Podnews Weekly Review

Is now the right time for ActivityPub? Is now the right time for Video Podcasting? If not now then when?

• James Cridland & Sam Sethi • Season 2 • Episode 2

Share episode

Send James & Sam a message

Special Guests: 

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the [ActivityStreams] format used by Mastodon and Castopod. It provides a client-to-server API for creating, updating and deleting content and a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content. It is also used for cross-commenting in the Podcasting namespace.  

Descript has launched a new version which has more than 30 new visual and AI-powered editing features. The company has also announced a $50m funding round.

Top Stories: 

Support the show

Connect With Us:

James Cridland:

It's Friday, November the 18th, 2022, the last word in podcasting news. This is the POD News Weekly review with James Cridlin and Sam Sethi. I'm James Cridlin, the editor of POD News.

Sam Sethi:

And I'm Sam Sethi, the host of Sam Talks Technology, which is coming soon,

Jay LeBeouf:

I promise. This is Jayla Buff, head of Business and Corporate Development at Descript. In this episode, we're gonna talk about descripts Open AI fund investment, and also. The new version of Descripts that includes tons of video editing

James Cridland:

capabilities in the chapters today. Video podcasting on Spotify and YouTube. Apple's hidden topic tags and the IAB goes for annual recertification.

Sam Sethi:

This podcast is sponsored and hosted by Bus Sprout, last week's 3000. 524 lovely people. Started a podcast with Buzz Sprout podcast hosting Made easy with powerful tools and remarkable customer support

James Cridland:

from your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly review.

Sam Sethi:

So to kick off, Is video podcasting about to take over? Yes. Is it Indeed, Spotify has released a video podcast everywhere in 180 global markets until now, they've only been in 12 markets. The proprietary service launched in April. Okay. James, come on. Is this a good idea from Spotify and are there any examples we

James Cridland:

can all see? I mean, there is a, an example of a guy called Joe Rogan. Not quite sure whether you've heard of him, but anyway, he's apparently got a big podcast and that is of course, he's back at number one. Yes. For the moment. Uh, and that is of course available in video on Spotify. You can go and, uh, watch that. They're very keen to highlight the fact that you can, uh, watch the video if you want to, or you can just keep it playing on background. Why would they be keen to highlight that? Because that's what YouTube only offers you if you pay. Uh, so, uh, Spotify trying to be, I think, a little bit clever here and all of a sudden launching in 180 global markets up until right now they've only been in 12 markets. They only launched in April. They can't be bothered really to update their blog posts cuz the blog posts were made in July. And they've literally just added a line saying, you know, it's no available everywhere, uh, on there. So, um, you know, I'm not quite sure how committed they are to it, but interesting to see. Launched in 180 different global markets. I mean, I think it's interesting that this is only working for shows that host with Anchor and only working if you play back in Spotify, and of course there is this thing called Open, you know, video podcasts. Lots of them are available. And in fact, I went to do some analysis on the podcast index. There are now 53,000 video podcast shows on rss. That number's up 38% year on year. And they'll play back on pretty well anything. You know, apple Podcasts, pocket casts, whatever you want. So, um, uh, clearly Spotify is in competition with that. Uh, and also there's another competitor isn't. Uh, yes,

Sam Sethi:

there is James, of course, and in its clearest sign yet, uh, YouTube's growing, um, podcast ambitions. We keep waiting for them to do something properly, but their video website has published a full guide on how to, uh, podcast on the platform, and it's also got a link to its podcast Best Practices Guide, uh, which goes into channel and content strategy. So I dunno what all that means. Does this mean that Anchor or Spotify know something that we don't, I e that YouTube's about to do something soon so they thought they'd get in early, or is it just a case of, uh, you know, this has been in the background since July. Let's just push it out a little further and see

James Cridland:

what happens. Well, I find it suspicious that, uh, Spotify has all of a sudden released their video podcasts everywhere. On the week that YouTube publish a full guide on how to podcast on YouTube, um, anybody would think that those must be linked in some way, shape, or form. YouTube's um, documents are really interesting. There's a lot that I've seen before in the leaked PDF that I was given in March of this year, goes into a lot of best practices on whether or not you should have different channels for your podcast, how you should work out the, uh, channels, all of that kind of stuff. But the most interesting thing I think from my point of view is around that playlists thing that you said. They use the word critical. They are critical to the proper displaying of your podcast. One of the frustrations with Zapier, if you upload your podcast in video, Through a Zapier Zap is that, uh, Zapier has no concept of playlists, and so I now need to work out how I can, um, fix that and make sure that, uh, the automated version of the pod News daily that goes up on there is actually automatically added to the pod news daily playlist. But you can also find this show on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/. Outside Pod News? Is that how you pronounce it? I don't know. Talking of

Sam Sethi:

Headliner, uh, they've just announced that they're letting you upload your entire podcast to YouTube. So from your first episode to now it's available for pro or enterprise users. Um, I didn't realize it, you couldn't upload your entire podcast before. I always thought you could because maybe I've been doing that. Maybe I've been on their beater. I don't know. I need to go back and look. But, uh,

James Cridland:

yeah, the difference there is that they have, um, allowed you to go back from your first ever episode and bulk upload all of those so that your entire show is available on YouTube. What they've offered in the past is they've offered the chance for all new shows to be added onto YouTube automatically. Uh, so that's the big, uh, difference there, which is quite cool. So you can end up with the full archive of your show, um, using a headliner. And I was using headliner only this afternoon. It's a very. Cool and smart, uh, tool as well. Now you

Sam Sethi:

mentioned Descript there as well, and of course Descript has just launched their new version called Descript Storyboard. Well, actually it's not called Descript Storyboard, it's just called Descript. It was internally called Storyboard. And they've also raised an amazing round of 50 million US dollars from the Open AI startup fund. And I thought now that we both use Descript James and uh, that they've come up with this new version, I thought I'd reach out to Jayla Ber from Descript and find out more about what's in this new version of Descript and, uh, what their plans are with all this new money from Open

Jay LeBeouf:

ai. Descript is an all-in-one video and audio editing service. Think of it as a, a tool that's like a Google Doc, and in the same way that a Google Doc allows anybody to collaborate and just edit text, well, we allow you to edit audio and video as easily as editing text. And the goal of Descript has always been to eliminate all that tedious work that stands between, Hey, here's a thing I want to do, and just getting it done and getting it out there. And Descript was very much known for being a podcasting tool and a transcription tool, and had that cool trick of allowing you to just delete a sentence you didn't wanna say with one click. Remove all of your filler words from your podcast interviews, shorten word caps. But we've been layering in tons of video editing capabilities over the past year. Internally, we called it storyboard, but really to the outside world now, it is just the new descript. So

Sam Sethi:

I've been a fan of descript for many years now, and it was a game changer when I first found it. I actually found it from listening to an Andresen Horowitz podcast, and I thought that sounds. And then literally when I put my first MP3 up and it did the auto transcription and speaker voice detection and then I was editing, it was a genuine game changer. So when you came out with the beater for storyboard, it is different for anyone who's used D Script, it does feel a little different. I mean, even Andrew in the video launch has said, you know, you might find a few buttons missing and they've moved around a bit and keyboard shortcuts have changed names, and there's nothing we can do about it. So what is storyboard fundamentally, what's new about DS

Jay LeBeouf:

script? So, yeah, as you mentioned, Andrew Mason, our ceo, he also uses this other expression that you're gonna have to rewire your brain. And I've always said that when people come in from an audio perspective, because the first thing they do is they reach for the timeline at the bottom, they look for their favorite waveforms and they try to expand the heck out of 'em. And they use that as our primary mode of operation. So, With storyboard, with our redesign, we wanted to really bring the focus to text based editing and using the script as your guide. And so it overwhelmingly takes up the screen now and you can always expand out the timeline. You have access to layers and fades and key frame automation and audio effects and all the good stuff, but we want people thinking about the script and the content first. So that was one of the main things that we've done in the redesign. Another piece is something that I think audio creators would really like is we created like a different mode. So we've always had edit mode, but now we have right mode. So with right mode, you can just get in there and start typing and outlining your scripted intros and pasting in materials for how you wanna a certain section to go and put in your questions. And then even assign those. To an overdub voice. So we actually have teams that are using it for pre-production, where they'll actually have their hosts create an overdub voice. For those of you that might not know, overdub is our voice cloning technology. So there's just a ton of AI packed into descript, one of which is our voice cloning technology called overdub, and allows anybody to create their own overdub voice or their voice clone with as little as 10 minutes of themselves speaking. So you speak into the system for 10 minutes, you get your own voice clone, or you can have your host do their voice clone, and then your team has access to it. So now you can imagine scripting out an entire show in advance with the host dialogue, with the host's q and a. See how that sounds? Start pulling in B-roll, creating from that. So again, you're creating from the script up, not from a collection of audio files, but from the script. Yeah.

Sam Sethi:

And it really is a change in terminology that as a descript user, you've gone from, you know, the way that we talked about it in the past with transcripts, now it's about layers and scenes and scripts. So talk to me a little bit about how the video editing works. It's something called scenes, which is a change in the way that people, I suppose, approach video editing from traditional applications that are out there.

Jay LeBeouf:

Yeah, exactly. So scenes are a visual paradigm that allows you to go into the script track and just break into different visual scenes. So those of you that have seen a screenplay, it's the same analogy. You have that part where you're describing, okay, it's a new scene now it's interior coffee shop, clanking of glasses in the background, things like that. By just dropping the slash key in front of a sentence, or even in the middle of a sentence, middle of a paragraph, you're telling descript that a different scene is occurring and that basically allows you to operate on that scene as if it's a different visual identity. So right now, Sam, we're looking at each other. This is a two camera shoot in squad cast. We could bring over these two cameras into Descript and we could actually go through either using AI or manually and decide when we want the camera changes to occur. We can also drop in a whole bunch of templates, for example. So I could create a scene which is like us debating something and it's, you know, two up where we can see both of us at the same time. But then as I'm doing my long monologue now, you would probably drag in the template that makes me like front and center and you're slightly minimized, but your show logos up there. So all, all this is to describe, like think of scenes as a way of telling the scripts that something is happening and that you want the properties of that to be preserved. And then the other metaphor we often use is think of scenes as slides. You know, we've always said you can use descript like it's a Google Doc, but now with scenes you can actually think of those as like, great, they're like Google Slides.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, I do. And it is very easy to do. And I think in the same way that Descript original, classic, whatever we wanna call it, was democratizing audio editing. I think storyboard is gonna democratize video editing and I find it is actually quite an easiest, simple, intuitive way to. I have to ask, does Andrew just like his keyboard, does he not have a mouse? Because shortcut keyboards are everywhere in D Script because I'm not a keyboard person. So is Andrew just a keyboard person? We're

Jay LeBeouf:

a company that values productivity tools. You know, one of Andrew's favorite things is productivity tools. It's, it's clear a lot of these tools are just rich with keyboard shortcuts. And if you take the time and investment to learn the keyboard shortcuts, you're a wizard. You know, I started my career on the Pro Tools team. You'd probably remember this, Sam. Like, I mean, there were literally companies that manufacture pro tools, keyboards, not only stickers that you can put on your keyboards, but like a dedicated pro tools keyboard that you can buy. Avid media, composer keyboards, final cut keyboards. So real professionals at the top of their craft really get into this and realize the time savings they have. We are always trying to find ways of doing it. And also we are not ashamed to be inspired by other companies. So, Things like command K or control K on Windows in, in most apps you can use that and something cool will happen. So, you know, we use Notion a lot. So I can hit Command K and Notion and I can just instantly jump to a new page or insert whatever I want in Descript, that's like the magic keyboard shortcut. You can type in captions, you can type in wave form, you know anything you want and that will just start happening. So that's kind of more of where we want people to go is again, to not like follow their instincts and reach for the wave form and try to drag handles of a fade, but just kind of tell us what you want to have happen and description, hopefully interpret that.

Sam Sethi:

Now clearly with Storyboard, there is a heavy focus on video, lots of new features, but also lots of export features. You've TikTok in there, you've got gifts, you've got reels, you've got YouTube. I mean, clearly there has been a decision making process within Descripts. 2023. That looks like a real video world and we need to get in there. Is that the thinking behind it?

Jay LeBeouf:

Yeah, so we have built in just a ton, I think it's 30 plus video editing features. And we were talking earlier and you mentioned Ds looking really video heavy now. Well, one thing is we just had a ton of catch up to do. You know, we've always been able to edit video by editing text, but we want us to make descript the place where if you're an audio creator and you need video, great, it's there. And it's always been this weird historical accident that you had to choose. Is this an audio first project or a video first project? And we really think we have a paradigm for doing both. And I think the workflow from going and starting with audio and then deciding, okay, now I need a new composition and create a social media template on it, and I need all sorts of different aspect ratios that should all be possible within one app. And then you should be able to export out to all of your favorite destinations. So, you know, we do have tons of exports to YouTube to most of the major podcast hosts for business users to places like wtia. We don't have a native TikTok integration or reels yet, but rest assured 'em we're talking to those companies.

Sam Sethi:

What I meant by that is you can change the aspect ratios of the videos to export into those platforms. So let's take a look at the funding a little bit. So the Open AI Startup Fund has put $50 million Series C round into congratulations. What does that mean for you guys? I mean, first and foremost obviously gives you the timeline on the roadmap to go and do what you wanna do. But what's the relationship now gonna be with Open?

Jay LeBeouf:

So Descript has always been a AI driven app, and we believe in exposing the AI to people, you know, very much behind the scenes, not with a series of 400 knobs and sliders and command lines for them to type stuff in, but things like studio sound or voice enhancement tech, which is basically one button and then a, a slider if you really need to control the intensity. And that philosophy is shared by open AI as well. I mean, they're really groundbreakers in everything from text summarization to text to image, and so many areas that they're working on, I think could be perfect integration possibilities for us. So we're super early days of figuring out what we're gonna do with them. But you know, squint look off in the distance. Oh my God, there's gonna be so much that we can do.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah. The one question everyone's gonna ask is, are you gonna build in whisper into

Jay LeBeouf:

descript? Yeah. So, We have descript working in, I think 28, 29 languages right now. We have very close integrations with our transcription providers, so it's not something that we would ever consider doing overnight, but the completely political and accurate answer is anytime we would even consider change like that is gonna require a lot of work behind the scenes and a lot of analysis of how it impact our customers, ideally for the better. So, you know, can't speak to it yet, but we wanna do what's best for our customers.

Sam Sethi:

Now, one of the good things about Ds script is that you have integrated with partners. So you've got an integration with squad cast, you've got an integration with numerous hosts, but it does feel that, you know, you talked about the element of pre-production scripting now that you can do within storyboard with Overdub and in right mode. We talk about post-production, which is the editing part, and we talk about publishing as well, which you have as part of descript. It does feel like you are trying to do the whole workflow. Will there ever be a point at which I will not use squad cast or stream yard or whatever, but I would use native descript to record everything cuz you already have a video recording capability. Doesn't seem like a big stretch to go that one stage further. So

Jay LeBeouf:

you're right on the video recording capability. We have native multi-track video and screen recording so I can record my desktop. It preserves my video, it keeps my audio, and my computer. Audio is separate tracks, so you can have four or five tracks layered up, but those are just local to your, your individual desktop. The tech stack that companies like Squad Cast and Restream have built up is incredibly impressive and serves a a totally different need. It serves, you know, people like you and I who need to do high quality interviews and ensure nothing happens to the quality of that. So I really admire what they've built and that would add a ton of surface area to us. So really our mission right now is to make Descript the best video editor and audio editor out there. And then, you know, my role as a business development professional is to ensure that. All of the content that's out there flows into descript. So ensuring that we have this edit and descript relationship with squad cast, where uncompressed multi-track audio files can flow into Descript for editing, they can do what they're doing and we can kinda work together to support them. It flows seamlessly into Descript, which provides editing capabilities that makes their platform more useful. And then from a publishing standpoint, we can do really cool stuff. Like since all of your assets are kind of always sitting in the cloud, we can render them up to 10 times, 20 times faster in the cloud than we could locally. So when it's time to say, Hey, let's just publish this to Buzz Sprout, I don't think the right thing to do is to add more surface area and decide, eh, we should become a podcast host too. Rather, let's integrate with the top podcast hosts and then make sure that we render the audio in the cloud, the video in the cloud, send in the transcripts, captions. You know, the more surface area you take on as a product, it's the sloppier, it's gonna look. And we've all seen products that have just gotten too sprawl and too complicated to use. And you know, descript has this simplicity of like, you drag stuff in and text appears and you just hit the delete key and stuff happens that you wanna actually have happen.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, don't be a jack of all trades. Be a master of one or two. That's the, now Jay, thank you so much for that. Look, congratulations once again on new funding loving storyboard, but please tell everyone where they can go if they wanna start playing with d.

Jay LeBeouf:

Absolutely, you should go to descript.com, spelled exactly how you would imagine it to be spelled. And we have a free version of Descript. We have a creator plan, which is just $12 a month, and then a pro version, which is 24 US a month.

Sam Sethi:

And if you wanna see all the new features that they've added, there's great videos from Andrew Mason that they're both on descript.com and on YouTube. And if you want a list of all of the new features that have been added to this version of descript, go to help d.com. It has a full listing of the, and all the new short keyboard, uh, changes as well if you really want them. Um, Jay, thank you so much. Where can people also, if they want to give feedback, what's the best way of giving feedback?

Jay LeBeouf:

Oh, absolutely. So you should join our Discord community. One of the many things that we want to invest in using our newfound funding is community. So we wanna bring together creators and communicators and give you all voice and support you have where we can. So come to the Descript Discord, you'll find links all over the descript website and also in our health center. We'll see you there. Brilliant.

Sam Sethi:

Thanks Jay. And yeah, I look forward to using storyboard much more. Maybe I have not just got a face for radio. Maybe I have a face for video. Who knows.

Jay LeBeouf:

Hey, you know we also have stock footage, so you can just. Use that too. Thank God great seeing you,

James Cridland:

Sam. Jayla be from Descript. I've been using it for one and it's uh, a pretty smart tool. It's getting much, much more spritely on my old fashioned MacBook Pro, you know, the one with, uh, without the apple chip inside it. Uh, so that's always nice to end up seeing. Um, and um, yeah, I'm playing around with the video stuff, uh, today should be fun after this very show. So looking forward to finding out quite how that bit works. Yeah, I

Sam Sethi:

thought it was quite interesting to look at the emphasis they've put on video. In fact, I'd said to Jay, you know, it feels more like a video tool than an audio tool. Um, and you know, he was talking about how they had to catch up against other video. Uh, editing tools. Um, I'm not a hundred percent sure that I like the new ui. I dunno if you, what your thoughts are. It feels very minimalist and I was talking to Matt Madeiras yesterday who used it as well, and we both said it took us about half an hour, 40 minutes to try and get our heads into the new version. Um, so there is a, if you have been using descript, there is a learning curve to get over into where the new buttons are, which you were expecting, and also how to use the video stuff. But it is worth doing, I think, once you've got over that hurdle.

James Cridland:

Yeah, and I think it, um, you know, it's a good evolution and certainly runs an awful lot faster. There's been an awful lot of work on the performance of it. I do an awful lot of speaking in front of radio people and I show. Descript to them. I'm gonna have to update that video now, but I show descript to them actually editing this very podcast and they are just astonished at what it will do. Being able to firstly just be able to edit audio from a transcript, but also secondly, that overdub thing of being able to correct um, words using an automatically generated version of my voice. Um, you know, they are amazed at that. Uh, and in fact, if you listened to episode 100 of the old show, then right at the beginning of it, you'll hear me reading out the date and I actually got the date wrong when we recorded, I got the month wrong and I thought, oh no, I've got the month wrong for episode 100 as well. How embarrass. And then I remembered that you can just, uh, use the overdub service and it was very cool. So, uh, yeah. And you'd never know by listening to it. It's a, it's a great service. So harrah for

Sam Sethi:

them. Yeah. And, uh, I do suspect they're gonna be developing much more of that video capability, but, uh, yeah. Enjoy descript while, while you've got the new version. Uh, now moving on. This is a, this is an interesting story. Apple's topic tags. Um, Dan Maer from Bumper has discovered that Apple Podcast is quietly tagging individual podcast episodes by topic. The topics are used to help Apples search engine and are linked to Wikipedia pages and Wiki data identifies. Now, you wrote about this James, and you also, of course, in typical James Cridlin fashion went off and built a tool as well just to do something. So come on James. Give us the background. What's this all about and what did you go and build? I

James Cridland:

mean, this is very cool by Apple. So Apple is, uh, clearly listening to your show. They can't be doing this any other way. So they're listening to your show, they're working out what topics you are talking about, and then they're dumping hidden away in the, uh, website. Uh, for your show or for your episode on Apple Podcasts, they're hiding away these topics. Um, and they're proper topics linked to open data, the Semantic web, um, uh, which is very nice using the wiki data, uh, stuff, uh, which is very cool. So I built an Apple Podcasts episode, topic view. Uh, snappy name and what that enables you to do is go and have a look at any podcast in Apple Podcasts, any episode of that podcast, and work out whether or not these clever new topics are being produced for those episodes. Um, interestingly, they aren't doing topics for the Pod News Weekly review. Not quite sure why not. Maybe it's because we've recently changed name or something else, I don't know. But the pod news Daily, they're doing topics for, um, now the topics are fairly, um, generic in terms of that, you know, it's all about podcasting and digital audio and that sort of thing, but they're still getting all of that data out of there. But if you go into the daily, or you go into the news agents or something like that, it's uh, tremendous the amount of information that they are pulling out of that, which would make for a, um, really good advertising tool. But, But they're clearly not using it for that. They're main, they're mainly using it for some, uh, search engine work. So if you type in a topic that has been talked about, even if it's not in the episode description or in the title, it will still find it, uh, which is pretty cool. So it's well worth having a look at. Mm. So

Sam Sethi:

I was gonna say, why are they doing this? But you think it's. Because of a search engine. Um, any other reasons that they might do this? Recommendations, uh, discovery, all of those

James Cridland:

things. I mean, they could, they could be doing it for mo moderation reasons as well. Um, if you are talking about specific topics that are, you know, I mean Covid is, is an obvious one. If you mentioned Covid, then would, um, the Apple Podcast's topic thing work out that you're talking about Covid and then, you know, I don't know, maybe in the future put that, uh, if you want to get the facts about Covid, go to this website thing that, uh, Spotify does, so. Perhaps they're doing that. I don't know. Um, but, uh, really interesting. The question I suppose is how long this data is going to stay on the Apple Podcast's website, or whether or not all of a sudden they pull all of this data out as people have discovered that it's there. Um, so my suspicion that they is that they'll probably kill it. But you know, Dan, uh, Meisner is doing some very clever things with that data and has now, uh, been, uh, circulating with, uh, a couple of people, um, not just, um, you know, podcasts and their neighborhoods, so other podcasts that people listen to. He's also now, uh, put all of the topic information into there as well, so you can even see, okay, we talk about, I don't know, activity Pub, and so do all of these other podcasts as well. And perhaps that's a really handy. Tool that you can use for finding new shows that you want to have listened to. Shows that talk about the same things as these shows do.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, they're very useful. Let's hope they do develop it. Now, uh, Acast has been doing something similar. It feels like they've got something called keyword targeting. Um, they announce that recently and it's a way for advertised to target topics and keywords. Uh, they wish to advertise next to the tool joins their conversational targeting, which matches podcast content with the i's content taxonomy. So this. In the highlight, I suppose, James sounds to me exactly like what Apple just seemed to be doing in the background,

James Cridland:

doesn't it? Yes. Uh, they may or may not be doing it, um, quite in the same way. If a cast are doing it cleverly, then again they'll be using topics into the Wiki data. Topic information. And that would be, that would be very clever, wouldn't it? Um, but I'm not quite sure quite how Acast are doing it. But yeah, instead of just hoping that there's an i b category for you, uh, which is what Acast launched a little bit earlier on this year, you know, keyword targeting would allow you to, you know, grab any keyword that you specifically wanted to target against or of course to avoid. And that's the other sort of side of it is this brand safety, the stuff that Todd Cochran likes so much, um, that, uh, you know, you could use this as a reason not to advertise in a podcast because, you know, this podcast is talking about guns, or this podcast is talking about pornography or whatever it might be. Um, but, um, you know, a cast doing this sort of thing, of course it's partially to do with a. Um, a bit of survival because a cast won't be able to use cookies, um, uh, anymore because of, uh, changing privacy rules. Um, so perhaps it's, um, it's a bit to do with that. But, um, you know, very cool systems to enable you to advertise next to the content that you want to advertise to. I think

Sam Sethi:

this is smart. Um, look, we add keywords to all of our podcast episodes. I go through and I pick out the. Let's say the the guests and the companies and some of the topics we've talked about, but that's us doing it manually. And I don't know if many people do that, actually. In fact, I know most people don't do that. So I guess this is the automated way of getting it out of. Podcast, but it would be nice if, uh, podcast hosts or creators did actually put their own keywords in as well. Yes,

James Cridland:

it would be. But I, I guess on the other side, that's also a recipe for spam, and that's why keywords aren't used in things like Google anymore because people just spams, um, you know, keywords in there anyway. So perhaps it's a, it's a slightly different way and it's, you know, computationally difficult. But clearly this is something that, um, apple has that Spotify doesn't. Spotify's podcast search is pretty rubbish if you've ever tried it. Um, whereas Apple's podcast search always appears to have the show that you really want at number one. Um, I'm not quite sure how Apple do that, but this is clearly part of their secret source, so to

Sam Sethi:

speak. Now let's move on. Edison Research, their share of ear surveys come out, uh, and it says, podcasting's daily reach continues to rise. Uh, it posts a 20% year on year increase now, Uh, 18% of people in the US age 13 plus. I always find that weird that they use 13 plus. I don't really consider kids using podcasts, but that's maybe just me. Listen every day. Uh, the graph that's in POD news that if you wanna go and have a look at shows that more people are listening to podcasts, which means content creators have the opportunity to grow. Time spent listening with those people. So, it's good news, isn't it, James? It's

James Cridland:

growing. It is good news. It's, um, slightly weird news because Edison Research, if you remember back when they unveiled the new, uh, data, um, from the Share Avir, they unveiled some data at, uh, podcast movement evolutions. And we were all quite sad because Podcasting's, uh, weekly reach I think had actually gone down. And so I find it interesting that Edison have posted this chart, which is, um, yearly data from 2014. all the way up to 2021, and then they've put in quarter 3, 20 22. Um, and it's only daily reach and it's, it's kind of a bit like Edison Research going. We've got some figures that are showing podcastings going up. Now let's, let's show that. Um, so not quite sure the thinking behind Edison researcher showing this, but nevertheless, really handy and nice to see. I think it's, um, it's 13 plus because that's just the standard in the US that, um, that, uh, all stats are done for. Um, interestingly, if you compare that to, I think, um, uh, the podcasting data that Edison research puts together for Canada is I think 18 plus. And for the UK it's 16 plus. So there's this sort of differing, um, lower level, uh, depending on which particular country you are in. But, um, yeah, I mean it's, you know, Adults Basically. If, if you think of a, if you think of a, somebody at 14 being an adult, I think there's probably a young adult. Certainly. So, yeah, it's um, you know, interesting to see numbers continuing to

Sam Sethi:

rise. Yeah. Isn't it because American high schools start ages 14 to 18.

James Cridland:

Uh, ah, that

Sam Sethi:

might be it. And that might be it. It's always been a weird one. Cause one of my kids, Um, 11 and they start senior school here in the uk. You know, suddenly they want their mobile phone and they wanted access to Facebook and Instagram and all that. And it's like, well no, you are underage cuz it says it's 13 plus. And I never understood that, but now I do. That's because America starts later than we do.

James Cridland:

There'll be lots of Americans having listened. To this, uh, shouting at their, uh, shouting at their podcast apps. At the moment, if you're shouting at the podcast app, don't do that. Press the boost button and send us a message. That would be a lovely thing.

Sam Sethi:

Now, uh, IAB certification. Oh, iab, right? Here we go. Uh, the IAB Tech Lab is now requiring annual recertification from podcast companies in a note that has appeared sometime over the past month on the IAB website, the IAB says it's updating its compliance program to require annual recertification. Um, James, tell me more Because, uh, on the back of the iHeart Media thing where, you know, two seconds or whatever it was, or five seconds of a podcast, listen. Qualified as an iab. Listen. Um, is this anything to do with that or is this

James Cridland:

totally separate? Uh, it is totally separate from that, but, uh, there are a couple of things here. Firstly, it's basically saying if you are certified for the version two point, O podcast measurement guidelines, then you have to book in a re-certification. Now you've got until the end of this year to do it. And if you don't do that, then you'll lose your certification. So that's, uh, the first thing that they've ended up doing. The second thing that they've basically said is, we will do re-certification every year from here on in. And to be honest, I think that that's quite sensible, um, because, uh, people's code stack do change and it's important to just make sure that they haven't introduced any bugs, um, in any changes to some of the code that they're ending up doing. So I can kind of see that. I think, you know, the concern was that I b re-certification is incredibly expensive or certainly was incredibly expensive. It used to cost $45,000 plus another $10,000 to become an IB member in the first place. If you wanted a certificate for IB certification, It turns out that, um, just as they didn't tell anybody about this annual re-certification and you had to find it on the website, it turns out that they, they've also not told anybody that they've changed their prices too. And instead of being $45,000, it's now 12,500, which is still a lot, but it's much less and renewals only 6,250. So, You know, I mean, why they didn't, um, say that on the, um, on that note, why they didn't actually publicize that note. They know where we live, um, . So why the PR company didn't bother actually telling anybody who knows. But, um, uh, yeah, I, I found, uh, I found that interesting, but I think it's probably the right thing to do to basically make sure that those people that are trading on those numbers are making sure that those numbers are still being calculated in the correct way. It's an annoying amount of extra money and extra hassle, but I think it's certainly worthwhile doing. Is there any

Sam Sethi:

other updates though, James, about the iHeart media thing, or has that just been washed under the carpet now? Just we've move. I mean, I

James Cridland:

think the iHeart media thing highlights the fact that, um, we are measuring downloads rather than measuring listen. And I think that that's, uh, a bit of a problem. Um, now of course, we tried to measure listens in the past with, um, rad, which was something that, uh, npr, um, uh, said would be a good idea. And everybody put their hands up and said, this is dreadful. This is the worst idea in the world. Um, perhaps we'll try again with the podcast events tag in the new podcast name space. But however we do it, I think we should be measuring listens rather than downloads. And the reason why the iHeart Media stuff, um, irritated so many people, I think in the industry, is that they were clearly gaming the system. There's no other way, uh, uh, rounded. They were, uh, producing something that would easily have downloaded 20 minutes worth of audio, um, uh, uh, would've counted as an i b download, even though clearly people were only going to listen to it for less than, you know, a minute less than you know. 15 seconds, frankly. Um, so I think, um, you know, I, I think that that's, um, a fundamental problem with measuring downloads rather than measuring actual plays and actual lessons. And, uh, the sooner we get to doing that, the better,

Sam Sethi:

I think. Yeah. I know Leah Port are, one of his, uh, has said he's actually asked for a total refund from iHeartMedia for all his

James Cridland:

advertising. Well, I mean, that would be the right, uh, the right thing to end up doing. Uh, Leo followed me on Masteron this afternoon, so, which was, uh, nice of him. Um, so, um, yeah, I should, uh, I should ask him, I know I should, I should ask him, uh, a little bit more about that. He calls, he's, he's got a fantastic, uh, yes. He calls himself the chief tot, obviously, as you know, and, uh, in case you're wanting to follow him on Masteron and you should, uh, he's leo@twitch.social, uh, one other person who's got her.social domain. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, uh, you know, if I was a advertiser and I was, um, and I discovered that, uh, iHeart was doing this sort of thing, I would be demanding my money back as well. I'll be

Sam Sethi:

honest. Mm-hmm.. Now let's move on to. Sadly a little bit more twisted news. Um, I'm trying to keep up with Elon. Uh, I dunno if you are trying to keep up with him as well, James. Um, first of all, you could buy your blue check. So basically your blue check now means you've got a receipt and a credit card. Um, then he stopped it. Mm-hmm.. Then he put a gray check mark, did you get your grade check marks James? Are you official again? I don't know. Did you get one?? James Cridland: Uh, I still Um, I am an old, an OG blue check in that, um, this was, how can we tell This was way back when you could actually upload. Id details to Twitter. Send them into Twitter, and they would give you your blue check if you managed to convince them, uh, that you were who you said you were. Now this now comes with a problem, uh, um, as a number of people have found out. We, the old, the old guard Blue Checkers are not able to edit our names on Twitter anymore. Um, because quite a lot of people were pretending to be, you know, somebody else. In fact, there was a brilliant person, I can't, I can't remember who the, who the particular person on Twitter was, but quite famous, um, person on, uh, Twitter who complained to Elon that, um, that. She couldn't change her Twitter handle, and Elon uh, did something clever in the back end and said, oh, you can now. And so she instantly changed her Twitter handle to Elon Musk, which was hilarious. Um, very, very bad. But yes. So, um, yes, so they've fiddled around with that. Um, and uh, that's very annoying. They've also, um, they also sack lots of people and then they invited some people back and then they have sacks, even more people, many of their contractors. And now Elon has given the remaining staff two days to work out whether they're in or out, and says that, you know, if you're not in the office on Monday, then you have resigned, which is of course a very different, uh, legal thing than if you have been, um, got rid of through redundancy. Um, plus there's all kinds of problems with the GDPR in Europe because they, by all accounts, have closed pretty well. Everybody, uh, everybody's, uh, positions in the Dublin, uh, office, which they need for tax reasons, but which they also need for GDPR reasons. Um, and so I think there's a few things there left because all of Europe goes through the Irish tax office, um, of the Irish Twitter office, which is of course then used for tax. Um, so all of this is. Utter mess. Um, but uh, yes. Dave Wener has some views though, hasn't he? Well, Dave's very much, uh, on the, I haven't seen Dave this excited for ages now. Dave Wener, for those who don't know, was one of the co-authors of the rss, um, feed and he hasn't really done much in, in recent years. He's, he's sort of been a curmudgeon, if I'd be brutally honest, just sort of moaning about stuff. But he suddenly, I dunno what rolled up his sleeves, got his old, uh, ID editor out and he's now. Producing verbs for Master Don. He's talking about inbound and outbound rss, and he's talking about if you add RSS to the end of your Master Don account, you can get your RSS feed. Um, and he says, uh, to, to out, this is a good model for you to emulate. Please give users fees. This is the way of the future of micro blogging. Uh, so yeah, he's very excited and as I said, he's written his first four wor verbs. Um, I looked at them, didn't understand any of them, but hey Dave, I'm sure that they're very intelligent and, uh, very useful. But there you go.

James Cridland:

Yes. It's, it's, it's just fascinating seeing that, and fascinating seeing the growth of Master Don, which of course is um, is under the hood, uses a thing called Activity Pub.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah. And uh, again, we've heard of Activity Pub recently from our friends at Cast Pot who've been using it and of course, uh, for something we've called Cross Comments. And so again, it seemed that it wasn't really taking off that sort of cross commenting. We, it had worked, but there wasn't a mass adoption across all of the podcast apps. But maybe there will be now and. I suddenly realized that one of the co-authors of the original Activity Streams, which was the precursor to Activity Pub before IBM got hold of it and made it a W three Sand, was our friend of the show c Chris Messina. So I quickly got online, shouted out to Chris, Hey, any chance you can come on the show and tell us about the history of activity streams and how it all came about? And it did. So Activity Pub

Chris Messina:

was an evolution of, uh, format that I created with some of my friends called Activity Streams. And the concept of activity streams was to add more fidelity and information to RSS feeds. So RSS at the time was the way to syndicate blogs. Blogs were kind of a way of taking or serving the job of newspapers, but on normal everyday people's posts. And so that would syndicate and you could follow updates for people writing things. The core insight. For activity streams. And then activity Pub was to say, well, we wanna be able to syndicate information just more than just blog posts. And we wanna be able to articulate verbs beyond just right. And we also wanna specify a noun, who is the actor in this context? And so we had a very simple, what's called the two, essentially a relationship between three things, an actor, a verb, and an object. So the standard in rss and the standard in the Adam format as well was Chris wrote the blog post, but if you wanted to say, Sam added Chris as a. Well, we needed to enhance the standard to be able to express that so that clients who were receiving that information would know how to render

James Cridland:

it correctly. Yeah, that's a little clip there and it's a great interview with Chris and it's such a good interview. I thought it needed a podcast all of its own. So instead of taking that interview and completely cut it up and, uh, only giving Chris five minutes, which, uh, frankly wouldn't be particularly fair, uh, I, I didn't do that. Instead it's up in full. In our new podcast, Sam, we've got another new podcast who would've thought it. It's called Pod News Extra, and you'll find Pod News Extra in any podcast, index app or in Apple podcasts. It's just called Pod News Extra. Haven't bothered putting it in Spotify yet. Probably will do that, uh, a little bit later today. It's also in our channel on Apple Podcasts too, which is called Podcast Industry News. If you've not yet seen that. So if you want to hear the full interview, uh, with Sam and Chris Macina. You wanna be going and finding the brand new pod news extra podcast? I feel

Sam Sethi:

like the strap line should be extra, extra, hear all about

James Cridland:

it. Oh, nice. Nice. I see what you've done there, . Who knows? That might be a plan. So, uh, very cool. And we are, we are both on Master on, aren't we? Well you are,

Sam Sethi:

I'm sort of hanging about like a bad smell there, but yeah, you are@jamescri.land and I am at Sam set@podcastindex.social. I do pop in there occasionally, but you are more active than

James Cridland:

I am, I think. Yes. I, I've kind of moved in there as my permanent home now and I'm, uh, very occasionally checking, uh, Twitter. But yes, I, I, I'm, I'm all in and really enjoying it. A lot of hard work at the beginning just to warn you, but once you're in, uh, you'll really enjoy it. Sounds like a nightclub

Sam Sethi:

entrance.

James Cridland:

Right. Let's have a look around the world and, uh, we start off in, uh, Germany. There's new data about German podcast, uh, consumption and indeed audio consumption on the internet. Broadcasters and publishers a r d and set day F have produced research about audio consumption on the internet. Uh, podcast listening has doubled in the last four years in Germany, according to the data, now 40% of German adults listen at least once a month to podcasts, uh, which is, uh, good numbers coming out of there. And my

Sam Sethi:

question when I saw that instantly, James, is this Native German podcast, i e language specific, or is this UK English American type podcast that they're just consuming like

James Cridland:

the rest of the world? I believe it's, uh, I believe it's a little bit of both, but, uh, Germany doesn't have a massive amount of people who speak English in the same way as, for example, the Netherlands or Sweden or Norway do. Um, so there's gonna be much more German language, uh, stuff that goes on there, but that will be interesting to have a lookout, wouldn't it?

Sam Sethi:

Well, all I'm gonna say is a lack. Uh, yes, Dave Jones won't understand that, but Adam Curry will. Uh, it's over to the Netherlands, um, podcast hosting and monetization platform. Acast has launched in the Netherlands. It's signing with a Vandi. I'm gonna know that I'm gonna get a booster around from Adam Curry saying I butchered that A podcast studio over in Holland. It says, now 49% of Dutch adults listen to podcasts in the country. Um, so yes, they're just ahead, I feel, I feel like I'm doing the Eurovision Song contest, that 40% is the Germans, but coming in at 49% where you have the Dutch Yes,

James Cridland:

except it's 49% of Dutch adults isn't a podcast. At some point in the country, there's no, there's no once a month or any of that, but still, anyway. But yeah, interesting seeing a cast jumping into that particular market. Of course, PMO being very big, of course, in the Netherlands market, they've bought a large, um, Netherlands podcast, uh, studio as well. Uh, so a cast, uh, signing a big podcast studio, um, in the, in the country is also, uh, interesting. Uh, speaking about pmo, which is of course based in the Scandic countries in, uh, Denmark. Is Denmark, one of the Scandic countries, or one of the Nordic countries. Oh, I always get confused. I always get told off Anyway, uh, up in Sweden, um, which of course is the home of Acast as well. Uh, an audiobook and e-book subscription service called Story Tell has raised 400 million Swedish crowns, which is 37 million, uh, which is, uh, pretty big. Uh,

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, I mean , I have to say, do Swedish VCs just love audio? Cuz I mean, PMO raised over 70 million and here's another massive raise as well. Or, or do Swedish VCs just have a lot of money that they dunno what to do with, in which case I'm writing a document now and sending it over.

James Cridland:

Yeah. Yeah. You should, uh, you should be translating your secret thing that we can't talk about into Swedish, uh, That would be a, that would be a bright idea. Yes. Um, so, uh, yes. Well, yes. Who, who knows what's going on there, but it's, I mean, it's clearly a time for the raising of money because, uh, we covered descripts earlier in France, odr, uh, which is an audio and podcast monetization company with a very French name. O um, they have raised 6.2 million in a series A funding round, which will enable the company to hire 50 people in the next 12 to 18 months, presumably 50 very cheap people., um, for 6.2 million maybe, but anyway, Twitter, yeah, maybe they are. Um, but it is a record funding amount for French audio ad tech, so they say, um, which is, um, interesting to end up seeing. They are, uh, both in France but also in the UK as well, where presumably they're called ion. Um, because you know what the Brits are like, I mean, it's not Nestle is, it's Nestles, Nestles, Nestles, kit Kat. Um, so, um, so yeah, so that's what, uh, is going on, uh, there. And uh, yeah. And there's stuff going on in the UK as well, isn't it?

Sam Sethi:

Well, just to prove you wrong, James, I'm just gonna go Saer. There you go. That was my French GCSE there. One word I remember. Very good. In the UK Octave Audio, and don't tell me that it's supposed to be called AAV or something stupid. Uh, octave Audio has re renewed its partnership with a very tonics a brand lift technology. I read that sentence when you wrote it, and I have no idea still what it means. So tell me more.

James Cridland:

Well, octave audio. Octa Audio, uh, is, um, Bauer and News uk. So it's basically the, uh, the number two and the number three commercial radio companies working together, um, to do things with, uh, streaming broadcast radio, but also podcasts as well. Um, and their partnership with Vari Tonic, which, um, Been in for the last, I'm going to guess a year. Um, they've re-signed that, uh, which essentially is attribution and um, and that sort of stuff. So it's basically measuring how well the podcast advertising and indeed audio advertising is working for Bio Media and News UK's wireless, uh, as well. So, um, that's what's going on there. Apparently it's a robust, um, solution and it lends itself well to verifying and amplifying the impact of audio campaigns. Um, so it says a company spokesperson. Had I known that was

Sam Sethi:

gonna be the answer, James, I wouldn't have included it. That was boring.. Now moving on

James Cridland:

Well, moving on. Uh, still something going on in the UK and Ireland. Apple podcasts have finally realized that, uh, the UK and Ireland exists. Hooray, and they've now got Apple Podcasts Spotlight. Which of course they launched a year or so ago, uh, in the us uh, they've now launched it in the UK and Ireland. So if you, um, go and, uh, have a look at the Apple Podcast spotlight in your app, you will see, um, actually a podcast from Acast being, uh, promoted. Um, weirdly, it's um, three people who are Londoners, but who live in amd. Um, so not, not quite sure why they've ended up being the first Apple Podcast spotlight in the UK and Ireland, given that they live in Amsterdam. But anyway, there you go. Um, and they are, uh, doing some wonderful things. Um, if you are a winner of the spotlight from Apple Podcasts, you also get up to 16 hours of recording time in Central London, which obviously these people won't be interested in cuz they're Amsterdam. Um, but, um, and it's, uh, being, uh, put together, I believe by the Apple, um, editorial team in London. Uh, I actually met with the Apple editorial team in, uh, the Apple Podcasts editorial team, I should say, in Sydney, uh, not so long ago. So, um, yeah, they've got them all around the globe. Um, and it's interesting to see them, you know, working and continuing to promote stuff. All I'm waiting for now is a Twitter account, already a master don. Which isn't just us stuff cuz nobody's interested in that. So it'd be interesting to have a look at, uh, apple Podcasts uk, for example, and seeing how they're

Sam Sethi:

doing. This is a message for Jake Hud, uh, from a message heard. Um, remember you were gonna introduce me to the Apple editorial team, Jake, um, because who? She, he, they, or it clearly is worth now knowing . So there you go.

James Cridland:

Yes. Why? You really want your 16 hours of recording time in Central London, do you Wow.

Sam Sethi:

Beats, beats sitting in my studio here,. Now, uh, finally in the uk uh, front of the show Crowd Network have launched a new crowd sports division. This is something that they've been planning for a while and they've launched it with a dedicated Apple Channel. They do a lot of good stuff in the sports podcast, uh, arena and yeah, so have a checkout of them as well. The tech stuff, tech

James Cridland:

stuff on the pod news weekly review. Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the pod news newsletter. And here's where we do all of the tech talk. You've found a, uh, particularly long and involved blog post from Nathan Gathwright, haven't you? Here, Sam?

Sam Sethi:

Yeah. I, I supported this and I thought it was quite interesting. Uh, Nathan says, I was curious, which podcast hosts published the most transcripts through the new podcast transcript tag. And I thought, Hmm, yeah. Be interested on start as well. So he went to the font of all knowledge, John Spurlock, uh, to help him rank it all together. And here are the results. James, go on. I'll let you read them out. Yeah,

James Cridland:

he's a, he's a massive ranker, isn't he? John Spurlock , um, couldn't resist it. Uh, number five, rss.com. Number four, transistor number three, sounder with 14%. Number two, captivate with 16% of all of their episodes with transcripts, but the number one is our number one as well. It's Buzz Sprout with 46% of all of their episodes with a transcript tag, which is pretty amazing actually. 46%. That's, uh, that's a winning plan. They should all be a hundred percent, by the way. Um, and, uh, apple Podcast should support the transcript tag and, um, and, and be truly inclusive to everybody, but we're still not. But nevertheless, wonderful to see Buzzsprout number one. Mm,

Sam Sethi:

well done to, uh, the boys down there. Now, uh, talking of John Spurlock, uh, he's a busy boy, isn't he? Uh, he's come up with a new user agent lookup list that's been, uh, based on both the oppo, is that how you say it? James Oppo, oag, um, and Bus Sprout implemented. Um, look, this is not my area of knowledge, so I'm gonna hand over to you to tell everyone about what this is

James Cridland:

all about. So basically, this is just a really easy and simple way for any podcast host to work out what. Has just downloaded that podcast. Was it Apple Podcasts? Was it PocketCasts? Was it some random website somewhere? Um, so John has, uh, really put the work in there in producing something which is open, which is public, which can be used. He'll obviously be using it for OP three. Um, but it's also available for anybody else to end up using. I know that, uh, Tom Rossi from Buzz Sprout, uh, our sponsors have been talking about, uh, implementing it as well. It's um, it's actually based on some of Sprout's work. Um, And, uh, but just has some more additional stuff in there. Uh, so there's a repo, which is available now, if you are a podcast hosting company, you should definitely be taking a look at it because it's crazy that we are all inventing our own wheels here and all trying to keep up to date with the latest user agents and, and, you know, what does Samsung free look like? I don't know. What does, you know, um, Spotify look like on a. You know, car, um, who knows what all of these things do, but if it's all in one place and everybody can contribute to it, then we all benefit out of that. So it's well worth to, uh, have a look at. Uh, you'll find a link of course in the pod new newsletter from Monday, but you'll also, uh, find it in our show notes for this very show too. Mm.

Sam Sethi:

So moving on, uh, Casta Podd has shared a presentation from Benjamin Bein Adori, who are the, um, co-founders of Casta Pod's. Wonderful little platform. Talking about using activity powers we did earlier, but they were talking about using a new technology called web monetization, which is an alternative to cryptocurrency for micropayments. And I shouldn't say cryptocurrency for micropayments, James, cuz everyone will get angry with us. It's Bitcoin. Nobody in the bitcoin world wants to be involved or touch cryptocurrency anymore.

James Cridland:

Ah, yes. Well that's probably, uh, that probably makes a bit of sense. But, uh, yes. So web monetization is interesting. I, I'm, uh, enabled for it on the pod news website. I wanted to be enabled for web monetization in the pod news RSS feed as well, just because, you know, well, why not? Um, but you can't be enabled for more than one different type of value, uh, it turns out. So you're only allowed one tag and you're only allowed. Way. So therefore lightning is the only way that I have chosen. Um, but uh, yeah, it's another way of, um, of, uh, micro payments and seems to work quite well in terms of the web. And could it work quite well in terms of podcasts? It probably could. So worthwhile taking a P cap.

Sam Sethi:

Do you know who's behind web

James Cridland:

monetization? Do I know who's behind web monetization? No, I don't. Do you know who's behind web monetization? No.

Sam Sethi:

I just thought it might be interesting to know if we're gonna implement anything to do with them who, who might be behind it. You know, it could be the devil. Um, you know, we don't know. So, um, no, I guess we better look it up, James. Yeah. Um, now moving on, uh, talking about Micro Payments, James, the first Value for Value podcast is launched in Zimbabwe, uh, in conversation with Trevor, hosted by the South African Podcast Company. Uh, Iona. It now accepts streaming sat and booster Graham messages. Congratulations. Well done, chaps.

James Cridland:

Yeah, I think it's really good to see value for value being used in some, uh, of the other countries that isn't just, you know, the US and, and the UK and, and that sort of thing. So, um, good to see it, um, appearing in, uh, Zimbabwe, uh, where it should work, you would assume pretty well. Uh, so, uh, yeah com in conversation with Trevor. Is the podcast to go fine

Sam Sethi:

now, the Guardian has launched something called Noisy Charts, um, a way of turning data into sound, noisy

James Cridland:

charts. Yes, absolutely. Uh, let, let, let's, um, take a look at this. Um, there's some very clever people who work at The Guardian, and one of those clever people is, uh, a person called Nick ever shed who works for The Guardian here in Australia. And one of the things that, um, he has been working on is charts and data in The Guardian. So when, whenever you have a look at a fancy chart, then it looks all fancy and lovely. And part of that is Nick ever shed's work. And Nick did a lot, an awful lot of work around Covid, for example, um, uh, showing what the, uh, figures were there. But he's now come up with. an interesting idea. It's a new tool created by Guardian Australia to easily turn data into sound with animations to accompany it. You won't be able to see the animations obviously, because this is a podcast. Um, but I can play you the sound. Uh, would you like to hear a noisy chart, Sam? Go on then. Okay. Uh, this is a noisy chart and it shows Mark Zuckerberg's average net worth per quarter. Here we go.

Sam Sethi:

There

James Cridland:

you go. What do you think of your first noisy

Sam Sethi:

chart? Uh, yeah. Somebody's had got, either got too much time or just decided to watch some cartoons and get some, uh, sound clips out. I have no idea whether you'd use that or not., James Cridland: it does I mean, sad tmb. For example, why, why you, you would do that? Heaven alone, those, but it is quite, it's quite a sort of a smart thing in that you can see, you know, um, the amount of rainfall that's happened in Sydney over the last year or so, and you can actually see what's the sound about then. Oh, don't, don't ask now. Why. Yes, Sam, I do have that, and I haven't just spent the last three minutes, um, fiddling around, uh, trying to download it and play it. Yes. Would you, would you like to hear the sound of the amount of rain, which has happened? Over the last year in Sydney. Well, that caveat at the end in Sydney means it could be nothing, but go on. Yes, please play it. And

James Cridland:

it starts quite nice and low. Really, there's not an awful lot of rain going on. Whoa. And then it goes up a bit during March and April, and then wait until we get to August, September, which is where all of the big floods are. Any, any minute now? There you go.. Sam Sethi: Anyway, for out so far, thanks for staying with us. There you go. Can we stop talking about noise

Sam Sethi:

charts now? Yeah. Never again. Moving on.. Um,

James Cridland:

excellent. Um, AI generated podcasts. Let's talk about them. Uh, Eric Boros, um, has, um, made a very clever thing. Using the Buzz Sprout api, which is all very smart. He's making more than a hundred automated shows. He's uploading those automatically through Buzz Sprout. Um, his code comes up with the title, the artwork, the images, um, which are the same as the artwork. So quite why I wrote that, I really don't know. It also comes up with the content as well. So it'll come up with a content, it turns it into voice. It then, uh, adds titles and artwork to it, uploads it automatically, automatically through Buzz Sprout. Very, very clever system. Um, and, um, I'm not gonna play any of those because they sound exactly as you would expect them to, as sort of slightly robotic voice reading you nonsense. Uh, but nevertheless, I thought it was quite an interesting idea.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, I mean, look, descript allows you with overdub to do, um, automated voices. Um, I've seen a few of these on. YouTube where you've got an automated voice reading out a transcript of, in my case, this is a football report and I instantly have to turn them off. They just great on me because I know they're not a human and I know that it's just a script being read and I just think, ah, there's no point. I can't be bothered. That's just inform. So it's not something I want. And

James Cridland:

I agree with, um, Todd Cochran, who was talking on the new media show, um, uh, this week and basically saying, ah, it'll never happen. Nah, get your own.com. Uh, it'll never happen. I'm only doing this for, for the boosts, of course. Boostgram Boostgram Corner Corner on the Pod News Weekly review. Yes, it's our favorite time of the week, Boostgram Corner. And, um, I, I. Particular fan when we get a boostgram of somebody who is complaining. Uh, so thank you to Hall of Famer, Dave Jackson, uh, who has sent us, uh, the Devil's sat 66. 66. Thanks Dave. And he says, thanks for not spelling, contracts or putting a link. He said, sarcastically. Is there a boo number? You know, I love the show. We know you love the show, Dave, we should get you on. Uh, cuz uh, yes, that would be a lovely thing. Thank you for the sat, um, con shas. Can you remember how to spell that? Um, it's that wonderful, um, that wonderful system, uh, for Albi, isn't it?

Sam Sethi:

K O x

James Cridland:

shas. I think it's c O N s h A x.app, right? Con shas and C o n s h a x.app. I will very difficult to say that. Put a

Sam Sethi:

link in the show notes for certain this week just for you, Dave, just to make sure.

James Cridland:

Yes, you just mark for Dave Jackson. Uh, that I will, that would be a good idea. Uh, Dave Jones. Uh, a big rush boost. Great first episode for the new branding. Keep it up. Thank you, Dave. Uh, we don't talk about what, what, what went before now. It's, it's all pod news from here on in. Uh, so thank you very much for that. Uh, Brian from London, uh, sent us a Israel Boost, 1948 sat, um, saying, first question mark. And the answer is, no, you're not. First, you're third. Uh, thank you Brian. Uh, very good of you. Um, Adam Curry, 25,000 sat, uh, thank you Adam. Uh, and he points out, and this is a very good point, a company that reports a loss cannot be improving profitability, just losing less. He's absolutely correct.. Yes. Yes, he is absolutely correct. Um, the first, um, booster, in case you're wondering Brian of London was, uh, Dave Jones with a, um, a 12 1 12 Satz, which is a kind of rush boost. Um, uh, which was, uh, the first one that came into us and it said, hello, pod News Weekly. Hello, Dave Jones and it's Pod News Weekly review, if you don't mind. But thank you very much. That's very kind. If you get value from what we do, the pod News weekly review is separate from Pod News. Sam and I share everything from it. We really appreciate your support so we can continue making this show so you can support us withCash@podnews.net slash weekly. Which nobody's done. Or you can support us with stats by hitting the boost button in your podcast app. And if you don't have a boost button in your podcast app, pod news.net/new podcast apps will help you find a new app like Fountain, for example. Uh, what's been happening for you this week, Sam? Uh,

Sam Sethi:

what's been happening for me this week? I'm trying to remember. Uh, I'm making great progress with my little secret project. I promise it the alpha will be out shortly. Um, and Sam Talks technology had a, a lovely chat with both Ben and Alberta from rss.com who are sponsoring it. Uh, so we're about to launch episode one of that. So yeah, all good stuff. What's up with you, James? Well,

James Cridland:

is your secret project, um, is your secret project something that, um, might be covered in pod news in the future? I'd

Sam Sethi:

hope so, yes. Uh, if not, I'm sneaking it in. If we can put that octave stuff in. We're getting in, uh, my story as well.

James Cridland:

Very good. Uh, you asked about my week. Um, uh, I am looking forward to the Brisbane Podcasters Meetup. It's on November the 25th. It's in South Bank, which is in Brisbane. I, I know there's a South bank in London. It's not that one. And I know that there's a South Bank in Melbourne. It's not that one, it's the South Bank in Brisbane, which is only one word. Um, there's more information, uh, pods.events if you are in Southeast Queensland, it would be lovely to see you November the 25th and the evening. Um, that will be splendid. And I'm off to Sydney next week to the Australian Podcast Awards. And if you are going to the Australian Podcast Awards, it would be great to catch up with you. If you are going to, uh, you can, uh, get a hold of me on Masteron or through Signal or, you know, Twitter or any of the other ways, um, that would be lovely. Or even via, via Telstra, if that still works. Um, uh, that would be a splendid thing. And that's it for this week. You

Sam Sethi:

can give us feedback using email to a weekly app, pod news.net, or send us a boostgram, which we prefer. If your podcast app doesn't support Boost, then grab a new app from pod news.net/and.

James Cridland:

Podcast apps. Our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila D, and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzz Sprout Podcast hosting made easy. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter@podnews.net. Tell your friends and grow the show. Support us and support us. The Pop News weekly review will return next week. Keep listening.

People on this episode

Head Shot

James Cridland

Host
Head Shot

Sam Sethi

Host

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

Podcasting 2.0 Artwork

Podcasting 2.0

Podcast Index LLC
Podnews Extra Artwork

Podnews Extra

Podnews LLC
New Podcast Trailers Artwork

New Podcast Trailers

Amazingly Brilliant Pty Ltd
Buzzcast Artwork

Buzzcast

Buzzsprout
The Future of Podcasting Artwork

The Future of Podcasting

Dave Jackson & Daniel J Lewis
In & Around Podcasting Artwork

In & Around Podcasting

Mark Asquith, Danny Brown & Friends
New Media Show (Audio) Artwork

New Media Show (Audio)

Todd Cochrane & Rob Greenlee