Buzzcast
Buzzcast is a roundtable discussion about podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. We'll cover current events and news, podcast strategy, tools we are using, and dip into the Customer Support mailbag to test our podcasting knowledge. If you want to stay up-to-date on what's working in podcasting, Buzzcast is the show for you.
Buzzcast
Introducing Buzzsprout's Redesigned Podcast Websites
We're diving into the latest announcement from Buzzsprout: redesigned podcast websites! The new podcast websites have several improvements to make your podcast website more engaging and user friendly, like episode search, a contributor page, a podroll page, highlighted Fan Mail messages, and more!
See the redesign and all the new features on these podcast websites:
Also in this episode, Alban shares his experiment with Pocket Casts, a move that transformed his podcast-listening habits. We compare features like customizability and search functions across popular apps such as Overcast and Apple Podcasts, helping you enhance your listening experience.
We’ll also highlight the latest updates in Apple products, including the game-changing iPhone 16 Pro and AirPods 4, and their implications for podcasters & podcast listeners.
Sound-Off Question: Share your updated Buzzsprout podcast website & let us know what you think!
Links mentioned in this episode:
Contact Buzzcast
- Send us a Text Message
- Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods
- Send a "boostagram" through Fountain or Castamatic
- Email us at support@buzzsprout.com
Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!
I'm not down this rabbit hole yet, but I know it's going to happen. The microplastics rabbit hole, oh gosh, I feel like it's on this, the border in my brain of being like totally made up. And maybe now it's not totally made up and maybe it is something I should look into and maybe microplastics are actually pretty bad.
Alban:Kevin's looking at me like.
Alban:Kevin definitely believes in microplastics, for sure.
Kevin:Yeah, 100%. But why did you just have a weird transition into microplastics?
Alban:Because a lot of socks have, like all these polyester and all these random synthetic materials. Some of them are plastic based.
Jordan:Oh, I mean, I have pants that are made from like water bottles.
Kevin:Okay, jordan has some plastic pants.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:I think the biggest concern with the plastics and microplastics, though, is ingesting them, not necessarily coming in contact with your skin.
Alban:Well, I don't know, kevin. I haven't researched microplastics yet. I'm just saying this is coming up, yep, and guess what? My favorite olive oil brand comes in a plastic bottle. We're in trouble. I'm blowing up my whole life If I learn about these microplastics. I'm going to have to replace so many things.
Kevin:I'll tell you, I think the biggest concern with the plastics is the like, the hot food and beverages served in plastic containers. That's the biggest problem.
Jordan:Oh my gosh. Do you guys remember when Cup of Noodles released that they now come with like microwavable styrofoam cups? And everyone was like wait what? Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. All right, Alban. So a couple episodes ago you talked about how you're going to start from a clean slate and only use Pocket Cast for your podcast listening, and I still haven't used Pocket Cast at all, so I want to know what your experience has been using it.
Alban:It's been good. I unsubscribed. Spotify kept pushing more and more podcasts and I you know I'd found a few shows so I had a few on Spotify and subscribed to all those. I started unsubscribing to everything and overcast and I declared pure podcast bankruptcy. Like I didn't go and say I'm resubscribing to all my shows. It was like like if I think about it and I go, oh, I want to hear that right now, then I'll go subscribe. I had 23 podcasts I was listening to actively and overcast. Only eight made it over to Pocket Cast and lost two weeks?
Jordan:Whoa, that's crazy.
Alban:It was funny to notice, like what would cue me to think of oh, I want to listen to that podcast. So some of them were like my favorites that were easy to think, oh, it releases today. But some of them were like I saw a social media post about a show that I like and I was like, oh yeah, I forgot to subscribe to that. I should go resubscribe.
Jordan:Just a little experiment for myself to see how many of the shows was I just keeping up with and how many of them were like my favorites. Yeah, I think like last time I counted shows I follow it was somewhere in like the 40s, Like easily I don't think actually listen that many.
Alban:I think I go through these periods where I have a more exploratory, I'm trying to find lots of new things, and then other periods where I'm like, alright, let's go back to like the core, few shows I really love and it's okay if some drops off. Maybe it'll come back when I kind of explore a bit more and find new stuff. So, yeah, quite a few shows got lost. It's been good and bad. There's a few things that I wish Pocket Cast had as opposed to Overcast or Apple Podcasts or other apps. But overall very good. Fewer bugs than Overcast had Kevin, you chime in on this too but like Pocket Cast feels like the most customizable of any of the apps by a lot. There you can change things. Like at the bottom of the now playing screen you can figure out how many episodes you want to auto download or even if you want to auto download, or you can change all sorts of default behaviors. You can skip the beginning of every episode of a certain podcast so you skip the pre-roll ads or skip the first 20 minutes of Buzzcast.
Alban:A few other things I like. I've got a whole list of good things. Search in Pocket Cast is so good. It's so much better of an implementation than I think I've seen anywhere else. If you go and you search, it's pulling up.
Alban:Here are the podcasts that are the best. It's right at the top, it's just a big list and then right below that are episodes and they seem to be searching at least descriptions, if not even some of the content, but definitely titles and descriptions. So I was searching for this podcast, dwarkesh podcast, and I searched Dwarkesh Patel and then all of a sudden I see he's been on all these other podcasts and I go, oh, I would definitely listen to that episode and so I download it and it's really nice to have that search. That was never available in overcast. I know Apple podcasts has this as well, right, yeah, yeah, but it's still like. This felt like a very clean implementation. Podcasts are first, episodes are down below it. Yeah, lots of slick animations. You know the forward and back skip buttons have a cute little animation. Play pause is a nice animation. You can add bookmarks if you think a spot is good and even title it so you can come back and listen to it later.
Jordan:Oh, that's nice.
Alban:There's ratings like a five star rating scale for all podcasts. Jordan, you're voting down. Okay, well, you'll like this. Well, I don't know. This is good and good and bad okay if you haven't listened to the episode, it will say hey, why don't you listen to an episode before you rate it?
Jordan:oh, that's what spotify does too.
Alban:I think you have to listen to like a minimum of like three episodes before you can rate them the downside is that you could have already listened to multiple episodes and you still can hit that notification and it doesn't tell me how to get around it.
Kevin:I ran into it when I started using podcasts and you just have to be patient. I think I came back after a week of using podcast and I could rate almost every show.
Alban:Well, I was running into it still with a few shows. There's a few weird artwork things. Episode artwork isn't always displayed like on now playing. I think podcast artwork for shows that change their podcast artwork Don't refresh automatically. I had to do that manually. So Kevin and I both listened to dithering, which changes the podcast artwork every month, and I noticed it wasn't updating.
Alban:But besides that, like overall very, very good, they have adopted a lot of the best features from every other app. And then there's just little tiny things, the few things I still miss from Overcast, though the Overcast UI I still think is the cleanest of all. It matches my brain in how things should be organized. I don't like playlists, I just want to like click a show, then click an episode and audiograms. I do this all the time I listened to a section, I go, oh, this is really good, and I want to take a clip and share it with somebody. And I know if I share a video clip that they can listen to it and we're not trying to get into, you know, I'm not sharing a link to an app, and so I would clip a little audiogram in Overcast and post on social media or send it out to the team or something like that, and I really would love that to be in pocket casts.
Jordan:I mean you can always like screen record here, the clip, and send that.
Kevin:That's true. Yeah, you can definitely share from the current position is what they call it. There's pros and cons of both. The nice thing about what Alan said is if you share an overcast soundbite video thing, whoever gets it can absolutely just play it because you just sent them a movie, basically, so they can hear exactly what you want to share. The drawback is it's not super easy for them to then follow it and listen to the whole episode because you just sent a movie clip.
Kevin:If you share from any other app at the current position, then there's problems if the person doesn't have that app installed. So like I get random podcast clips sent from people who are like listening in Spotify or something I can't. I don't even have Spotify on my phone. Half the time I keep installing it, uninstalling it. I wonder if there's a solution to that. I mean, I know the like for Buzzsprout podcasters. You can always share from your Buzzsprout website and then that just plays in a browser so anybody can play that. But there's not like a universal way to share podcast clips that kind of just works for everybody and lets them jump right into the app that they like to listen to podcasts on.
Alban:That's what Nathan did with Podlink. His goal was every podcast. I'm just going to pull together all listings, figure it out, and you can send out this link and people can go there. What would be really nice, though, would be if you had something like Podlink that didn't need a business model behind it. The whole business could just be send this link and it auto sends you into the podcast app that you use on your phone.
Alban:Yeah, similar to the way a browser would work. There's a website, and whatever browser is the default opens it, and, I think, just the world of apps, where everything is sandboxed away and Apple and Android control the whole thing, and they don't really want to create an app switcher between all the podcast apps. There's not a lot of incentive to build that world out, but I think that would be the nicest. You just shared a link, and then your podcast app opened up and was like Okay, I grabbed all those and so we're ready to go. I mean, really, I guess this is what the RSS feed should be. You just share an RSS feed, and then it's like okay, I see that this is a podcasting link, I'm going to open it up in your podcast player, whichever one you have as your default. And here we go.
Kevin:Yeah, it seems like there has to be a certain level of I don't know general use or popularity or something before those. Those are like operating system level preferences that have to be built, and I think Apple is just now getting to the point where they're getting enough pressure from the outside world. Where they're, they'll let you set a different default browser. Is that even? Can you do that? I don't even use a different browser, my iOS, I just use Safari.
Jordan:But can you set like if you had Chrome.
Kevin:Can you set Chrome as your default browser?
Alban:Yeah, and you can set like a different default web search and you can set a different. I think you can have a default like music player now, at least for the home pods and stuff. Yeah, so they're adding more of it. The irony would be that podcasting is one area. Apple only spends money. They don't make money, and so for them to be like, okay, we're going to build an app switcher piece into the operating system so that you know you can open up pocket casts. It'd be nice of them to do that, but that's just another area that really wouldn't, you know, align with all of these concerns that have kind of driven the browsers or the search bar and all that stuff.
Kevin:Yeah, but I do put I imagine it's in a similar category for them as providing a map service or a weather service Like these are just great native experiences that they want to ensure that their phone has. But I don't think they're opposed to third party developers. I mean clearly not because they provide an app store where third party developers can make these things, but as of right now, I don't think there's. I don't even know if there's much of a use case for defining it like a different default weather app or a different default mapping app. But you do see, this come into play sometimes when apps ask you like if I check into my Marriott hotel and then I say like, show me the directions to the hotel, It'll say do you want it in Apple Maps or do you want it in Google Maps?
Kevin:Well, it'd be nice, or do you want it in Waze?
Alban:It'd be nice if OS and the same type of thing for podcast apps, but it hasn't come to maps yet. Gosh, not going to come to podcast apps for ever. So overall pocket casts uh, I don't know four and a half stars. I feel like I've done my two weeks Very, very good. Probably the best third party podcast listening app. I think I'll stick with it. It's probably the one I've liked the most. There's still pieces of it of overcast. I'm like, oh, I really wish I could get that back. Overcast is very clean. I really like the organization.
Kevin:I have really struggled in embracing the aesthetic of Overcast. I never really liked the old one and I really don't like the new one. But that's great. People can have different opinions on what appeals to them or not. So Alban really liked the aesthetic of Overcast, I really didn't, but I also really liked the aesthetic of Pocket Cast. I think it's. For me, it aligns with my sensibilities really well, and that's the wonderful thing about podcasting is that there's lots of different apps out there, and so, as a podcaster and a podcast enthusiast, I think the takeaway here should be, hopefully, that people feel encouraged to try to find new apps if you're really into podcasting. There's so many really good options and there's probably no one app that speaks to everybody, and that's great. That's a wonderful thing.
Jordan:So, as many of our podcasters know, all of the paid plans on Buzzsprout include a website for your podcast and they were nice and they look very clean and, you know, had all the basics that your podcast needs. But now they have been refreshed with a new design that not only looks very like polished and professional, but we've added some new things as well.
Alban:This is something we've talked about for a long time. Yeah, because last time we redid the websites I don't know it was years ago. And you, we get lots of ideas whenever we talk to podcasters, especially ones who use the websites, or maybe even when you get the best feedback from people who don't use it, because they went and they built their own Squarespace sites. They wanted something slightly different. Yeah, and we just kind of have had this list.
Alban:We've been building good ideas, some ideas that maybe not great, but we had lots of good ideas and, with Cameron on the team, we have an opportunity to lean more in on the design side. So now what we're giving are these professional podcast websites without all the hassle. You don't have to go and do all these configurations, you don't have to go set up something else. Your podcast website is going to pull everything together your episodes, your transcripts, hosting, guest bios, directory links, fan mail and a lot more and now it's just this very clean, organized page so that you can send one link out and know everything about my podcast is here and people can jump from there out to the rest of the world to get access to everything else you're doing for your show.
Jordan:Yeah, and I think like one of the biggest things that I noticed right off the bat seeing this new design is that our previous website design felt very like top heavy.
Jordan:All of the navigation was at the top, we had all of our like links at the top, support was at the top and, yeah, like I said, it's very top heavy. But this one feels a lot more like spaced out and even though we have added more features to these websites that podcasters can enable or publish, it just it feels a lot cleaner somehow, even though there's more so, and I know that that is all thanks to the design team and you know, just their incredible work making sure that everything doesn't feel as cramped as it could have felt. One of the main things that you'll notice on the new websites is there's a new like top navigation bar and it includes episodes, contributors, fan mail about podcasts we love support and follow, and I think that we have added what one, two, three, four, five, six of those, or rename them in some way. So, yeah, that's that's a big change, just right off the bat.
Alban:Just looking at the menus, All right, can we walk through these? Maybe we'll start at the left and walk through and talk about all these things we've changed.
Jordan:Absolutely.
Alban:All right, first is episodes, and the thing I am excited about here is episode search.
Kevin:So on the episodes page.
Alban:This is totally redesigned, Looks really good. It's this one page that's like, dedicated to every episode that you've released and then at the top, you can search the title, you can search the descriptions, you can search for the guests. You can search the title, you can search the descriptions, you can search for the guests. If you want to try to find hey, I'm looking at the Buzzcast website. When was the last time that they talked about value for value? You can go and search value for value and pull up all the episodes where we mentioned it and you could jump in and listen to those. It's going to be really nice, I think, especially for larger podcasts that you've been podcasting for years. You've got 155 episodes. That's what it says for us. That's a lot for people to kind of scroll through, and this is a much easier way to find content, especially if you haven't listened to every episode already.
Jordan:Yeah, let me tell you this is one of the things I am most excited about, because there are so many times in past episodes where you guys have been like, oh yeah, jordan can link to that episode in the show notes where we talked about this at like some unnamed date and time, and I have to then go through and find what episode you guys are talking about, and so I'm very, very excited about this one. I think it's going to make my workflow a little bit easier.
Kevin:And then from the main episodes page you can click into an individual episode. Those pages have also been redesigned and the player has been simplified, which I really like, because our standard embed player used to show a lot of stuff that was like repetitive in the context of that player being on your own website, so you could get to the chapters and you can get to the show notes and stuff through the player. But now, when you're looking at this in the context of your own website, that stuff is already all there and so we were able to really simplify that player experience and I think it just looks absolutely beautiful. And there's a really nice share link as well where you can share from a specific starting position or a timestamp, and you can also quickly share it to Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn or just copy the URL straight to share the page.
Alban:Yeah, these look really nice. I forgot about that, kevin. Like if we looked at the old embed player, you know the title of this page would have been lock screen widgets and. But then the player would say lock screen widgets and then, if it was like playing, you might see it a third time somewhere. Now it's been simplified because we know our player is going to be on these pages. This information is already on the pages. So this is a special way we redesigned it. It does look a lot cleaner. You've got your show notes. You've got your chapters. The chapters have a nice little design, so if you click it it'll jump the player to the spot and then you can click over to transcript and you can read the episode if you want to, as you're listening, and then down there at the bottom you've got every, all the people on the episode, so you could click in and read Jordan's biography and see all of the episodes she's been on, or same for Kevin or I.
Jordan:Yeah, and I mean really that segues nicely into our next update, which is the contributors, and these are roles that we've added. You know, it used to just be that we would allow you to list hosts and co hosts, but now we've expanded it to include producer, editor and guests and the guests can be linked to specific episodes. So, you know, if you click the episode and you have added the guests as a contributor and you have like their bio and their link, you can go into the episode and click add guest and then select them and you can do that for multiple episodes. And it's really cool because then when you go to the contributor page on your website, you can see all the episodes that that guest has been a part of.
Jordan:It's very fun to, you know, have myself listed correctly as a producer or editor on other podcasts I'm a part of, instead of host, because I'm not a host or I wasn't listed before, you know, in some of these. So it's really cool, you know, especially being able to lift up your editor. So if somebody listens to your podcast and they go, man, the editor is so great. I want to see what else they work on and you can link to, you know their personal website and just really promote them that way, and it's really neat.
Alban:Yeah, all this comes out of the podcast taxonomy project, where they went and they pulled out all of these different roles that people had host, co-host, and I mean they had 50 different roles. And we went in and we said, all right, there's a lot of roles here, but what are the most common? And so we started looking at all of our shows that we have. We said, okay, what roles do we know are very common that we would use? And so host was obviously one of them, co-host, guests, the editor, producer. So we pulled a few of those in. It's not everything. There's tons of. You know, you could have the best boy grip version or whatever the equivalent is for podcasting.
Jordan:I mean that was the thing was like looking at the taxonomy, it was just like, okay, what are the most common ones, or you know, maybe like most important? And it was one of those things that was really difficult to decide between, because it was like, man, we can see so many use cases for voice actors or for this and that, and by the end of it, where we were like, all right, these are the most important ones, these are the ones we have to have, it was just like way too long of a list, and so it slowly becomes a thing of like okay, like what can encompass more roles.
Kevin:You know what can you put together? And, yeah, for a service like Podchaser and their mission was to part of their mission was to become like an IMDB for the podcasting space I do think it's important to have a taxonomy so that everyone who's involved in the show could be credited accurately. Right, and those credits mean a lot in that context. But in the context of a website where you're just listening to podcast episodes and the purpose of the website is to make them easily accessible and to promote the shows, that context becomes less important. It's still important to make sure that people are credited for the work that they did, but having the exact details and the nuance around all of the titles of exactly the function that they performed in that specific episode becomes less important there. And so, not to take anything away from the important work that the Podchaser team led and did with the podcast taxonomy project, we think that is fantastic, but it's just becomes a little bit nuanced for when you're displaying an episode on a public website.
Alban:Yeah, and if you think about it, it's not like I'm going to listen to this episode. I'm like oh, jordan's a co-host, not the producer, or some like some little nuance in the exact piece of work you did. You're the editor, not the producer. You're a co-producer. So like I wouldn't be like oh, now I'm not listening.
Jordan:You're a voice actor, not a guest. Yeah.
Alban:But the big thing is now there's a place to say hey, this is the guests, and I feel like we added a handful of the guests for Buzzcast. And then I scroll down and I'm like, okay, this is a pretty good group we've got.
Alban:I mean, we start the list off with Adam Curry, the podfather and we've got all sorts of big podcasters in here and I mean I'm seeing these guests and it gets me excited to think about. Oh man, we've been doing this show for five years. We've had a lot of really cool conversations with people in the podcasting industry, when we don't even do that many interviews. This is not an interview show. It's not, and just through the years we've had opportunities to bring people on for little conversations and we really have a pretty, pretty awesome group of people who've been on the show.
Kevin:Yeah, and there's. There's two little but important things to note about the contributors. And one is that we hope that if you add a person as a contributor who you might have a guest, be a guest on your podcast, and then link them to that episode, then when you share that episode with them, they will then see that they're credited on it and it's nice. And if you grab a headshot from them or find one online and put it in there, they see their face. We hope that gets them more excited about sharing it with their circle of influence as well.
Kevin:So that's a struggle that podcasters often have is they say oh, I had this person on as a guest and I'm having trouble getting them to promote their own episodes. How can I help? Well, maybe having their picture on there with a little bit of bio linking to their website, it gives them a little bit more incentive to push it a little bit further. And then the other thing that's nice is that when you add contributors and then you link them to specific episodes, that stuff also lands in your RSS feed by way of the person tag which is a podcast namespace project tag that's been accepted and standardized and more and more apps are starting to pick up on that tag and display the images.
Kevin:So no longer is Apple Podcasts the only app that can do this, and they do it their own way. Now more third party apps can start to do this as well. So I know like Castomatic Podfriend TrueFans. Of course, TrueFans does everything, and PocketCast says it's on the way.
Alban:Another improvement for the number one Buzzcast-supported third-party app, PocketCast.
Kevin:Yeah, so that'll be fun to add contributors, I guess, and then see those in your favorite podcasting apps.
Alban:Before we leave the contributors page my favorite feature of this page we've still missed.
Jordan:What is it?
Alban:This ridiculous headshot of Kevin as a cowboy. Jordan, did you put this in here, or is this Kevin? I don't know who put it.
Kevin:I did it you did it, Kevin. I did it.
Jordan:So you willingly did this. Oh yeah, what do you mean willingly? I did it so you willingly did this.
Kevin:Oh yeah, why? What do you mean willingly?
Jordan:I mean, you look handsome, it just was unexpected.
Kevin:That's my new look. You're going to see this because we're going to Nashville next month and, of course, nashville is a cowboy hat state, so that will be my look for that whole week.
Jordan:Oh man.
Kevin:Yeah, we traveled out West on a family vacay this summer and I had to pick up a cowboy hat because I was out in, you know, the Tetons.
Alban:This is a big boy. Cowboy hat. Kevin, this isn't like just a little dress up hat. It's a 10 gallon, it's a big one. We joked about adding a cowboy hat feature to this page. I think, seeing this, I think that'll there'll be something we need to do. We need to figure out a way to add cowboy hats to every image on this page.
Jordan:Yeah, we'll have to see how many feature requests we have for AI cowboy hat filters on those photos.
Alban:No, we just need to reach out and be like. You know, adam Curry gave us a headshot for when he was a guest. You just be like Adam. I'm gonna need a photo from you of you wearing a cowboy hat. Ariel Nissenblatt hey, we've got you on here. We're going to need a cowboy hat photo. Cat.
Jordan:Flynn A cowboy hat.
Alban:I'm confident there's an Adam Curry cowboy hat photo. Oh yeah, For sure.
Kevin:I'm sure that exists. Oh yeah, he lives in Texas. For sure, we've got it.
Alban:All right. The next page that we should talk about now is fan mail. Fan mail is not just off on its own. You getting texts and you hearing from your fans. You can now highlight fan mail on your podcast website.
Jordan:It's really great on your fan mail messages for each message. So it's not like an entire thread or anything like that, and you get to choose which ones you want to highlight on your podcast website and there's just a little link next to the message that says you know, pin this to your website and so you get to publish that fan mail and then it shows up as like a nice little quote. It's very similar to when you see those websites that have like the quotes with like ratings or reviews or things that they do. And I love this because it's not ratings, it's not reviews you know I hate those, but it's love letters from your fans and so you get to finally publish those and say see what a nice message I got from this listener and it's a way to show your appreciation.
Kevin:Yeah, and we hope that this drives engagement with through fan as well. So now, if you don't, you know, on this show we ask questions every episode and we ask people to respond in through fan mail with answers to their questions. Those things don't make like great things to publish as love letters from your audience. Right, they're very hinged, but yeah. But we've had a few that are, and so we've gone ahead and published those as great examples. But now I think it expands the opportunity for what fan mail can be used for. So now you know, as a listener, if you write in, use fan mail feature and you can answer a question, or you could just send something nice like what would you love about the podcast, or whatever, and there's a good chance that we'll end up publishing that to the website.
Jordan:It's still anonymous, you still can't see. So if you want to, you know, shoot your friend a text and say hey, will you please say something nice about my podcast so I can publish it. No one's going to know, so I can publish it.
Alban:No one's going to know. We launched this feature like 30 seconds ago. We're already telling people how to subvert the system.
Jordan:It's not subvert the system.
Alban:Send yourself a positive text, then post it to your fan mail page and make it look like Duh.
Kevin:You have to get a bunch of cell phones.
Alban:This rating and reviews fan mail page. This was only a pure system for about 30 seconds before Jordan's like here's how you can hack it. Jordan went and picked out a couple that were on here based on most of our fan mail. We have a lot, but most of it is like Kevin said, it's people asking questions.
Jordan:Or sending us weird out of context things like 2x. That's crazy.
Alban:Right, all of our fan mail would be arguments about Merino wool socks and whether or not you should listen to a podcast at 3X. But we had a few that were really nice and so those are on there. But yeah, I'm sure over time we'll get more. Now that we're specifically saying, hey, if you do text the show with just a kind of like a review of the show, if it's more of a review style, I think that's the kind of things we'd want to put on here. Yeah, why would people like listening to this podcast? They can see it on the fan mail page.
Alban:Next page is I just am like sliding down this top navigation is an about page. This is something that the Buzzsprout websites have never had and probably the most requested feature. You know it's just a nice to have a single page that's about the podcast. You know what's in the description for your podcast. What is it about? So now people can click it, they can jump over there, they can read about the show, they can see the contributors, they can go out and subscribe to the podcast. I think it's kind of self-explanatory, but it is really nice to have this on a special page so it's easy to find online.
Jordan:Yeah, and you know, again, it's another feature of contributors, so you have to make sure that you get your hosts and editors and guests on those pages, because it's going to look really good. Another thing that I really like that we added to the about page is next to the cover art, there's a nice little like since the date your podcast started and how many episodes you have, so it's a really easy way to just quickly glance and see how many episodes your podcast is published. The next tab that we have is podcasts we love, which is also known as your pod role. I just love this page and it says check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, and it's so sweet.
Alban:Yeah, it's just a clean page that says podcasts we love and you can see all the shows that we recommend and if you click on them you jump to the podcast index page for that show. So the it links out to all the different podcast directories and it's a nice little way to recommend podcasts that you enjoy and you think your listeners might also like.
Jordan:Absolutely.
Kevin:Yep, and some people might ask like, why link directly to the podcast index? And Alban hinted at it. We wanted to link somewhere where the show would give you the option to subscribe and whatever or follow in whatever podcast app the person wants. The way around that, of course, is to give specific links right here on this page, but then it becomes a very messy page, like every single podcast that you recommend would have an Apple link and a Spotify link and a YouTube link and this, that and the other, and then all the other third-party apps are under another menu. It just gets really cluttered really quickly.
Kevin:The other option, of course, was to link to. Almost every RSS feed has a podcast website link there, and that would be nice too, but then a lot of podcast websites are not very good about giving you easy links to be able to follow the show, and so this is why we defaulted to the index, and we love the index. The index has to continue to thrive and exist. This is one of the main things that is keeping podcasting open, so just wanted to address that question. I've heard it a few times. Yeah, that's the reason.
Jordan:And then the last thing that we have here is a follow button. So your podcast used to have what we called like a share page and now it's kind of been renamed to a follow page, and this is just to like encompass following the show on like social media, subscribing to it on podcast apps. I'm very excited about this. It just looks so good, so it has a little bit about the podcast. It has all of the links to subscribe to the podcast or follow the podcast on the different podcast apps that you're listed on. You can also copy the RSS feed and all the social media links.
Alban:I know lots of podcasters you'll use like a link tree or something for this. You know they'll try to put everything together in one big tree and send that link out, but now with your podcast website you can send a single page hey, follow this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and you send them this one page. And what's really nice is they can go click into any app and listen, but they could also jump over and check out fan mail and contributors and all this other stuff. It's really nice. It's mobile friendly, so it looks great on your iPhone or whatever phone you use. It looks great on desktop and it works everywhere. So I really love this page. I love the design of it and it makes it really easy to just send one place to everybody and say okay, follow this podcast from this single page.
Kevin:And the last couple things I think that we should point out is one have you guys noticed how fast these pages are?
Jordan:Yes.
Kevin:I mean it is crazy fast as you're moving from section to section. The search is really fast, navigating between pages is very fast, and the team did a really, really great job of making that a high priority. So there's a couple of reasons why that's super important. With webpages is one like just user experience. There's a point at which websites respond so quickly that it in of itself becomes delightful, and I think we've achieved that, and it's rare, because most websites just don't, and so you can get a website that performs so quickly that it's like this. It feels like it's almost like local to your computer, it goes so quickly, and so I'm really proud of the work there for that.
Kevin:The other thing and Alban can probably speak to this is that it impacts the ability for you to rank higher. So search engine optimizations one of the key things that you can do to get better search engine results for your website is for it to perform very quickly, because Google knows the best sites perform quickly. The faster the site performs, the more likely that site is to have high quality content and be a really good website, because a lot of websites that are kind of cheap and just thrown up and just have a bunch of junk on them. They're just thrown on shared servers that don't perform that well, and so Google uses that as a metric when they're determining where to rank your site.
Alban:Yeah, some other stuff that went on in the back end around.
Alban:That is breaking everything off into its own pages. A lot of this info was available. You know things like the about page, but when they're not on their own page, that doesn't show up in Google as a separate page. You know, you've got this one page that's kind of like for the whole podcast, but it's also the episodes page, has all the episodes there. When everything like that is collected, it just makes it a little bit harder for Google to rank, and so I think these improvements are not just going to be better for people and for listeners and for the podcasters, but it's going to be a significant improvement for search engines and my hope and we will be able to track this very quickly, since we have so many podcast websites out there but we'll be able to see that these are hopefully rising in the rankings pretty well, so that podcasters who talk about current events or talk about things that are really popular could see their shows getting higher ranks in Google and then getting more listeners that way.
Kevin:Yep, and the other cool thing I would like to point out so forever you've been able to customize your website. You can add a header image you can choose, like a highlight color to use on your website to make it more aligned with your podcast brand. We've added a new way to customize your site as well, which is a list of fonts that you can select from that will be used as your header font, and so that's a really nice way to make your website look distinctive, match a little bit closer to the branding of your podcast, and so this is a feature that we've snuck in at the last minute, and so, if it's not, this episode drops Friday. If it's not available yet on Friday, don't freak out, it's coming. But just like with anything, we like to fully test stuff before we roll it out, and so we're seeing it in development. Everything seems to be working great. I hope it's out by Friday, but if not, it will be shortly thereafter.
Alban:When Kevin says we snuck this in there, snuck it in meaning Jordan and I have an outline of what we're talking about today. It's not in the outline oh this is live. By the way, I just changed the fonts for Buzzsprout and so all of our headers are this like big, chunky buzzcast, which I actually think looks really good. Yeah, it's a bit more. It makes the page a little more dynamic, I like that it's fun.
Jordan:So what are the like font options that people have to choose from?
Alban:Knowing Cameron, it's going to be some font you never heard of but looks really good. That checks out. There's going to be no comic sans. I'm sure papyrus didn't make the cut no lobster cocaine, cowboy, whatever that wild one is my favorite fonts. None of those are going to make it in there, yeah.
Kevin:I'm not. Some of these font names are very hard to pronounce so I make I can pronounce inter and railway and play fair, but the rest are a little bit hard to pronounce.
Alban:So I can pronounce Inter and Railway and Playfair, but the rest are a little bit hard to say. Give them a shot, kevin. We can't see them. You can see it. You got to give us a chance, just say it with confidence All right, chivo, okay, oh yeah, classic Classic. Chivo font.
Kevin:Oh, I can say the next one DMrapay, oh, a-r-a-p-e-y, arapay, railway Playfair, rubik, rubik, r-u-b-i-k. I think is Rubik.
Jordan:That checks out like Rubik's Cube right.
Kevin:Yeah, and Sign S-Y-N-E Ooh.
Jordan:Sign.
Kevin:So there are eight different options and they're pretty. You know. Cameron did did a really great job of going through all the options that are available through the Google font list. These are fonts that are safe to use on websites and available for free for anyone to use on their website, and he chose eight that are distinctly different from each other and will match a wide range of styles, so you're not going to be overwhelmed with like 300 fonts to choose from, like we've all been in that scenario and MS Word trying to figure out which title.
Jordan:And then the words start looking weird. When you like, scroll through.
Kevin:Yeah, but it's a really nice safe list. It's almost like you can't go wrong list. All of these fonts are beautiful. All of them will look good with almost anything next to them.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:And they are also distinctly different. So you should be able to quickly find one that kind of matches the aesthetic that you're going for, and then you have a site that's just that much more personalized for you and your podcast.
Jordan:Well, if you want to see the new design complete with Buzzsprout subscriptions, publish fan mail messages and everything else the new site can do, I'll drop a link to the Buzzcast website in the show notes for you to check out. So yesterday, Apple had its glow time event where they announced a whole bunch of new products coming down the pipeline and updates to current apps and things like that. Alban, I know that you kind of kept tabs on this You're kind of a resident tech guy and so I wanted to see if there was anything that you thought would be good for podcasters.
Alban:Before I start, do we know why it was called its Glowtime? I just thought like iPhone announcement, but they called it it's glow time why?
Jordan:Okay, if you look at their phones, because they're pushing AI really heavily, whenever you use, like, the AI, there's a pretty like rainbow glow that comes in on the phone screen, and so I think it's like a halo, and so I think that's what it's in reference to. And so I think it's like a halo and so I think that's what it's in reference to, but I'm not sure.
Alban:So it's go time for AI, using this glowing animation.
Alban:It's the iPhone glow up. All right, yeah Well, I did not watch the whole iPhone glow up video, but I did go through all the press releases trying to find what. In here I heard a few things that sounded like these might be of general interest for podcasters and I came away with, I think, like three or four products that I think are valuable for podcasters to think about. The first is the iPhone 16 Pro. This is just like the flagship iPhone model, but they spent a good amount of time talking about these four studio quality mics for higher quality recording. So they're claiming that they've done good amount of time talking about these four studio quality mics for higher quality recording. So they're claiming that they've done a lot of work to reduce background noise, to pick up human voices better. They're using AI so they can actually adjust the sound mix in recordings, isolate audio elements like vocals, isolate individual people's vocals All sounds very cool. And then I? But when I start researching, I'm like what's studio quality mics? I start searching that phrase. It's also the same mics that are in my phone. Now, oh, really, or at least that's what they were calling my phone. They called it studio quality mics as well. They are not studio quality.
Alban:In the iPhone 15 Pro that I've got on my desk I tried to record a video yesterday and thought, yeah, I've got to record this again with my microphone. So it sounds like an improvement and it sounds like there's a lot of cool AI technology going into this. I want to see what ends up coming out of it. And then I saw a nice Apple podcast improvement for chapter markers and chapter titles. So there's a little UI enhancement that will kind of highlight, in the same way that YouTube does hey, there's a chapter break here in kind of that play bar. There's no, you know, just an indication that there's something different here and you could jump forward to those chapters.
Jordan:Yeah, I love that. I saw an image of that, you know, in pod news. James shared like a screenshot of pod news weekly review with the little chapter markers in it. Seeing it I was like man, that's so like intuitive.
Kevin:Yeah, that's really nice. Sometimes when you're about to skip forward in a chapter, you're like, oh, I'm going to skip forward. It's nice just to have a visual representation of how much am I skipping, like, am I skipping a little bit of this podcast or am I skipping a huge chunk? And the UIs in podcast apps don't always give you a really clear indication of how far you're going. Yeah, and so it's a really nice way to do it. It'll be a nice improvement to the Apple podcast app.
Alban:Or if you hate the buzzcast cold opens, or if we get chatty you can just look and see how much more chat you got until we get to the next topic, right? The other thing that really stuck out to me where they'd made a ton of announcements around AirPods and I'm like a huge AirPods fan. I think they're great. They're probably my favorite way to listen to podcasts. It's nice to not have the cord and I don't like all the weight on my head, and so I was going through and listening very closely to what did they add to these AirPods, and quite a few things sound like stuff I'm excited for for when I listen to podcasts.
Alban:So number one, airpods 4, they added active noise cancellation. So these are like the AirPods that don't have the little stick, the thing that sticks into your ear canal. I hate those. They just kind of sit in there. These are just like they sit in there. They feel better, but now they have active noise canceling so it listens to what's around you, plays the opposite sound wave and actually cancels out some of the audio. That's going to be really, really nice.
Kevin:Yeah.
Alban:If you've ever listened in a loud environment like when I go run and I'm near a road I notice I have to crank up the volume. Well, it's just that it's like I'm blasting a podcast into my ears really loudly and it's not good for your hearing. But with active noise canceling, you can listen at lower volumes without not being able to hear it. So you can hear at a lower volume. So that's really nice.
Kevin:It'd be nice to be able to not have to listen to that truck that's about to mow you over.
Alban:You definitely should like look around you when you run across the road.
Jordan:You know what's funny is I actually. So I have my little AirPods, but I didn't know when I bought them that they weren't noise canceling, because I just didn't research it, I just grabbed them. So I was very disappointed that whenever I go like an airports or I'm in an airplane or I'm traveling, like editing podcast episodes is so hard. And so this last weekend they had the AirPods pro maxes on sale for $399, which is like a huge discount. So I went ahead and grabbed it. And then I saw the thing that they announced new ones yesterday. So I was like, oh, of course.
Alban:Pro and con for you. Jordan is the one they announced are the exact same, oh good. The only difference are the colors and the port.
Jordan:Good.
Alban:So yours has like a lightning port.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:And the new ones have a USB-C, so Dang it, man, I just missed it.
Jordan:But they're probably more expensive than what I got.
Alban:So Dang it, man. I just missed it.
Kevin:But they're probably more expensive than what I got. Yeah, they're $200 more. So I think you probably made up. I think that's the right way to do it. I would say I don't expect the noise cancellation on the AirPods 4 to be the same as the AirPods Pro. They basically toned down expectations a little bit in the presentation of how they announced it, but when you're not isolating the sound is some is still going to leak through, so they can. It can only cancel so much because it's not completely sealed in your ear canal and so it'll be fine, but it's not going to be the same exact experience that you're going to get from the pros or from like wearing a full ear covering headphone.
Alban:Yeah, a new feature that I heard about or maybe this has been around, but I'd never heard of it Adaptive audio. So if you have active noise canceling on and, let's say you're listening to a podcast and somebody starts talking to you, it'll notice oh, a person's trying to talk to you. It'll automatically tone down the audio of what you're listening to and amplify the person's voice so that you can hear them.
Jordan:I hate that. Yeah, I'm thinking about wearing these around my kids Like no way Can you turn that off.
Alban:Mom, mom, mom, mom, look at this, mom, look at this. And the AirPods are like activating adaptive audio. You're like, no, turn it off. And then the Apple AirPods Pro 2 have some cool stuff around accessibility and hearing loss. So one of the things they talked about a lot was just, everybody gets hearing loss as you get older and probably if you have AirPods in your ears 24-7 blasting podcasts because you're near something loud, you're going to have hearing loss much earlier. But one thing that they're doing is they're like testing your hearing and then, once they've tested it, they make a sound profile, your like hearing profile, what you can hear and they will adapt everything to your unique hearing profile. So if you can't hear certain mid range sounds, it will adapt the audio what you're hearing to not you play those sounds and instead play the sounds somewhere else in the mix.
Jordan:That's incredible.
Alban:Yeah, I don't know if this is gonna be great. This is actually the same, a similar promise that you get with those colorblind glasses, where they're like, oh, they'll make you see colors and they're just like remapping the colors to different areas of the color spectrum. Those have never really been worked very well for me, and so this is kind of a similar ish idea, but it's really going to be great. You know, somebody couldn't hear any high pitch things and you're listening to a podcast with someone with like a high pitch laugh, or maybe you're listening to a podcast or a music with high pitch noises. It might just shift them down into where you could actually hear it.
Jordan:I wonder if that works for like your outside, especially if they're doing like this adaptive thing Like I wonder if you could wear it like at a restaurant and it would isolate like someone's voice or something like that.
Kevin:Yeah, absolutely yeah. All the high end hearing aids do exactly that, jordan. They try to focus on the foreground sound and push out and reduce the background noise, and it seems like that's what Apple is trying to mimic with some of this technology.
Jordan:That's neat. It seems like Apple is really getting into sort of like a they're getting more involved with like the health field, obviously, like Apple watches and stuff. You know there's people that discovered they were like pregnant or had a heart murmur or something like that with the Apple Watch, and so maybe Apple's leaning more into that.
Alban:Yeah, they've done tons with the watches and I know some of like the Beats now will track your heart rate by using the heart rate in your ear canal. So it'll actually feel it. I mean all that. I mean there now, so it'll actually feel it. I mean all that. I mean there's some sleep apnea stuff coming to not necessarily great, you know, important for podcasters, but these few features, especially around hearing loss, I think we're, you know, I was really excited to hear them. You know, hear about these features and I know in the future, when probably my hearing gets worse, I'll be able to listen to more things by cramming these AirPods into my ears.
Jordan:It's time for SoundOff, the segment where you send in your responses to our podcasting questions.
Alban:Ira Garr Wedding Pro CEO podcast. Thank you, Alban, for clarifying why links are not available on podcastapplecom on the desktop. Grateful for the show, we're grateful for you listening. Thanks for writing in.
Kevin:Dave Jackson wrote in and said I noticed that I can't stream or boost Buzzcast. Why was this feature removed? Wasn't removed. So let me give you a tip here, Dave. There's a really cool podcast called the School of Podcasting, and they teach all about how to set this stuff up the streaming sets and boosting a podcast. I'm just kidding. Dave Jackson is the wonderful host of schoolofpodcastingcom and so I'm sure things are right on his side, and I tested and confirmed things are right on our side also. But this is new tech and there's glitches and bumps once in a while, so maybe you just ran into one of those. But give it another shot. I tested just today and it did work, so hopefully you'll be able to boost and stream sets for this next episode.
Alban:We got another one from Missouri regarding Snapcast. Consider rebranding them to Minicast. A new name suggests a shorter format but allows longer content when necessary.
Kevin:Minicasts Hmm, doesn't roll off the tongue like quick cast or snap cast or fast cast?
Alban:Or snap cast. I still think snap cast is great.
Kevin:But many cast is more descriptive. I think you're right about that. But so is quick cast right. We'll nail it at some point.
Jordan:We'll figure it out. These things take time.
Kevin:Rob from Wicked Wanderings writes and says where do you get your stickers? Well, we've gotten them from a lot of different places over the years. One of the places I'm excited to try is, uh, our local t-shirt vendor just a few hours south that we order t-shirts from is called sunday coolcom, and they're doing stickers now.
Kevin:So the next batch of stickers we do. We're going to order from them, so if you're looking for a new sticker vendor, maybe they're good. I can't vouch for them yet, but they look good on the website and that's the next place we're going to try.
Alban:They actually do all our shirts and when I did our last order of shirts they sent me like a hey, what other kind of content do you want us to create? What are the swag and number one I put on there was stickers. Be nice to have somebody just down in Orlando who did everything. Yeah, check out Sunday School.
Jordan:All right and day school All right, and our sound off question from last episode was what experience have you run on your podcast and how did it turn out? First up, we have a family message from Kevin Lowe with the grit, grace and inspiration podcast. The first idea was cool, but it fell flat. I offered my listen blind challenge, incurring listeners to listen to certain episodes with their eyes closed to see if they could experience my guest and their story as richly and vibrantly as I can. I also dove deep into testing podcast SEO by optimizing the title and episode titles for certain keywords, which appears to make a massive difference in downloads, and a change in my publishing rhythm has also benefited me, as my solo episodes always tend to get higher download numbers. Yeah, we actually did something similar with the podcast SEO. We had some podcast episodes that were a little bit more like fun titles and it didn't actually describe what the episode was about, and so we changed those and, honestly, the downloads have been up on those episodes since then.
Kevin:And Barnabas from the Kids Code podcast wrote in and said I do a lot of experience with the podcast. After every episode, I publish a road trip edition featuring all the stories from each episode. I've also tried subscriber only content, but with fewer than 50 listeners per episode. No one subscribed. I recently started doing episodes that are just secret messages. It's not something I would have done if my listeners hadn't asked for it, but it's been doing well. Those are fun ideas. I like all those.
Alban:I love the road trip edition, which kind of touches on all the stories from each episode. It might be pretty easy for you to miss an episode and never go back for it. I love podcasts, especially when they get you know there's more episodes, that they highlight old content they've created and they recommend you go back to it. So that's a cool idea. We had another one from Sarah Rossett, who is the host of Wish I'd Known Then podcast. She said we did a short-lived experiment with transcriptions a while back. No one seemed to be reading them and no one missed them when we stopped, so that was a bit of a fail.
Alban:Our most successful experiment has been opening up to subscriptions using Buzzsprout. We tried doing monthly live Zoom calls for supporters as well as supporter-only episodes with evergreen content. Our next experiment will be hosting online writing sprints via zoom for our supporters. That is cool. By the way, I just bought some darn tough socks for hiking and fly fishing. Thanks, Alban. Still looking forward to the best olive oil breakdown today At some point. Talk about olive oil opinions, did you promise?
Jordan:I think we talked about how you did a deep dive in olive oil, but you didn't go into the details of it. It sounds like we should have gotten an affiliate code for Darn Tough Socks Alban.
Kevin:Well, I'm ready to move on with a new sock brand. Ooh, what are you moving to? Because do you remember when you were talking about the socks, you talked about different types of material. Yeah, and you gave me.
Alban:You started introducing alpaca wool. That's right. And I started looking at it after that and wishing that I'd done an alpaca wool comparison Right.
Kevin:So I went ahead and bought some alpaca socks from hollowsockscom H-O-L-L-O-W Promo code K-Fan Hollowsockscom Yep, and I got my first pair last week and they're great. They feel like they're going to be super hot because they're super thick and heavy, but then I wore them to play pickleball for three hours in Florida and 100% humidity and they weren't. They weren't super hot. They did a good job keeping my feet dry and comfortable the whole time. So if you're interested in dry, comfortable feet while you're playing pickleball, check out alosoxcom.
Jordan:Use K-Fin for 0% off your next order. And then we got a message from Caitlin saying hey, team. First, thanks for the amazing shout out, love you guys so much and can't wait to hear how you like the paddles. Second, to answer the question at the end of the episode we've experimented heavily with Our Kids Play Hockey. It's an all network feed but during the holidays we run giveaway specificspecific micro-podcasts with companies in our industry. It was a lot of fun last year and we're planning to bring it back again this year. Definitely difficult to set up, but totally worth it and super helpful for lead generation, wow.
Alban:Yeah, I do have an update on the paddles that she sent us, kevin. Okay, kevin and I have tried to play pickleball three different times. Since then. I've gotten rained out three out of three, but I did go play with my wife a little bit with them, and they're really good. It also made me realize that the paddle that I'd whacked against the ground did have a dead spot, so quite a bit more shots were going where I intended them to go, so what I've thought was user error might not all be user error, so they've been performing really well. I need to go play, though, with people who are a bit more aggressive, maybe a bit more competitive, so that we can see how these really turn out.
Kevin:Yeah, and Caitlin Alban still has not delivered my paddle to me yet he's holding it. I don't know why. I keep going in the office and walking into my desk and expecting to see the paddle sitting there, but it hasn't shown up and I think he's had it for a couple of weeks. I think he's playing with two paddles. I'm over there Double paddles, one in each hand.
Alban:So one thing I'm noticing from these experiments. I don't know if y'all caught this theme too, but some of the things that people said were successful for them were the exact same thing that failed for other podcasts. Did you notice that?
Jordan:I didn't actually.
Alban:Like Barnabas the subscriber, only content didn't really work. But then Sarah said actually that was really good for her. I don't know. One thing that just kind of comes away for me is you might need to test this stuff out for your podcast. The benefit is these are experiments for your show and your audience is going to be a bit different. But maybe some of these experiments that we heard about from all the people who wrote in sent us all this great fan mail. Hopefully those will kind of spur you to try a few more experiments for your podcast.
Jordan:All right, so sound off question for our next episode. We want to see your Buzzsprout websites. So if you want to send us a fan mail message with a link to your Buzzsprout website, we will feature it on the next episode and let us know what you think about these new updates.
Kevin:Yeah, take some time and customize it. Choose a cool color, maybe a heterographic, switch the font out if that's available, hope it will be and set up things like if you have any fan mail you can publish, put in some guests and link them to episodes. Build the site out, shoot us a link and we would love to feature them in the show notes of our next episode.
Alban:Yeah, jordan and I, when we started playing with these. Really, the websites look so much better as you build them out. So you pin some fan mail, you set up your pod role, you set up guests and everything. The more that you do, the better the sites start looking. So it'd be great to kind of click through and see all the variety that everyone sends in and then we can highlight them so everyone can get inspired by what you do with your sites.
Jordan:So to have your response feature on next episode, go ahead and tap the text button in our show notes and shoot us fan mail, as always. Thanks for listening and keep podcasting.
Kevin:I was told in a text message last week, fish are cut bait and I started to think about that saying for the first time in my life. I really started to think about it because I've always interpreted that saying as it's time to either like figure this out or move on.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:Oh no, it's different, but there's a, there's an alternate meaning to this, yes. And so I started to say, like, ask myself the question, like I wonder if that's what they mean, because it was in a weird context. Or do they mean, like, figure out a way to be productive, like figure out, either do this job or this job, but you've got to choose one of these two jobs. You've got to figure out a way to be productive on the thing that we're trying to accomplish. And so I looked it up, I did a little online research and, sure enough, there are two definitely distinct meanings and, like, depending on the context of the conversation, you could be totally wrong about how you interpret the same.
Alban:Oh no, kevin wrote fish or cut bait post show. That was all that I saw, and so I was like what's the etymology of fish or cut bait? And so I went and researched this too. I, like you, kevin, had thought the same. I thought it was like either fish or cut the line, like cut the bait off the line and move on to something else.
Alban:But it doesn't really make sense because you never cut the bait off the line. It's like you're not letting the tackle go. That's true. It means either fish with the rod in your hand or hand it to someone else who will fish, and you go cut some bait up because you need to go do something.
Kevin:That's right, like do some work. Yeah, I think the original meaning of the word was for people who were like standing around not doing anything and everyone around them was working, and so the saying of it listen, there's multiple jobs to do here. You can either fish or you can cut bait, but don't just stand there and do nothing.
Alban:Yeah, you can't be the roadblock blocking other people from doing something and making a decision, right? Oh, so which do you think it was that? This text message that you got, now that you have the two alternatives?
Kevin:I think it was the first one, which is which is, make a decision or move on, but that's really a poor interpretation of their term. So the correct interpretation is find some way to be useful here, but most people misuse it. Anyway, after looking it up, I was like oh, here's a phrase that I've heard multiple times in my life, I probably use myself and I've probably been using it incorrectly. So I decided we should inform the world that this phrase needs to be used properly.
Alban:Well, I, when I was researching it, I was finding all these famous usages of when people would say Fisher cut bait. Sounds like it came from the colonial times and it was like the frontiersmen and women are saying oh, you either need to help make a decision or you got to get out of the way and help and somebody else made the decision. And it got picked up by politicians in the 1800s who were often saying to like a legislature, you need to pass a law, or you need to get out of here so that somebody else can come in and pass a law and make a decision about this. And so there were all these like event these you know colorful characters, you know Sir Richard Farnsbottom or something like some famous legislator. It would say you would always say this. And then there's a bunch of presidents from the 50s and 60s who would say it. And now now we're talking about it on our podcast, so maybe this will help inform people.
Kevin:And now it's generally accepted that there are kind of two meanings, two interpretations of how you can apply it, but one of them is clearly wrong.
Alban:Yeah.
Kevin:Like. One of them is like at some point people started misinterpreting what the saying was, but enough people had misinterpreted it over time that now it's generally accepted that both can be correct. Yeah, I think that's also interesting. Like that, we can get something wrong enough for long enough that it just becomes correct, isn't that weird?
Alban:Yeah, that definitely happens. There's so many phrases that or words that end up having two meanings, sometimes opposite meanings, and both of them are acceptable. Yeah, the word cleave it can mean to separate or to join together. The word cleave it can mean to separate or to join together, like think of the Bible verse a man should leave his father, mother and cleave to his wife. To his wife, you know you should join with your wife, not be like enmeshed in your own family when you're married.
Alban:But then if you cleave food, you know you're cutting you're separating the food, and English has there's a word for this, but it's all these words that mean two things that are exact opposites. We have like flammable and inflammable. Both mean it can start on fire. So sometimes people will say this is inflammable and people are like, oh great. And like no, it could be come inflamed and burn you up. But sometimes they mean it to mean no, this will definitely not catch on fire, which is like this we really need to know which of these two it is.
Kevin:Yeah, and I think I asked this of Jordan in the last recording that we did, but she said something about Tom's famous podcast stats talk and I asked you about like cause I've heard people say the same thing in a positive way when they use the word infamous.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:But Jordan clarified for me that really infamous means like famous for a not good reason. So it's a little bit.
Jordan:It's a little bit negative but there's also, like I don't know, I think of like the folklore heroes who are infamous but everyone like loves them. So you know, you think of like Robin Hood, or you know, uh, bush, cassidy or whatever you know. So you have all these people who are like outlaws and so they live in infamy, but they're also like folkloric heroes in a way, and so I could see how it would get turned around where, like, infamy is a good thing.
Kevin:You got a weird language.
Alban:Yeah, it is definitely confusing. I feel bad for everybody who learns English as anything other than their first language, because there's so many little tips and tricks and nuances that you know you can be paying attention to this stuff for 60 years and still have no clue what you're talking about.
