. And,
you know, he also was kind of happy and I said to him, I think
maybe even on the show like oh man, canceled culture is wicked,
you know, and they had actually, I think, tried to go after him
and now these things do affect sponsors and no matter who you
are, depending on how you know how wide it can get with it. The
craziness but in general, he's really saved he saves his his
whole property by having this protection of income protection
is really what it's about with with Spotify and and for me it
was fantastic personally because I kind of got a I got
recertified, you know, it's like oh look at this guy remember
him? Kind of on the it's a hell of a lot better than being on VH
one flashback, so it felt very good about it. You might my
daughter just turned 30 So I got my friends all loved it. They
all watch rogue so
perfect. Yes. Macaulay Culkin on Twitter the other day said, Hey,
guys, I just turned 40. How does it make you feel that you don't
want to be that guy?
Exactly, exactly.
But I realized that this was kind of a shame, because as of
the first of the year after a transition period, Joe's no
longer going to be available in any other app, I'm just going to
call it an app, then the Spotify app as far as I understand it.
And that makes sense. Because they need to have that exclusive
for their, for their platform, which I have no problem with
doesn't matter to me one bit, mainly because I feel that this
creates a space for the next Joe Rogan to come along. And the
next one and the next one. And you know, this is a big world.
And if you really look at what's out there, what's already being
done in podcasts that you've never heard of or seen of, you
know, if you just if you're able to jump into a big pile of it,
it's very interesting what what you what you come across. And so
there's going to be a vacuum and that vacuum will get filled up.
And I think that's only good for everybody. So that but that did
make me think a bit about Okay, where's this going? What is what
is happening? What are the strategies? The second piece is
when Apple decided to D platform Infowars and Alex Jones in this
was this was I know that this hurt his business? Because his
business really came from the podcast from the audio podcast.
Same with Joe Rogan, by the way. You think it's all the YouTube?
The YouTube money, which no, I don't think he was sad about the
YouTube money. But the podcast, the mp3 is where the money was
coming from.
Alex Jones did he? Did he have no I thought he was on radio
too. When he syndicated he's
always been streaming. He's always been a streamer. But he's
been doing a podcast from day one. And and that's particularly
back in the day when when podcasting, its subscribe
mechanism was very important because we had low bandwidth,
you either couldn't stream or you just be sitting there
waiting for something to download podcasting helped us
over that bandwidth hump. Gotcha, which was part of the
original idea behind it. What was that? First of all, I didn't
like that Apple did that. I thought that they were, you
know, knowing what's out there and what is available through
them, I just felt they were making a shitty judgment call.
And that turns out, they've done more of that, then this was
really well publicized. But because of the ecosystem, to use
that shitty word, the ecosystem of podcasting, most podcast apps
are getting their search queries and their directory information
from the Apple System, which again, is is very nice that
they've allowed that. And we'll talk about that, what they
actually allow and how that works. But there was a domino
effect. And the domino effect was that other podcast apps now
also no longer had Infowars and Alex Jones. And that was like,
wow, you know, that's a weakness. Because for one thing,
and this is our motto, for what we're going to explain. So what
longer than I intended, but I think it's important to get all
this history out, is really, we need to preserve podcasting, as
a platform for free speech. But podcasting is the literal free
speech example. There's nothing else but people talk. And of
course, there's many different types of podcasts, but you get
the idea. So that has to be maintained, and there's no
reason why we can't have a way for that. It's just there. You
know, it should be like, it should be more like your own
blog. And not like Twitter, you know, you shouldn't be kicked
off should be like DNS, thank you lets you be like DNS, you
should just be able to get the podcast, and it should be
available, you should be able to find an app that works for you
that you like. And as I looked at this scenario, I saw the
problem. And it's most definitely I was involved in the
initial decision to give my copy of the index to Apple, but that
needs to be outside of any entity that needs to live in a
place where you don't have to go through some intake process,
other than Gee, can we make sense of your feed, it shouldn't
be limited to what your free speech is, after all, it's just
speech. Hate speech is speech, love speech, speech, it's all
speech, I don't really care, the internet should has thank you
for that analogy. The just like DNS doesn't care what website
is, or what server is going to connect you to. That's really
what I thought would be very powerful.
Yeah, you if you, if you think about it in those terms, I mean,
what what's needed is a directory, where the central
directory itself has little to no policing. And then because if
you think about it in DNS terms, if I don't want certain websites
to be shown on my net on my internal network, then I just
filter them at my door, don't feel I don't, I don't expect the
root DNS name servers to filter out all the porn, all the porn
domains, right now that they exist. And if I don't want them
here, you know, I just, I just filter them. And you know, so if
you have a podcast directory, that's just got everything, and
it's not making these decisions. And then you put the tools in
the hands of each individual, each individual, either
developer, or listener, to filter and set up those those
things that they can curate their own list. And
the flaw was that there was no incentive for independent
software developers to really jump into making a great
podcast, I'm gonna call it podcast experience, because just
saying a podcast that puts you in a frame of mind of what
everybody's always doing. What we learned with publishing our
show notes in OPML, on the no agenda show, is that if you just
OPML, which is structured data, so it's not even a database,
it's just all these files that are easy to parse, and you can
do something with lo and behold, we have developers who just gave
access to it just said, Oh, it's here, who've created search
engines, show notes, pages with players, I mean, all kinds of
stuff integrated. The search engine stuff is really
impressive. It is, yeah, just by sucking up in ingressing, all of
that structured data, which is exactly how Oh, my God, there's
that word interrupt works is supposed to be it's all supposed
to work together. But what incentive do they have they're
not a software developer of a podcast app is not in the value
chain of what's going on between the podcaster and the podcast,
listeners. They're just there to help and facilitate. And there's
really, in my mind, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's no way
for a developer to really focus on all that when most of your
time is going to be spent on exactly what you were talking
about all this shit, that just doesn't work. Because it's
flawed. I mean, people, it's just not, it takes a lot of work
to get your aggregation and all these fees working. And then,
you know,
I would say it took probably, I don't think I'm being I don't
think I'm exaggerating to say it took probably five years to get
to aggregator where it was consistently good and not
missing feeds. Like, I think that if you if you go, what
would happen is you go in and you say, okay, everything looks
great. And then you would read it, and then you would make it I
would, I would realize that there is some edge case, this
certain phase we're hitting. And so then I would make a change in
the code. And and like all of a sudden, you would contact me
soon as I would push the new software to your server and
maybe with you'd say, oh my god, I'm seeing like, feeds I haven't
seen.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we had we have all kinds of
functionality like piano feet painted a story
new and maybe it was a cause. It may have been because these
these feeds are being generated by the same software and they
were letting a weird UTF eight noncompliant character through
in the encoding are some crap right? That you know, right?
It's like in that would that would just Bork a whole you
know, a whole handful of fades. And so like the the years of
experience of getting the act of getting all these problems and
making the adjustments necessary to get the feeds to work right
in the in our aggregator. You know, that that led to this
where it's like, Hey, can we do this on a bigger scale for
podcast,
right? Also, all the functionality you would want to
have from an entire database of all podcasts and I think, debut
and I like this, because the all podcast in the universe is a
number you can kind of see it's not like all web pages, but all
Podcast feeds in the universe, we can kind of see it. So. So I
also was thinking like, wow, we really need to retool podcasting
and another edit next stage and turn it into a platform of
value. And what that means we're going to get to, as we continue
in this process and this project in the podcast, want to take a
break, I want to play a clip here. I was sent a link by Luke
from to hell, he's in Finland, I've known Luke for a long time,
he was putting podcasting into the Nokia, the early Nokia
devices, the end was that the na 81, or that were on the MeeGo
platform that MIMO MeeGo and the all the Linux stuff they were
putting into, into portable devices that, of course, kind of
disappeared when the iPhone came out. And he sent me a link to
the accidental tech podcast, which is this Marcos show?
Yeah, this is the developer of overcast. Yeah.
So overcast is a podcast app that, you know that that I use,
I use it to you Marco is as has built a business out of it. I
think he's one of the few. And we'll we'll talk more about, you
know, what podcast apps are out there and why they're around and
what their future is. But he sent me this this link, and it
was, it was kind of related to what to what I was thinking at
the time. And I think I sent this no, that episode to you.
Yeah, you texted me. And you're like, you're like, listen to
this, let's talk.
And so they weren't using Alex Jones as an example, but
something that Apple had done with their Apple news podcast,
and they had removed it from the index, because they wanted I
guess they wanted to kind of force people to use the Apple
news app to listen to that podcast. And to me, this was
kind of the the Oh, wow, yeah, we got to do something about
this moment. Because, you know, Apple is willing to do things to
their index, that, that, that hurt podcasting, across the
board, because feeds go away and things don't come in and things
can change. And it's an it's an I can't blame them for decisions
they make. But instead of complaining, we've decided to do
something about it. So here's what the who was Marco talking
to on this.
He's just talking to his co hosts on the show about about
this Apple news today, podcast and how and what what sort of
the trickery that Apple was playing in their index with it.
The iTunes directory is serving as only like directory listing
to tell you here a podcast that exists that are registered with
Apple, that Apple's staff has like vetted to be seemingly
legit, seemingly not illegal or inappropriate or anything like
that. Here's the RSS feed. And then you go to the RSS feed from
that point forward and apples no longer in the picture. So they
really are just like a listing service that's telling you,
here's our RSS feeds for these podcasts that we think are legit
podcasts. And so the definition of what is a public podcast,
what the way most people interpret that is something you
can get to in any podcast app. The more technical side of it
seems to be it has to have a public RSS feed. But
realistically, if it's not listed on Apple podcast with a
public RSS feed, it's not gonna seem like a public podcast to
most people most of the time. What Apple news today has is a
little bit interesting. Apple news today has an iTunes ID. It
is playable and searchable in Apple podcasts, it shows up in
the Apple Podcast Directory even in the API if you search for it.
However, its entry in the API does not have a feed URL that's
just missing. So it kind of seems like Apple doesn't want
other apps to play this. Now, if one were to manually set in a
database, in a podcast app, this feed URL matches this iTunes ID.
If you happen to know the right fit URL, and you happen to make
it public, it happens to play just fine. So most podcast apps
there that have kind of been, you know, on top of this story,
you can now search for Apple news today and just play it. And
it works. Because most podcasts apps, I've realized, Oh, we just
add this RSS feed and make it searchable for this title, and
it will work. And I think the I think the reason it has an RSS
feed that's undocumented and not listed in the public API, is I
think Apple wants it to be an exclusive to Apple podcasts
because they're trying to gain some kind of leverage over
Spotify, which is eating a lot of their market share in the
podcast player space. But the apple podcast apps do not do
server side crawling. They crawl RSS feeds directly. Apple has
some servers like crawling to update its directories and
everything. But when you play a podcast on Apple podcasts, it is
directly crawling the RSS feeds from your app on your phone. on
your, on your Mac or whatever. And so for the Apple podcasts
app to be able to play this exclusive podcast without
significantly rewriting it and some and rewriting some back end
server stuff, which is probably a bigger project with an apple
than what they can probably get engineering resources for right
now. For it to be playable in their own app, they had to give
it an RSS feed. So I think it has one, just for that reason.
So yes, I think I think what freaked everybody out? I think
that's, that's a good sort of snippet. To show what freaked
everybody out was that Apple is starting to sort of tinker with
the directory now, right? Not just with the Alex Jones sort of
D listing type of stuff, which is, you know, there's always
going to be a certain amount of people that are okay with that,
you know, and that's, that's, that's fine. You know,
everybody's personal politics, but there's always going to be
the next step. And so like, when you if you're de listing
somebody that a lot of people don't like, you know, okay,
well, that's, you know, maybe we can forgive that, and then the
next but then the next step is Okay, now we're starting to
return things from the directory, which has become the
default directory for podcasting for pretty much everybody. If
you're not in the iTunes directory, you don't exist for
the most part. So now that they're starting to do little
odd stuff like that, which means like not returning a feed URL
that begins to give you pause and say, Well, you know, is it
the best idea for one company? And I think, as far as comm big
tech companies, I'm probably on the side of apple 90% of the
time, in most cases for their privacy stances, and that kind
of thing. But just in general, as a general rule, is probably
is it the is it the best idea for one company to be in sort of
in control of the directory for all of podcasting, which is
supposed to be this open platform? I mean, like, if you
think of in terms of like DNS, like we talked about a while
ago, there's not one company that owns all of DNS, you know,
it's it's fairly distributed at the top, you know, there are,
obviously financial interests, but it's distributed enough to
where one company can't use can't push their own interests
into the way that it functions. But that's not what we have in
podcasting. Now, what we have is a very centralized, private
entity that is controlling pretty much what everybody
considers the default, Yellow Pages for podcasting.
And so this problem, and then Marco was talking, I don't have
the clip, but he was talking about what would it take to do
an independent directory. And as I was listening to that, I
realized that everyone is, and I don't want to accuse them of
this, but most people are stuck in the it's, you know, how do we
monetize? How do we make money? How do we do advertising? Do it,
it would take investors, you know, all these things that I've
been through and have absolutely no interest in being a part of,
but I did know a guy who loves a challenge and a fun project.
Does that? Yeah. And I thought, you know, wouldn't it be
interesting, if we could do a couple things, one, we need to,
to preserve podcasting as a platform for free speech. And,
and in order to do that, we have to create a an index that
anybody can access for their, for their project. And this is
developers, this is this is a news, we're an API company. This
is not about a public facing thing. So we need to enable that
and also have have the core index be available for anybody
for free for any use at any time. So if you want to go and
create your own index and load up a database, then you should
be able to download this, you know, in a CSV file and anything
you want and and that would kind of be the challenge and I think
when we talk like you know, there's there's so many ways to
do this simple part than not have it break you know, break
our bank initially as we see if it catches on and having enough
experience with the value for value model in podcasting, which
means Hey, you know, you you get out of it, what you put into it,
people who would be interested in supporting this type of a
project can just donate to the PayPal on podcast index.org
First time I think we've mentioned the URL in this
podcast
is index.org is the is the product so to speak to We're
building and net that's that's the, if you think about if you
think about what you would want, as a developer, you would say,
Okay, I, if I'm going to build do a project around podcasting,
the number one thing that I want is the ability to search for
podcasts, request information about podcasts, about the feed
and all the metadata that goes around it, and be able to see
when there's new episodes in various ways, those are the
three things that as a developer you want, and those are the
things that we're aiming to provide at the beginning. Just
around around this initial product, there's, yeah,
so the idea is, and the belief is there that developers really
want to develop, and for stuff that they probably want
themselves see Adam and Dave, for the past decade. It's too
much heavy lifting to get into this game. The competition seems
overwhelming. And that is a piece that I think, you know, we
actually discussed our roadmap way before starting down the
road at all, and how we thought we could actually bring some
huge value to the software developers who are creating. And
it doesn't just have to be an app, it can be an html5 app for
all I care does. And any any type of application, or
directory service or notification. The idea is give
everybody as much access to as many different functions as
possible. And let's see if something great comes out of it.
So before we talk about the API, specifically, I want to review
and this is all at podcast index.org. Right at the top of
the podcast index is an open project to preserve podcasting
as a platform for free speech. I don't care as long as you we
don't care. As long as you have an RSS feed. It could be your
lecture, there's no intake process. Anybody can add a feed
to the index, there's no claim your feed, your feed is in
there, it's not in there doesn't matter who was added to it. The
core categorise index is always available for free for any use,
and will have archives in multiple places. Now, we are a
partnership, a limited liability corporation, podcast index LLC.
And we are a software developer focused partnership. I'm reading
this that provides tools and data to anyone who aspires to
create new and exciting podcast experiences. Without the heavy
lifting of indexing aggregation and data management. What that
means is, our core of what we're doing is we're making this
available on our dime, and anybody who wants to help,
because they see the value of it, and they want to support us
with a PayPal donation. We intend to find ways to create
such value for developers podcasters and listeners that we
will be able to get a piece of that we don't do it for anybody
else. We don't get anything. Yeah. So again, the core podcast
index is financed by bytes, founders and stakeholders,
podcasters developers and listeners, we're all in this
together. And that means it's more than just money. It's like
we need feedback, we need people testing, we need people hitting
the API, coming up with requests, coming up with great
ideas that we can do to enhance what we make available.
corporate interests and advertising are antithetical to
our business. And podcast index LLC strives to grow by providing
enhanced API services of value to developers and organizations,
which means if we can't give you something, the value, then we're
failing, and we may fail. And that is worth trying. So our
mission and goal, again, preserved podcasting as a
platform for free speech. And then if we're successful with
phase one, retool podcasting to a platform of value exchange
that includes developers with the podcasters. And the
listeners. And we started basically today with getting
developers to sign up if you're just interested whether you have
high skill level low skill level. Dave, tell us what is
behind the curtain at api dot podcast index.org.
Okay, so game game show style, the this. Let's see, if you go
to API dot podcast index.org. You it's pretty simple. You can
sign up for a developer account, and you get some API keys.
There's no There's no ad feature at the moment for adding feeds.
That's, that's coming. But that's got to be you know,
that's obviously very critical to make sure that you keep
everything it actually is there when we say that, but it's not
public. So that that API call will be public very soon. So
there's two as a developer, there's two kinds of a there's
two kinds of keys. There is a read key and a read write key.
So you can In AV, by default, you will have a read key, which
means you can hit the API and search for you can look, search
for podcasts by title, or you can do lookups on your own your
own podcast by iTunes ID or by Feed URL. Now to give you a lot
of data will give you the metadata around the feed. Or you
can search for episodes by iTunes ID or feed URL, and some
a few other calls that will let you just basically get all the
information that you need to begin to build whatever basic
app that you're gonna get, you're gonna build the the
probably most basic app that you would build out of something
like this is there on the in the developer pages. So once you get
logged in, you have you have documentation, you have your API
keys page, and then you have something called Search. And if
you go to the search, that is basically a podcast player, you
search for the podcasts you want to you want to hear, it brings
you back a list of matching podcasts, you click on the one
you want to want to look at. It gives you a list of episodes,
and then you just click play. Now it can read the show notes.
And that can.
So what it doesn't have, obviously, or maybe not
obviously, is, is a subscribe mechanism, because that would be
something that is completely inherent to the application
itself.
Yeah, yeah. So like this would be to say that, I'm going to
build an app. And then I just go get my go get my keys. And then
I started writing my app. And then I'm just going to use these
keys to, to do to do subscribe, and get notified and get, you
know, fun find out when you when the feed gets updated and new
episodes are released. Right? That's perfectly possible, then
the subscription mechanism is just a per user thing within the
app itself. Okay, so the developer themselves would do
this trip now, how will I think we will handle subscriptions in
the future? That's definitely on the roadmap to be able to say,
Okay, I have here's an anonymous user ID. And I'm going to
anonymize it on the app side. And then I'm going to hand it to
your API and say, here's the fields that this anonymous user
ID is subscribed to let me know, when you like ping me when a new
episode is released from one of these fees that is in the
subscription list, or the other way around the URL, just check
every now and then with this anonymized ID. And you can tell
me whether or not any one of the feeds in that subscription list
has been has been updated. So that that's definitely on the on
the roadmap that lets you that lets your app be super lean. So
you can say okay, well, this person, however you choose to
identify your user, if it's an iPhone app, or whatever, if
there's, if you have an ID for that person, you just give that
ID back to our API. In a way we don't know anything about these
about this stuff. It's just a random value that you decide and
then we'll we'll just tell you, Okay, out of these 47 podcasts
that this person did this idea, subscribe to these three have
changed. And you just mean a hit it every hour, or whatever you
want to do.
So how does this differ just for people who are still hanging in
there? Who are not developers? How does this differ from what
can be done with the iTunes directory now versus the podcast
index?
I think it's, it differs a little it's but let's just say
from the from as it stands right now, it's, it's mostly similar.
Okay, the difference is the fact that it's that is outside of, of
any of any interested party, that, but the one technical
difference at the moment right now, though, is the ability to
get those episode lists easily. Right? We are we are doing the
aggregating if I understand it correctly, right now Apple in
their directory, you can get those, those episode lists, but
you do that through HTML scraping. So like you would have
to there and you know, like you're not going to get, you're
not going to ask their API, give me all the episodes. There may
be a way to do it through the through the iTunes API, but it's
not clean, right? So if you just for here, you've got, you know,
you've got the iTunes ID or you've got the feed URL in on
our API, you just say, you know, you just hit an endpoint, which
is episodes, recent, you know, are there episodes meaning by
Feed URL, and it just, it's just one hit
considering? Considering we want to, maybe I'm jumping ahead
here, but considering we want to close the loop between listener
and podcaster. With the with the aggregate with the app in the
middle? Is there anything developers should be thinking of
as they start their projects up front that would To help them
later on.
I would think that they need Well, that's a hard one. And
because you know, the the biggest thing that we're doing
is the aggregating. So if you're if you're looking at, you know,
if you're looking at building the app you really did, you
could take that whole thing out of the mix, the only thing I
think you would really want to think about is how you implement
the API itself. It's very, it's very simple. It's based on an
Amazon style AWS style API authentication mechanism. So you
can, if you're not familiar with that, you have a key and a
secret. And then to call the API endpoints, you just basically
create an authorization header in the HTTP request. And that
header is a hash of the key, the secret and the Unix timestamp.
That's current of the current date. And as long as it's within
a five minute window, that time that that will be fine. So you
hash those three values together, put it in the
authorization header, and send that along with the date. And
the key and the key as as other headers in this in the
documentation on how to do that. This is the answer some example
code in there too. But it's very simple, very simple process, as
long as you know how to add headers to your HTTP request.
And really, you just get handed back JSON. So if you're, you
know, really, I mean, this could allow you to build an app, a
podcast, player app, I mean, with very minimal, minimal
effort and take so take, take marks take overcast, for
example. There's a whole ton of infrastructure behind overcast,
which is what has made makes it a very powerful tool, podcast
player is in his because he has put in the time to build his own
aggregator infrastructure behind that. And it's very valuable,
because then his app on the front on the on the iPhone side
can be very lean, right? And he's just making calls every now
and then to check the status of what's going on. So it's
basically
it's basically, we're doing we're replicating a lot of what
Marco has done.
It's it's similar. I think, the I think the difference, and I
may be mistaken, but I think on his side, what he is doing is in
within overcast, if you subscribe, I think he's doing an
iTunes look up. So if he, if if I'm an overcast user, and I
searched for a feed, or for a prop for a podcast, and I find
it, that search is coming from an iTunes, look up, and then if
I hit Subscribe on that, on that search result, then he says,
Okay, this, this is a feed I need. So he grabs it and sticks
it in his database. Now he's got it, aggregating it, got it. So
if you're talking about a million feeds in, in, you know,
the iTunes directory, then he may only be in he may only be
aggregating. I don't know. 25,000. Just right. He's only
aggregating. Again, I'm guessing this and he can correct me if
I'm wrong, but I would, I'm assuming based on the way it
looks, that he's just aggregating only the fields that
his his people are interested in
listeners, well, he's made, he's made a lot of investment. But of
course, we'd love for him to connect to our system too. I
mean, maybe has a toggle switch, which is sanitized, crazy world.
Yeah, that's what we talked about, like heaven. And that's
what's going to be in. That's that part is not fully
functional yet. But, you know, part of this is, within the API,
you can tell it, what format you want the data, the data to be
returned to you in. So you can say, if you just do, if you just
do a call, you get back a JSON reply. But if you if you put in
a Boolean value of, of iTunes, it'll give you back exactly the
way iTunes would give it back to you. So what we're hoping is
that people who are using the iTunes API right now for their
lookups, that they could easily just go in there and just make
make a couple of changes to the way that they're doing their
calls, but not change any of the other downstream code. And
they're going to just be getting basically they're getting the
exact same results they would get from the iTunes Directory
API, they would just be getting it from us instead. And that
way, you know, they can have as a fallback, the you know, you
can have to that you know, that way so if a failover, so to
speak.
So what I what I hope to have by the next time we record an
episode is hopefully we'll have a few developers to watch. This
is really just we're selecting whoever well first of all,
whoever comes in will be happy. Anyone's raises their hand. I'm
really Let's
refresh the page and see a new developer I was gonna be Yeah,
yeah, you're in. We, I'm looking for creative thinking, you know,
it's not, it doesn't have to be just a podcast player. For all
podcasts, there's many different things you can do. I mean, on
podcast index.org, we have one of my favorite new pastimes,
which it's crazy that I don't think anyone's really done it
that way. And there's top 10 lists and featured lists, but
just most recently updated. Just before we started recording, I
went, you know, we have a little carousel, as we call it with
think 10 or 2020 podcasts that have just been updated. And I
looked at around 11 My time and podcasts of a podcast, it was
sermons, there was a, it was a couple of rabbis, it was all the
god casters were just popping by and they all passed, they all
updated at the same time, it was really fantastic to see that to
see that scroll by. And, you know, maybe we have some time,
we could just have a list of like, you know, the most recent
100 updated, just a list doesn't have to be with images. But
that's so exciting. Because you listen to stuff like holy shit.
I never heard what is this podcast? Yeah, you know, there's
a lot,
there's some crazy stuff out there. Yeah, there's a lot of
weird stuff out there. And a lot of like, I'm just looking at
one, there's some podcast about Richmond, spiders football. I
mean, like, Who would have ever, that's something. And that's
something I think we need to talk about. And I think one of
the things we're thinking about with this series of of podcasts
is that these these shows is that we're going to be able to
this whole thing needs to be transparent. So I think what
we're thinking is we're going to be able to talk this stuff out
and build the system, that people that developers would
need, in real time in front of everybody transparently, where
people can, you know, you're listening, basically, you're
listening to us through a lot of this stuff in the open. So it's
not like, we're going back and doing a bunch of code and then
saying, Okay, here's this new thing. And don't worry about the
way it works, you know, because I'm going to, there's a lot of
things that, as you hear somebody talk about, and you get
an idea, it's like, hey, this, this nice, this needs to be
done. And I've got this great idea for the way this could be
better. But you would have never come to that conclusion, if you
have not heard the process discussed openly. So I think
that, you know, having, having this outlet to be able to talk
about well, we'll get into some like, techie, you know, kind of
like crazy, boring aggregator stuff, you know, in the future,
as well. And as you hear that stuff talked out, it's, it's
cool to be able to influence the direction of a product like
this. Yes, and
this is so reminiscent of the the original, bootstrapping of
podcasting. With the developers. I'm a, I'm a listener and a
podcast creator. So it's, we have pretty much the right
people at the at the table, but we need to hear the voices, you
know, we need to we need to get the feedback. We also want to
feature your apps, you know, if you make something we want to
feature it so other people can try it out. We'll have a GitHub,
I guess, where we'll use for, for discussion issues, etc.
Yeah, documentation, documentation is on the A is on
the site after you get logged in as a developer, but I'm about to
put it up on the onto GitHub as well. So you know, there'll be a
GitHub project that we'll link to, as well. And it'll be open,
like it won't be behind a behind the registration wall or
anything. And we're looking at, we're gonna publish the stats
too. And, you know, think, man, you both have decided that, just
the more transparent, this whole thing can be the better for
everybody involved.
That's the only way it's the only way I'll do it is the only
way to go. And also, I just want to reiterate, this is we're
doing this because it's the right thing to do. And we aren't
actually I think the guys to do it. That's the the core basic
reason for this project is, hey, we just got to make sure that it
can be a little rickety, you know, whenever we're going to be
apple. But who knows, you know, when we don't have to do much,
we just have to be able to maintain the index, we're
putting our money where our mouth is, we're helping you to
do that. But we're a real organization behind the scenes
whose core mission is also to be creative, and find out if we can
get ways to get value flowing through these RSS connections.
And, and that can many different that can come in many different
forms. But we might be able to do that and everybody would
benefit. So that's why we've set it up properly, to set ourselves
up for success. If we achieve, you know, our first our first
goals.
Yeah, and we're fun. I mean, we're funding this out of our
own pocket where paying the hosting fees and that kind of
thing and hope. Hopefully, you've been you have, I would
say you have almost created single handedly the value for
value model and shown that it can work. Yes. With the Vortech.
Of course, yeah, yeah, of course with no agenda and that we want.
I mean, that's the whole thing is the value for value. We know
it works. So you know, if it's going to cost us to, you know,
$200 a month of, of hosting fees, before we even have the
first developer signed up, if that, if that can become
something where people can cover cover our fees and free us up to
to progress the platform. That's, that's great. That's
all. That's what this is about. And I mean, we spoke but in
order to show the commitment to it, we're doing that we're
funding that ourselves right now. If you start to use it, and
it's awesome, then, you know, pay it for us.
Let's upgrade podcasting, everybody. I know there's a lot
of cool people in this industry, a lot of people have been kind
of dormant, just kind of seeing it slowly slip away to, to these
big players who are really whatever in your business. They
were radio guys, I Heart Radio, I guess they were the ones that
they buy Stitcher, I think and why they do that is obvious. And
of course, they allow any other podcast in there, you know, so
they are basically, you know, they're basically getting a free
ride on that. Okay, because you get exposure, there's nothing
wrong with that. But they're doing it because their their
model is not working so well for them Spotify as well, there,
they are a music streaming company who has to pay or find a
way to pay for everything everybody listens to because
they have to pay these licensing fees. So they want to transform.
So they want to be HBO or Netflix. And yeah, we're winding
up with a whole bunch of apps you gotta have to use. But
wouldn't it be delightful if we could just keep the platform
open for everybody, for anything I want, I want someone in school
to be able to say, Hey, man, do a podcast, I want to be able to
submit a feed to the index, and it work on apps right away, and
they can enjoy that experience and not have to even go through
an Apple account, an approval process, none of that it's
antithetical to the whole idea and the openness of podcasting.
And it's worth fixing. It's worth metaphases There, it's
worth a try. And if anything, we wind up with a kick ass database
that anybody can do something with. And maybe they'll discover
one day anthropologists will be wondering what the fuck we were
doing. Did they not know how to write proper RSS? These guys
were no good. Alright.
Real Time stats. We the database is 38 gigabytes currently, and
we have 17 point 3 million episodes of podcasts indexed.
Those are big numbers.
And we're counting the stats will also soon be on the
homepage, podcasts index.org. And email. Are we using info at
podcast? index.org? Is that what? Yeah, the easiest one for
us right now. So this being up this podcast, subscribe to it in
your favorite podcast app, but it probably will hopefully be on
iTunes database. By the time by the time we put it up. And also,
they'll be a way for you to sign up. If you have an idea. Just
want to come hang out. Just kick it around, take a look at it,
podcast index.org and consider supporting the project as well.
Dave, I'm really excited about about what's ahead.
Yeah, it's been fun, and it's gonna be fun. We got a lot of
stuff to talk about, too. We got we got a crazy long roadmap
ahead of us. And we haven't we haven't even we haven't even
talked about scratching the surface yet. You know, we got we
got a million ideas, and some of them are gonna are really weird.
And they're gonna, like, we got a lot to talk about.
I'm very fired up. I have not been this excited in a long
time. And it's a great project. And I'm so happy that we're
working on it together. And we have more partners who will be
introducing on the podcast when appropriate. They'll probably
want to pop their heads up when we have some success.
Yeah, we're gonna have success off their head.
Exactly what protecting the innocent at this point in time.
Yeah. All right. That's great. We'll talk to you soon, buddy.
Alright, man. Alright. See ya. All right. We'll talk to
everybody very soon here on podcast. 2.0 Thank you very much
for listening. Subscribe, consider supporting us this
value podcast. index.org See you next time. Bye bye.