to podcasting 2.0 for September 18 2020. This is episode number
three, our first board meeting. Bo, AR D, Bo R Ed. Reinventing
something reimagining a lot. It's time. We have a quorum. I
believe I hear Dave Jones there. Dave, my partner in podcasting
index.org
Second emotion you put out?
We have literally not spoken to each other. I think we talked to
each other on the phone since the last podcast. I
don't think so. Absolutely not.
That you've also been heads down because you've had a lot going
on at work. And we both have actual other day jobs.
You have like 16 podcasts you're doing right now.
Yeah, it's nice though, because the studio is getting a lot of
use. And I got my new my new desk coming, which I've been
waiting for. Oh, man, three months now I think accustomed as
well coming. Hopefully next week, you know, this is the guy
drew drew T who I found here in Austin, who moved to California.
Yeah, exactly. So you know, Joanie to the desk, he's like,
alright, I'll put mine on hold. And he made the actually made
the table. That's a nice ass table doesn't quite show up,
right? In the new studio settings, I guess?
Is it going to have like a, like a stain? Or is it gonna be raw
or what? Like,
no laminated mines will be the one I have. Now. It's, it's a
geek desk. So it's adjustable in height up and down. Yeah, I've
had this for years, I've had this for gosh, I want to say six
years, I had two of them actually one point. And the
motor, still a good knock on wood. So just replacing the
whole top with an entire new custom custom setup. And it's
custom for me because I like to take the same rig that I use
here at home in the studio when I'm going on the road. So it has
to continue. It's not going to be rack mounted. Basically, I
decided on this portable rig just so much easier, man, even
just having a different laptop on the road, and you fire that
thing up. It's like, Oh, hold on, why don't you wait a day?
Well, Windows 10 figures out where you've been all this time.
You see like you're totally deconstruct double mean you can
take the whole thing apart and just throw it in a case and take
it away.
Not even that it's just I got an over the shoulder camera bag.
That's that's the majority of it. And I put the microphone
boom arm in the suitcase. And then I have a little I have a
small roller bag, which I can just put all kinds of stuff in
and and I'll put the screens in there because I got three I was
a surface Surface Pro six I think and and then I have two
screens.
Just surface go on I
have the surface the surface go is my go to machine. That's my
daily driver running Ubuntu. I love that machine. It's I mean,
I can't take advantage of any of the touchscreen or any of that.
But it's just such a nice small little keyboard the format's
perfect, you can clap that thing up. Almost put it in your back
pocket, take it along. I liked that thing a lot.
But in it slow. Like, I've heard everybody knocks on it because
it's slow. And if you're running like virtual machine with Ubuntu
or arm Yeah, I'm
running virtual machine.
You're getting away with it. Well, I have the
SSD. So I got the eight gig. Was it eight gigs of RAM memory?
Yeah. And then I think it's 256 gigs SSD, that the SSD is what
makes all the difference as usual. Yeah. And yeah, so I have
a virtual machine on a USB drive, which I do. I mean,
that's my whole my whole life is on a USB drive. And I have it
installed on three different computers.
That's weird as comic strip blogger run in Linux on his
iPad. I still don't understand it's somehow I wrote example
code in it. I saw it
I saw it. Well, let's first of all, let's This is the two
thirds of the of the organizations here. So this is
an actual kind of partner board meeting and we haven't really
updated each other there's a lot a lot of stuff to cover since
because we kind of Yeah, we opened up the you know, the call
the launch but the the API is open we've got to some people
let me just make sure that I've that I've got that I've got
everybody here on the list. I so for we we had pod news who have
integrated podcasts index.org with their search, then we have
fireside which is Dan Benjamin. Now and he's now
Dan Benjamin. Five and
Dan Benjamin has like 18 Different companies.
Okay.
He's Uh, he's here in Austin. And he actually integrated
pretty early on I had somehow I didn't really see that he had on
that, because you gotta let me know people when when, when
you've done something. Yesterday we had the Captivate launch,
which is really nice because they did a whole professional
press release. And it was fine. I was like, Oh, let me write a
quote from me. Let me see what I'm going to say. What do you
think of my quote, I liked my quote, there's like,
I was beautiful. I mean, it was like it was it was so it was
amazing. You blew me away with that, please. Like, you know,
they get the MCO it would have been, that's great.
But you'll get to do your quotes, as many as you were many
as that's great. By the way, Dave is in Unit server room and
a data data warehouse where yes,
sorry, as I got I got UPS units blowing. It's okay.
So if people are wondering what the noises, we even move my mic
now I don't worry about it. We have a full on full on
integration into the hyper Capture app. I think that's
using it. Now. They're using us completely, or they have their
own user search. That's okay. Yeah, he's
switched over to search for us. But then he's using I think he's
still pulling the feeds locally for that, which to me is great.
Yeah.
That's great combo. It's a great combo. So what am I now besides
when we want to talk about some people, some some developers
who've come in and some of the things that it might be actually
easy if I say, Okay, here's what I'm seeing, you could tell me
what's really going on because we opened up a mastodon
instance, which I think is probably a good idea.
That turned out when you first said that I was like, oh, man,
it's another place to check. I'm not sure how that's gonna work.
But then, like he's turned out. And that's been great. It's been
really great to have like a direct pipeline. But I like
Mastodon because it's not. It's not. What I don't like about
things like Slack, is that they expect you to be all over them
all the time. It's so instant. And it's like it just, it just
tethers you to a certain thing, or slack is easier. Slack
is completely evil. It is ruining children in our
corporations in America. I have invested in it because of this
reason. I like wow. I should buy some show. Yeah, I made like
$800 or something on just before the lockdown like, and then I
saw it go all the way down like Oh, I'm fucked down here. I just
let it sit. And then I was like, oh, okay, made some money.
Because I had seen it. I knew what slack was. It's like, I
know, Microsoft is going after them with teams. And then with
zooms, crack, but it's well, it's and the kids don't like it.
I mean, yeah, they do. But I think it's destructive because
you can create the private channels and bitch and moan
about people and then of course, an admin you know, can be
convinced for the CEO to go look at those channels. He just saw a
bad idea and it's in your pocket. It's bleeping has got
bad counts everything he's mastered crack is corporate
crack. Yeah, it is. It is the BlackBerry of social networks.
That's a pretty good, pretty good.
That's that's a terribly accurate. So.
So the mastodon instance, and I decided to eat my own dog food,
because I'm always telling everybody and you don't need
these, these. You don't need to go Silicon Valley companies for
things doesn't GitHub, of course. Now I was also really as
Microsoft. Although it's still functioning the way it should,
as far as I can tell. But there's this kid think isn't
just a kid, things Hugo, he may be in Portugal, actually. And a
couple years back when I was sitting up, no agenda
social.com. I found this Masto dot host ma s t o dot h o s t.
And he does virtual instances. I think it used to be six, like
five euros a month. And his basic plan is now nine. But I
think the most you you can go up to for really a full on full
blown instance, is like 39 euros. So I took some middle
tier option, but the guy is really good. And he gets it up
and running for you pretty quick. And I've never had a
problem with it.
It's so is it one of those. So is it like go to a website and
launch it? Or is it like you contact him and say, hey, I want
it can you tell me something and he just you know, you
go to a website Masto dot host and and you input everything and
then it says okay, we'll send you an email. Now I set this up
one evening, and there was a screen that came back. It's 4am
Now in Portugal, but the minute our staff Hugo wakes up. Right
this right on this for
you? Wow, man, he's Johnny on the spot.
Yeah, well, and he has quite some infrastructure. He's good.
I don't know. I've just seen him flourish. And I'm really, really
happy because that's the kind of thing that especially because of
the federated nature of it, can work can work really well just
for small groups. And this is the first test I've done outside
of no agenda social. So it's podcast, index dot social. And
you can get a click on the invite from our developer page
API dot podcast index.org or hit us up if you need one. So yeah,
That seems to be working pretty well. And within a short amount
of time, I think we have 50 people on there a combo of
users. Developers, we saw a young master Trent come in who
was here in Austin, and he's doing some design on the, on the
web pages itself. Of course, the infamous comic strip blogger who
I have to say is impressed me to a great degree with his with his
insight and coding skills. And, you know, I've had a long, long,
long relationship with comics through blogger going back to
the pretty much the beginning of podcasting daily source code
days. That's Dutch. Now he's polish. Okay, I think he's Yeah,
I'm not sure what nationality he has. But I think he comes from
Poland. And, yeah, he's he's doing some code, and you seem to
be vibing with him?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, he puts out stuff. And I mean, I've like
half. Well, I split off the GitHub organization to split it
off into two, two groups. Now we have all the all the the podcast
index proper stuff in them. Now we have a separate organization,
for example, code. And literally two thirds of the example code.
org is, is comic strip blogger.
What kind of what kind of code is this? What did these bits of
code do?
Well, there, I've been real happy because people have been
posting example code and just taking the format and the
template of the other, I guess, I think Mr. Bulger kind of
started this whole thing. It basically just has his code in a
certain style naming convention. And the way he does it with the
API key separated and that kind of stuff. And he so he kind of
set the standard, and everybody's just kind of falling
in when other people submit or example code. They are pretty
much just kind of following that same format. Works great. Yeah.
The star naming
Yes. starts the beginning that just kind of sticks. And
everybody does. That is beautiful. Yeah, it's working.
Now. It's also where there's stuff that will do that will
regret, regret and 20 years from now, like, fuck, why did we do
that?
Oh, yeah, we may regret this little thing in six months.
So the code that he's submitting is that code for integrating
into different languages. So you can access the API or so it's
just like a star. Hello, World type thing?
Yeah, it's all hello world to get hooked up to the API. So
there's one and there's a there's go, there's Node js,
there's Swift, C sharp, Java. Python, Lisp, and flooded the
list now not all these are coming through blogger he's,
I think, wasn't one of our how someone on podcasts index dot
social talking about doing a what is the not vi but emacs
doing an emacs integration? Is that what the
list was for? And maybe Yeah,
I think I saw someone posting a guy always wanted to pod a
podcast app in my Emacs. Oh, that's what Now that's cool.
That's, that's very weird. But I think Yeah,
Matt, is the guy's name that that did the E lisp. I don't say
his last time he is the guy that did that.
For those of you tuning in wondering, is this just about,
you know, a bunch of coders? No. We have has set this up as a
project to see kind of where the community takes it. We have some
general ideas and, and some, some vision of what we want to
do with it. Obviously, there's a little bit of confusion or not
as much as I expected. People saying, Oh, how do I how do I
get my my podcast in the index? And that seems to be something
that we could focus on right now. As I said, we already have
a couple people who have systems that help you list into the
index. Do we have other apps or or posters or anything on the
horizon? I saw Todd Cochran hanging around Don't worry, he's
going to participate.
I don't know. I hadn't heard anything on that. No. CEOs
rss.com Those guys, aren't they? Are they auto submitting?
Ah, yeah, I think so. Who were they again? I remember seeing
them I know that we're going to
I think I think transistor may be as well. transistors. What's
wrong with the last show? John Buddha is the guy's name it that
from transistor. He was a melt a couple of times. The I think
those are the ones we know to talk about that for a second.
You know, there's no real public way to add feeds to the to the
index and I I am completely comfortable with that at the
moment. Me too. Me too, you know, go ahead, there's so much
sensitivity around duplicate feeds and feed fraud and that
type of deal. And what what I would really love more than
anything is to is for the like, for the developer portal to be
the only place to add feeds for, for the foreseeable future. And
for most of the feeds and the podcast, data to come in, from
podcast networks and publishers, right, because we, I mean, we
trust those guys, we already have a system set up where in
order to you can't add a feed, except manually through the
developer portal. Or if unless you have a read write API key.
And you have to ask permission, you have to request that and we
review and review each one of those to make sure it's not
some, you know, janky, made up Gmail address. And then, you
know, if for batch adding a feeds to the index, you have to
have a publisher key. And that's a manual process, you can't even
request that. So for people like, you know, transistor and
captivate in, in these guys, fireside that they can get a
publisher key. And that makes the whole process is simple for
them. And also, it makes sure that we don't get in a situation
where we have somebody just dumping garbage feeds into the
index, of which we can roll that back we, we have a we have logs,
but we also have a table that records every fee to get added
and which developer account it came from. So if we notice
shenanigans in there, we can immediately Yeah, we
can take it down the line and find out contact people or
contact and say, Hey, what's going on, figure out who's doing
what to whom,
yeah, and if it was, if it was shenanigans, we can, we can just
roll it back and take all those feeds out, somebody dumped 100,
you know, fraud fades in there, we can just pull it out.
So I like this a lot, because it really brings together the
entire community. And I would say most hosting companies are
you know, they're commercial, but they're independent and
commercial in nature. So if you're hosting a podcast, if
you're using one of these, one of the services, you know, shoot
him an email and ask him to add to add the podcast index.org to
their feed submission process, which I think most of them have
now.
Yeah. And I don't and it's, it's so easy for them. I mean, like,
it doesn't really require much code at all. And they me it's
really just a single API call when somebody creates a new
feed, if they want to auto submit, or like Captivate, did
they just put a, you know, an extra button on their page that
says, Oh, do you know, do you want to submit to Apple, all
these other ones will also know about this one, too. I mean,
what what I would like I don't know how you feel about this.
But I would like there to be the same process in reverse as well.
So like, one thing I think we need is an eighth is an API
call. That just lists basically every feed that has been added,
basically a firehose of feeds that have been added. And so if
somebody let's just say, somebody else out there is
running an index as well, or a director,
want to get our updates, then we can just blow it to him,
whatever they're missing. Yeah,
you don't have to scrape as they don't have to pull it. They
don't have to,
please, let's not scrape people.
Yeah, don't don't do that. We're gonna give you every possible
way to get everything in the index. And if as far as like, if
all these other publishers and networks are pushing to us, then
we'll just pump it right back out. Exactly. Just follow that
one single fire hose feed, and you don't have to even scrape or
anything, and you'll get it all.
I think it's really interesting how, what we'll see how it goes.
But as you were saying, there was a lot of I think it's died
down now. But there was some conversation about, you know,
bogus submissions and fraud feeds. That was that was that's
a big one. Right? I think the fraud feed is really something
that gets mitigated when we have, you know, the partnership
of hosting companies and submission interfaces in between
us and the person with the feet. I think that that's that's kind
of cool idea. Like it's a very federated type of a way of doing
it and I think it keeps it clean but also still removes the
process of Oh, please someone approve it. No, you're in as
long as you're not you know, as your partner that you're doing
your feed with. Sanctuary Okay, with, it's good by us. That's
some version of trust there. I think it's good.
But you know, if you're, if you're, let's just be honest,
there's not a lot of podcasts out there that do what you do.
So you have your own CDN. you host your feed from your dynojet
to feed and Mofaz feed from end to end this feed from your own
location. So you're completely independent on the distribution
side. And that's not very common, most, most podcasters
are going to go through a publisher or some sort of
network. And they'll pay, you know, they'll pay for hosting or
whatever they need to do. And so if that's let's just say, I'm
making up numbers here, and let's just say that's, you know,
80% plus of podcasts or follow that model, then a loosely
coupled system of directories, like let's just say blueberry,
captivate a transistor, all these guys, Lipson, let's just
say they're all feeding into podcast index, and then we're
feeding back out to all of them. Well, when Lipson adds a new
feed, it shows up in the fire hose now blueberry, and all the
rest of them can pick it up. We all distribute amongst each
other. And then what you have is not a single silo of feeds,
right? You everybody participates? And if one element
of that goes goes down, if Apple goes off the radar, or, you
know, whatever, the other ones, yeah, then the whole thing still
stands.
I like that a lot. What I'm missing, the one thing I
expected to see someone show up doing is a very simple web based
search interface. Just a webpage that has Oh, search the index.
Yeah, yeah. It's like It's like the easiest app to make. Any web
developer I think can do it. Yeah. It's just a simple web
search. And then you can everything's there. You can make
beautiful results pages. You can you can add icons for people to
subscribe. It's such an such an obvious one. I think it's too
big that people can't see how, Oh, I could do that. Because
we're not doing it. You see, that's, that's what that's what
is so different. I think about our approach is we don't want to
compete for your, for your let's just call it your customer. We
want to provide you with all the plumbing, and everything else is
needed to preserve this to keep it going. I mean, we just saw
Amazon launch. Was it yesterday? I think,
yeah. What do you think about that?
Well, I of course, when, when you have something like that you
immediately download the app. I don't use any. That's not true.
I do use one or 2/3 party apps from my, my smartphone at home.
So I loaded the Amazon Music podcast app, and immediately no
agenda. What's in there, no agenda. There's a shitload of no
agenda, but not our show. Which is good because I had not
submitted it. But what was interesting is just before we
started today, I received an email and it says your podcast
is now on Amazon Music sent to Adam mccurry.com. So if they
were polling feeds, that's a now of course, I have an account
with Amazon. But I've never logged into their podcast area.
I've never submitted anything. Hello, podcaster. I'm getting
all giddy over the personalization. Hey,
broadcaster, like hey, loser. Yeah, we're, we're excited to
let you know that Amazon Music has launched podcasts. I'm
reading it with emphasis intended, check out our shiny
new Amazon Music podcast homepage. And if you click on it
on your phone, of course, he goes straight to an app store,
which I didn't want. I guess I can I think I can log in on the
browser here. Oh, yeah. Let me just double check. Okay, so
looking at it right now and they've got it's very It's very
typical, the top serial 99 Invisible What the fuck with
Marc Maron radio lab? What's Trending? I'm not sure how they
know what well of course we know how they know what's trending.
No Rogan zero Rogan? I think he's in there. But he's not
being promoted because they're going after they're going to
also silo a whole bunch of talent. No, Rogen is not in
there. Now, okay. And if I do no agenda, quite interesting. What
I come up with it's a lot of it I've seen on on the index on
podcast index.org. Here, there's no shows but no agenda, Sundays,
no agenda chat. So we're not in there. But they kind of act like
it and I had to read the email a couple times, because you come
upon this line. If you've already submitted your podcasts
to our service. You can search for your show here, which I just
did. Click on search fields a bag is a bag Yep. Click on the
search field. Enter your show name under podcast section. You
should see your show art. All you need to click a click on see
all clicking your show or it will take you to Amazon Music
Show page. You can grab your show page link by copying the
URL. And then it says For details on how to add a listen
on Amazon Music button. They don't really say, like, hey,
submit if you're not on here.
So does that mean you have you have essentially, does that mean
that no agenda has a like a shadow page on there could be
and if you do activate it, then this like, boom, you're in
there?
Well, I don't see where you'd activate or so here's the
podcast, but you'd have to have some kind of
like go to your page and do all this kind of stuff.
I don't have a I don't have a login, you know, I don't have a
I'm not a pills, like they get you teed up to where I mean,
it's like, even if you blink wrong, you're in there.
Well, with me that would add everything I own so much
blinking. Yeah, true. So anyway, I think we just became more
relevant with what we're doing to ensure to ensure that there's
a lot going on, I mean, Amazon their initial Terms of Service,
which I did see, because they I know they sent that to me. I saw
that early, early on, which I think they went back and change
stated, you sign up for this. You can't say anything
disparaging about Amazon or Amazon products. And there was a
bit of outrage over that small bit. And I think that got
removed from the terms of service, but I've never signed
up. So I'm not in there.
Anyway, and that's that's a personal decision that that you
made, right? Yeah, just yeah.
Yes, it is. I mean, I haven't really discussed it with with my
partner Divorce Act, but I think he would agree. Yeah, you know,
people already know how to get their podcast. It's when Google
Play first started. And and that's another you can't, you
can't opt out of Google Play, you have to put a piece of code
in your feed. So Google knows not to index it.
Oh, like a robots dot txt. Yeah, no, that
literally, that is also an option. But that will take
several weeks. If that won't show up. Of course, in Google
search, they claim if you say I don't want I don't want it
listed there. And I just keep my eye on it. I'm not really
against against it, per se. But if it has to be through an app,
and now it's I don't want it it's like you're making money
off of our of our product, and people can get it any other way
they want. And how hard is it to just push another app? Yeah, no,
I'll be I think, can be Disney plus, and Netflix and all that
no one box overs an app. And that's where you can get other
stuff. And I'd like it to be a multitude of cool apps.
But you know, all you're doing really, when you participate in
that, and I'm not criticizing him, but he does. But the real
thing is, when you participate in that sort of siloed system,
you're just perpetuating that, that propensity to, to build
another silo and create more exclusive content. And, you
know, the, the exclusive the exclusivity has been in the, you
know, video game world has been in the book, the book publishing
world has been there for for a long time. But now it's in the
podcasting world, and ever, and there's this go this land grab
to try to get the next exclusive thing into me, those aren't
really even podcasts. I mean, if it doesn't have a feed, it's not
a podcast, it's just a, it's just a show.
Exactly. Exactly. So it's just
like, all you're doing is protect, you know, like, if, if,
if you say, Okay, I want my stuff in in your silo, well,
then everybody, let's just say you have 10,000 of the most
popular podcasts, those 10,000 Just give legitimacy to that
silos ability to have five exclusive shows that nobody else
gets to have, right. So they they're just using your product,
yes, to build their to build their own exclusive product that
you can't have.
And we're and we're going to run into a much bigger problem, I
believe, because we've already kind of sold ourselves and our
souls down the river with the whole app ecosystem, which you
could have seen coming. I think we talked about on the last week
of the first episode. It's very possible that someone who says
although we have apps that are doing it, someone says, oh, you
know, you've got this app, you connect to this open index, and
as Google Play said about some apps for Mastodon servers, or
maybe all of them are where you can connect to horrible hate
speech. It's very possible that that will get rejected, then the
podcast app will get rejected from the stores. That's how far
we've let it come. So I would say in addition to just a great
page where you can search and play around with some podcasts
and you could add all kinds of functionality in there. A lot of
podcast apps will take an OPML feed of Rs OPML file of RSS
feeds, you could have that import into your app. And
there's a million things you can do. But how about just a plain
old web app? It would be great. I would love to have a web app
for my iPhone will be fantastic.
It's just a, just a wrapper around search and play. Yeah.
So that's the kind of stuff that I'm looking for. And I think
that it's becoming more clear to the developers that I've seen
and witnessed the numbers that are showing up like, Okay, wait
a minute. And this is something that legit, we can build out and
tell me about some of the stuff that has come up. I've seen a
lot of talk about categories, languages, geography, or Geo
coordinates. Has, where are we in that, because I saw a flurry
of activity, I'm not sure what's going on with it.
That's where most of my work has been, over the last couple of
days has been with categories. And we were tossing around some
ideas on GitHub, about about how to do that. And I'm trying to
resist my tendency, which is to like Blow, blow the whole thing
up and create something more simplistic, but that's not
necessarily the best idea always. I think James at pod
news has, has brought a little bit of balance to that. And I
think what we're going to do is basically a hybrid. In the apple
podcast categories, have always bothered me, because I have this
just sort of innate dislike of hierarchy of hierarchical
category systems. I don't want I don't it's, it's not a digital
native type process. So there's, to me, there's no, there's no
reason when you have a database or something that's fast search,
where there's no reason where you should have hierarchy in
your categories. I much prefer just a flat labeling
you mean? So if you so if you need to walk the tree, more or
less, you have to go into stuff? Is that what you mean? I mean,
I'm thinking simplistically, of course,
well, so like, in, in Apple's category system, you have games
and hobbies. And then as a sub category of games and hobbies,
you have video games. So got it. Like, to me, I don't, I just
don't understand the reason for the hierarchy.
Seems to me like that hierarchy can be created, after the fact
the way someone wants to present the data.
Yeah. See, that's the thing. Oh, my God,
I'm a developer.
Yeah, I'm gonna push this code to you, you can finish it for
as long as it's go, I don't programming anything else?
Oh, you only go on an iPad. Okay. All right. You're good. So
I don't, I just don't understand the reason for that. And first,
there's must be something within Apple proper, the way they like
that stuff, because a lot of their stuff is hierarchical. And
I just don't get it. But that's, you know,
well, to be fair, because of the way they operate. They are both
sides of the equation. So they're the guy. They're the
guys that have the index. And they also have the app, and
they've got the phone, and they've got the people and
they've got the whole the whole kit and caboodle. And they want
to they have their own idea of how they want to present things.
Because ultimately, I think categories always comes back to
what's popular. What's the chart look like? You know, it's it's
going to come back to that. And it may it's for advertising
purposes, it may be handy, but I agree with you. You can just
have video games, handheld games, console games, PC games,
iPhone games. And then on the back end, anybody who has an I
think that gosh, I'm just realizing that now I'm
understanding it. Any kind of way you want to surface that
data to make your own categories. So we don't know
there's no fight. Right?
Okay, that's exactly right. So the, what we, you, you kind of
nailed it because so what we've ended up settling on is both,
okay, so you have you have the standard Apple category list,
which everybody kind of adheres to nab, buddy, everybody
understands it fine. Okay, whatever. So, but then also,
what we did is we took the that Apple Categories list and just
basically duplicated it and converted it into just a flat
flat list. Okay, and that yes, and that goes in tandem, or how
does that work? That's it. We're just keeping one set of
categories is fencing in there.
That will fit? I don't know. Well, actually.
Yes, he will. Select.
Fencing is not in there now.
See, what's up with that. But well, how do I get it? How do I
get a category out? And that's your
that's your sport, right? Yes. In your sport.
I 40 years ago, I was quite good.
Okay. But you're still, if you did a fencing podcast today and
that had a category you would be number one tomorrow would be
number
one on the charts. Yes.
But Cricket Cricket is in there. On cricket. Yes.
Yeah. Okay. So but that's what it's about. We question the
categories ever get added as this? were set in this good? And
what if some new economic model appears? Can we never have a
category for that or a different country?
Yeah, I think that the categories expand very slowly
and with much deliberation, because the way this is gonna
work is that so you have an apple category list, you had
hobby, there's a category a top level category called hobbies
and games or games, hobbies, I don't remember which order it
comes in. So it's hobbies and games. Well, now we have a label
games and a label
hobbies. Okay? And you can combine those two boolean.
Exactly. So what we'll do is if, if somebody in the metadata that
we return when somebody wants to say this podcast has these
categories, we will have the list of categories, hobbies,
games, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, blah. But they will also have
something something if they if they request it in APA format
will give it back in hobbies and games.
I hate to be a douche about it. Dave
ditional up the
fenced in podcast, Tokyo 2020 fencing podcast British fencing
be you be different fencing, podcast fencing, the exceedingly
complicated sport you claim to be master of fencing fanatics,
USA fencing, Coach education, the fencing update, I would have
to work real hard man to be number one in that category.
If you get in there. You're going to be an also ran p are
not even going to be
listed. People. Yeah, people make one of these searches for
yourself. This is great. Is this is so fun. You said
the saw somebody on Twitter the other day? I think it was
somebody got retweeted and they said good morning, everyone.
Just a reminder, you don't have to start a podcast.
Like, yeah, of course
million and a half of which, which also seemed the only
category thing. That's why I've not really been too concerned
about it. Some people have been like, you don't have categories?
What the hell? I mean, like, what do you do it? What do you
been thinking? And I knew we would get to and I mean, we're
gonna get there eventually. But and we're doing it right now.
But the same time? Okay, there's one and a half million podcasts
out there. Like, what does it? What does the category really
get you? I mean, I think everybody's gonna go into the
index and say, Okay, show me all the news podcasts and
wants to see this. This is the thinking, which I've never, I'm
not so sure it works that well, the thinking is, go look at look
at it. I mean, if you look at Amazon, or you look at Spotify,
or look at Apple, that's literally what they have news,
podcasts music podcast. So it's their vision of their consumer,
which I think is probably right, that's typical Apple consumer
probably thinks that way. Yeah, you know, if it were me, I'd be
like, I'd like a category, Public Radio. You know, to me,
it's just tags, really. And that brings me to my next question,
which is, how good is the search? The search that we have
right now? How good is it?
That I think that's gotta be an open discussion, because I think
I haven't not found what I'm looking for yet. And that's but
let's see, I think that comes back to the fact that it just
like, just like you, I've been in the computer world so long,
that I, there is an art form to searching for things true. And
you like I see it every day with text, you know, tech support as
part of my job. And as I see it every day of people that just
don't understand the art of search. And so since you know
that when you go to Google for something, some of that I can
Google for it and find something in 15 seconds, right? Whereas
somebody who's not used to the way that search is supposed to
work, can they can spend hours and not find what they need.
So I think our surfing search is not Boolean. Oh, right.
No, it is not Boolean right now. Okay. But I think we're Really
what it what the discussion needs to revolve around. And
this is what I was trying to get at is that I don't I don't think
I'm a good candidate to tell you how good the search is because I
kind of know how it works. But I think the open discussion needs
to be, which pieces of metadata get indexed, and become
searchable? Because I think that really dictates the whole thing.
Because at first what we were doing is we were indexing,
podcast title, a description field, and it was getting
everything in the world, right. But we backed that off to just
title. iTunes, owner name tag. There's about three pieces of
data that we're indexing and what what that helped was now
you can type in like New York Times, and you can get all the
New York Times podcast, but you don't get everybody who
references New York Times in their description field. Right.
So I think it's pretty good. But I think it can get better if
people just want to pipe up and give us advice. Yeah, yeah.
Because I've seen some searches where it does spit back just too
much. You know, I really liked just getting the show. Yeah,
Episode search. I mean, it's something that is, I'm totally
open to, but I've never used an episode search. It's just not
how, how I think about when I'm looking for a podcast, like, can
I find there's over 30 million? Yeah,
exactly, exactly. I think that's the direction Apple wants to go
with transcriptions and the transcribing some stuff for some
podcasts and hosts files for some hosts and stuff. So they're
doing something about it, and they hired some kind of
executive.
I just don't see that being being useful at all.
What do you see as being most useful?
Well, you know, I think it's really just tart is targeted mid
metadata. Or maybe the other idea that you could come at
would be just denote a stop word list is? Hmm, maybe. Okay. So
like, if you're Google, or us, or you're doing some sort of
search algorithm, you want to have a humongous list of words
that just don't register. So you want to have like, like the, and
as, yeah, of course, you want to say, I don't ever want to even
touch I don't want to index these words at all. Right? The
better the better. The search, usually, the bigger their stop
word list is. And so me your stop word list can be, you know,
100,000 words or more right, of things that just are polluting
to they pollute your index and don't help. Right. So I think, I
think the way I would the way I've envisioned it in my mind is
that eventually, we will have a very large stop word list. And
we will begin to index does the Description field but where the
stop word list will be robust enough to cut the noise out?
Because when you because that brings in some cool stuff, like
people's names? Yeah. You know, things like if you're looking
for some somebody's name that you wanted to see, they maybe
had an somebody interviewed this person, and I've got a unique
name that would bring that in. I kind of see it go in there. But
I really do think that this is a place where people can can
really help.
It's interesting. I was just asked to review and comment on
an academic book about podcasting. Oh, really? Yeah.
And well, actually was, we are with my book as in final edits.
Would you please would you mind answering some questions? And
now I want to read your book first buyers to get permission
from the publisher it's that Okay, finally got it. It's so
sad to see how the it's a perfect overview of commercial
radio going back to Tesla going back to Faraday actually, so the
way too much history about radio am FM very abbreviated history
of podcasting, but all along it's all about the commercial
aspect and who owned the stations and and what
advertisers and how can your business it's, you know, it's an
academic book, but it just seems it's all coordinated around how
do I make money which is kind of sad because and I think this is
where we where we can shine or people who connect with our
index and work on great new experiences, great new ideas,
because there's so much out there so many other ways to in
fact, this what we're doing here the whole thing is value for
value. All we ask is that you support us with your time, your
talent, your treasure, whatever you can. We've got a PayPal link
on the on the developer page on the homepage. I'm working on my
Bitpay a server.
Oh, did you get it? Oh,
yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
You sent me a screenshot. That's right. Yeah.
I need you to connect to my lightning node. So we can, we
can, yeah. Cool. See if we can pass stuff back and forth.
Yeah. We ever figured out if cash at this cash app, do
lightning, do it for you that yeah, they do like an API. They
didn't. Okay. Yeah, I'll send you some money.
Yes, send me some money. But those of you who want to support
the project, we got it. It was really great. We got a couple
$1,000 Since the launch, which is fantastic. How are we doing,
by the way on? On the server situation? I know you spun up a
couple more things. And yeah, what's the view?
Yes, it's gonna it's gonna die. We're about $250 a month at the
moment. And I think cool. So settle out somewhere between
that is somewhere south of three 300 is what I expect. And I
think that'll be fine for a while. Hopefully, that'll
that'll keep
that scales up is that something that Cloudflare then handles a
lot for or
with Cloudflare has been helping out a lot, just having them in
front of us. Yeah, that has helped a lot. Just taking some
of that net cash heat off of us. The one, the one thing we
really, that we do need help with? And this is something that
I just don't have any experience with? It's one of those things
that I know, I know about, but I've never implemented is rate
limiting. And because you can do it at a few different levels. If
we do it at the Cloudflare level, it's going to cost a lot
of money. It is unpredictable. Yeah. Or we don't know none. And
we don't want that. And so what we can do it at the nginx level,
or at the app level. And I probably preferred at the nginx
level. And so if anybody has, I'm going to, I'm going to be
digging into that soon. But if anybody has advice on, or sample
configs, or anything like that they can send that would also be
very helpful and valuable. But that's something we need just as
a fallback just to keep people from, you know, hammering this,
this system and taking it down by accident.
Yeah, cuz I think accident would be the only way you can really
hurt us. I don't see many other ways.
Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't really care about. I think it's
really just somebody that doesn't know that they're
hitting us too hard. I'm not overly concerned about somebody
who's doing something legitimate. I think we can
handle that.
Yeah. What else do you need?
Not a whole lot. I mean, there's, we're getting such
support from, you know, from people, I needed help with a
course config on Nginx.
Can you explain to me what that is? Because I looked at what is
this course thing? I've heard of it? I know it has something to
do with a browser, but I'm not quite sure.
Yes. CRS is cross origin. I think it's resource sharing,
cross origin resource sharing,
oh, is this a security thing that comes into play? Yeah.
So by a by design, web browsers, JavaScript running in a web
browser, is subject to the same origin policy. So it cannot
communicate with anything except the domain that it was served
from.
And so unless you have a course policy that allows it, is that
is that how it works?
Yeah, exactly. So we would have to allow, we had to set up on
our server, which we've done now, to allow other dumb
JavaScript reading mains to hit us.
I've seen this on the AWS bucket, probably. That's where
I've seen Oh, yeah. Before. Okay, so I understand this. I
got it. I got it. And so that's working now.
Yeah. Yes. Working on it. The only you know, of course, your
your risk there is that you open yourself up to a denial service
tech. But, you know, we got cloud for flare. So yeah,
hopefully that should that should mitigate it. We'll
bring that into play if necessary. So what
do you think is coming up in the well, you got a week and you've
had I know you've had a long week, you've been working?
Really I seen what you've been doing on on the index. I know
you also been doing your regular job. What do you see is as as
the timeline, where are we at what's just what is your feel?
I feel really good about things. I mean, I feel good about where
we're at so far with the category thing is a big hurdle.
Once we get that working well. Then I think, really the next
the next focus for me is going to be to stop and do some
infrastructure work. I need to slow down and make sure
everything's documented and make sure we all have our backup
procedures and everything to make sure that all that's
looking good. Just you have to stop every now and then to just
double check that stuff. And then it's and then next after
that is really just going to be shifting gears because here's an
here's an idea I've gotten and I want to I want to I think I
mentioned this to you the other day is is splitting, splitting
the API in a sense, okay, so what you had have in my mind is
you would have the API as it stands now, which is for
interacting with the index, which would be adding feeds.
complex query, adding retrieving queries, yeah.
Yeah, accomplished. Yeah, complex searches, things like
that. But then you would have, we would have this other thing.
Okay. And so the, it would be two object storage repositories.
So basically, it would be like miniature versions of s3. And
you can run that with a thing called min IO. Have you ever
heard of that?
Well, I saw you post about it for the image server. So that's,
what is it like just a little thing that does almost like an
application specific server?
Yeah, it's a it's like a binary in a bucket. Okay, gotcha. Yep.
It's compatible with the s3 protocol. It's, it's completely
it's completely self contained. It's
much cheaper. Let me guess. Free.
Which, which perfectly fits our lack of money? Yes.
This is fits within the business model. Very good.
Yeah. The Venn diagram between them and 100% overlap.
That's one big circle.
Yes. Yeah. So so the, the minio server, we can spin, we can spin
those up. They're lightweight. And then you basically it, it
takes a folder on your, on your Linux box, and turns it into the
bucket. So when you add them, they just show up.
You know, this is the thing. Dave Weiner was trying to make
happen. Man, this has got to be almost 20 years ago, he had
this, he called it the upstreaming folder. And he had a
little radar to this. Yeah, he had a little radio userland,
which was his app, which is basically you access it through
a web browser going through Port 5337. locally. And so you so
you, the app was just in the background, well, you know, kind
of his whole, it was like a scaled down version of frontier,
any any had this application that would create a folder on
your desktop, and whatever yours whatever your server settings,
were, I think at the time was probably FTP for most of it, you
just drop, drop it in there, and then it would appear and would
be in the cloud. Or on your server. It's the same, it's the
same system, which is, I think, the original kind of Dropbox
idea.
Oh, is that it? Was that all running on on the RPC cloud?
Type protocol?
Didn't know it, then? No, I think that no, well, maybe
later, but not in the beginning. But anyway, so I understand what
min IO does.
Yeah, so. So we, here so here's, here's the, here's the scope,
here are the the vision, we have two min IO servers. One is
called feeds dot podcast. index.org. The other one is
images dot podcast index, the index Oh, I feel
you, I feel you. And you can just mount you can just mount
that shit from any computer in the world, and you've got all
that shit in there.
Files. You don't you don't even need to hit the API. You don't
need to hit the API. You just if you have if you know the feeds
ID, you just say you just make a GET request to feeds dot podcast
index.org/the Feed ID slash, you know, the, the metadata file
name, whatever we're going to call it and you just made this
decision. It's the equivalent of calling the Get get feed by the
API.
except zero strain on the database. Exactly. Oh, yeah.
Like
we're, we're constantly and we would be constantly putting
those feeds out there. So anybody can get a well, you
know what? Okay, I know where you're going. Dave Jones, you're
not fooling me. I know what's next.
Maybe I don't know what's next. You film you reverse told me?
IPFS? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's obvious. IPFS is
perfect for that.
Because then you have the was it the IP NS the name system and
people were my IPFS people were my IPFS boys and girls.
Yeah, we need the app PNS stuff pointing to the object stores.
It's just like, completely static and it never changes.
And, and then, okay, so it's the same thing on the image side,
because James was talking about this the other day, he was
saying, he said, you know, he had two problems. He's like, I'm
uncomfortable. Just loading random images off the Alpha
million places on the internet.
Yes, that's that's a very valid point. Because you don't know
what's going to show up. I'm sure it's true. A lot of people
are like, oh, man, let me Put some cooling there.
Yeah, exactly. So he's like, I got that problem. And I've also
got the fact that when you do that is slow.
Because you're coming, you're coming from God knows where,
yeah, a million places. It's like if you load up an html5
podcast app, and you're, you're loading 25 podcasts on the
screen at once, and they're coming from all these different
language locations, you can see it in the search. Now on our
page, it loads slow sometimes,
yes, because of the images. And right now, because of something
we changed. Even though I truly interesting, you know, I
published a whole new feed, no aggregator I know of has picked
up the the changes to the images in the entire feed only for the
new episodes, that changed the URL, as you know. So all the
aggregators only, of course, look at the first one, but
here's the conundrum, or the new items, and they get the images
correctly. So for instance, now, the image for this podcast will
show up in the index, because even though I changed the feed,
the aggregator just has the old stuff in there, the only way I
think to do it, is to change the geo ID or the published date for
each individual item, which could probably trigger a huge
read download of hundreds of 1000s of apps. Totally Well,
that's why I don't do it's actually a flaw in the system to
fly to Florida system,
and see if that saved me the search for you in the index. I
think we picked you up.
Now. You're in there, but I think
now we get your data.
But if you do if you do podcasting 2.0
Is it still it cuz it hasn't updated yet? Right? Yeah, cuz I
haven't
updated the feed, even though the images are correct in the
feed. But yeah, I was like I've learned over the years. A bad
idea. Especially with no agenda where we have a lot of we push a
tariff, we get max at a terabyte per second. When I when I
correct Oh, yeah. Now that only lasts for I think, I want to say
10 minutes, and then they throttle it down.
See, that's what you are. That's why y'all you're the exception
is
unbelievable. So you know, when I fuck up something in the feed,
which I have done. It causes massive, massive problems.
Mainly people emailing me saying, What is this? It doesn't
work. I can't find it. Where's the file? iTunes doesn't like
it. It's not on Google Play. Stitcher is no, it's like, it
goes on forever, even to republish, it's just it's a bad
idea.
How many times do you double check and eyeball that feed
before you hit before you push it? Not enough? Not enough?
Not enough? No. This was still way too much manual work in
there. It's and it's Yeah, thanks. It's like, episode
number off by one, you know, or I've just know, there's a lot
more I should and could automate. And but it's just now
I have this whole checklist. And even then, you know, if I let's
put it this way, if it were if it was preflight for and I was
flying, I probably would have been dead by now. I've made so
many mistakes. So many mistakes.
Yeah. Yeah. The runway and
silly that shit. Right. In the in the river. Right. Yeah.
Anyway, that I'm really excited about that. That I think is a
fantastic idea. And this is part of the mission. And a lot of
people saying, well, well distributed well, here is the
opportunity, we can distribute the actual feeds. Interplanetary
wide. And that's sure there's many other ways to do it. With
IPFS, such as, I think IPFS is waiting for this.
I think so too. I think this is a great use case for it. Like,
and I like the the image thing. It was like dead simple. I mean,
we wrote, James mentioned that, I think, and we wrote that in
like a day. Right? It was like it was I mean, that's, that's,
it's working. So I mean, it pulls every you know, when a
when a feed hits, it pulls, it automatically pulls the image
and resizes it into four different resolutions and sticks
it in the object store. I mean, like, it's beautiful. I'm not
gonna, I'm not I haven't made it live yet. Because I'm just going
to make make. I don't want to get too deep into that yet. But
I think that is absolutely the direction to go. And we push it
through IPFS. And then we don't even have to worry about about
those calls hitting the index. I mean, hitting the API. And so
what and what we could even do is just like when I when a, when
an API request comes in to one of those endpoints for a feed,
we just redirect which 301 it over to the object store. It's
don't even pull out of the database.
I'm kind of jacked about this because it's such an I didn't
know we would get to this so quickly. It's such a beautiful
use case for IPFS high volume, lots of changes, global in
nature. Lots of people who can contribute and seed I mean, this
is tons of people can help see if we need that.
Yeah, we just see the hope. And we can, we could just see the
whole back end, you know,
we need the pen or the pens, I guess would be more accurate
description, use a pin servers. So we'd be a pin server. Okay.
But you want to have as many as possible, and then anybody can
help with that.
Yeah, I would love what I would love is to have have the IP and
IPFS stuff working. And then on the HTTP side, have people are
clone our server, you know, our sink or server or whatever,
whatever protocol, we figure out for that. And then we just have
multiple people that are running copies of it exactly like for
like for the image database. And then we can just round robin the
DNS. So that is coming from somebody, so we just share the
load. And that's another way people can can share value.
Well, you said it, we could share the load, I'm going to
give you the whole load today. You're triggering that shit.
At least once, at least, at least once.
Well, this, that that's a good, a good, yeah, good spot to be I
guess.
Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking, a lot of people, I
guess the the natural question is why? There's already some
directories and stuff like that out there. A what's the point?
Why are you? Why are you doing this? Again, so to speak, and
that our sort of our vision for this, obviously, is to preserve
podcasting as a platform for freedom of speech we want to
make that's, that's, that's the mission is to make where you're
everybody is not dependent on one single entity or entity,
corporate player, we're business to or an LLC. But basically,
that's just because we have to have some place to pay the
bills. And so the but the real, the real drive here, and the
real aim is to make it where the whole world of podcasting, which
is, on the technical level is chaos. And we've said this
before, but I think we've maybe not been super clear about it is
for anybody to get into this game, as a developer, or as we
look at look at Amazon music, for instance. It took them how
long? Yeah, bring up their system quite a while. Yeah, I
mean, months of work, to bring up their system, because they
get to build aggregators, they get to do all this jazz, to make
sure everything is normalized, they get data, it's a lot of
work. And so
you could have had a career Dave Jones,
yeah, I could have, instead of being the back end guy for the
no agenda show for two years. And which is not lucrative.
You got one dinner out of it so far.
I did. And creme brulee. Hey, it was you remember the crem brew
lay crap. crimper lay? Forgot what drink that was ahead is
like
do we got to fix is that where we went? I don't, I actually
don't remember it was down sort of like, is a few blocks away
from your house. And then it was on sort of a main drag that was
going down a hill? I don't remember. But then they had like
this. This drink. It was some sort of like gin or something I
forget. But it had like jalapenos and yah, yah, yah.
Yah, it was like, bathroom city the next day that she had and
jalapenos. They go fast. They go through
just renting him temporarily. Yeah, excellent. Well, we'll
just on that for a second. Just to reiterate this, I called you
and I said, Look, here's what I see happening. I see. We're
going to have the same kind of streaming wars where we have and
it's not really a war. But you know, I know people make
documentaries they pick to pitch them to Amazon, they pitch them
the Netflix and depending on what's going on in their world
and their their corporate mission, they either hot for it
or they're not hot for it. You know and this is how you
eventually wind up with stuff like cuties you know, there's
all kinds of stuff that that goes wrong and or is just it's
it's about commercial interests and stats and, and the art kind
of, in my opinion, the art kind of gets lost and you end people
get locked out pushed down and this was what happened
originally with with podcasting. Is that the surfacing of the
shows and anyone who was round and will remember the griping
and grunting and groaning it was all NPR was the safe stuff and
in fact that it, as we both talked about, the first thing
Kara Swisher pointed out when she heard about podcasts or
Steve Jobs is how do we? How do we tag that? You know if it's
bad or naughty or horrible words, and that is it. So when
we say preserving podcasting as a platform for free speech, that
is exactly what it's about. And in order to do that
platform, yeah, that's the key word. Yes. Yes.
Thank you and the planet, the reserve the whole platform, not
just not just the podcasters not Yes, it has to be everybody. And
and the group that never got the chance, in my opinion, is the
podcast app developers, people have players search people who
want to do charts, directories, indexes, highlights, whatever it
is you want to do. That's what we want to that's we want to
serve, and moving this to an interplant. That's what IPFS
stands for people who don't know interplanetary file system. Were
truly, it's just it's global distribution in nature, you
really can't take stuff down at a certain point, it's just out
there. And from our perspective, we might get lucky. And we'll
say, Oh, here's something that we can do that will provide
added value to the platform. But we realize there's no platform.
So that's what we're building. And the platform has been that
we have 50 people in the Macedon only how many are actually
developers, but I consider everyone to be developing one
way or the other end, the contributions will benefit
everybody, and everybody will be able to create whatever they
want. And we'll see where it goes. That's the 2.0 part. And
there's live lots of ideas. And you have ideas, and I see people
coming up with great, great questions and thoughts. Once we
get this part done. It should be easy.
I think that's the other. Maybe the other issue is, is that I
remember reading a while a while back, I forget how long ago this
was or even what it was about. But it was a guy talking about a
product that he had made. And it ended up being mildly
successful. And just to interject, though, we, for us
success doesn't mean that we make more money, success
probably means that money gets tighter, because the bills go
up. So do my job. Yeah, exactly. So when I say success, I just
mean success in the mission. So this guy was talking about how
he had built a product. It was a web based thing. And he said, he
got into the mindset of how he couldn't release the product.
Yeah, because he needed to add this new feature. And well, he
would add that feature. And he said, Okay, well, I can't Yeah,
but it's still not there yet. I gotta add this other feature.
Yeah. And he just kept doing this and doing this. And he made
this comment. And I will have never forgotten that this is
private 10 years ago. He said, there's never a time when not
having a product is better than having a product. Yeah, I'm in
total agreement. So they, we, we've opened up the podcast
index to people with a whole lot of warts, and, and crappy user
interface, and all that stuff. But the thing had to be it had
to live and it had to be out there. And so all that stuff, no
categories, these things are getting fixed on a weekly, daily
and weekly basis. And it is getting better. And but at no
point was not having an open source free index. Better than
having one. Even if it's not complete and, and some sort of
amazingly shiny thing that'll blow your socks off. I
totally agree. And I look forward to the day which will
happen when I can look at a smartphone screen. And yeah, I
may see Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and I want to see 4040 other
apps that do all kinds of crazy stuff with podcast. Yeah. And
they also because that that's the competition, you know that
your competition is now one icon on a, on a launch board from a
smartphone away. I mean, that's, that's, and it's for anybody to
have. I mean, personally, Spotify is interface is
atrocious. It doesn't start half the time. It's you know, it's
confusing where the video is. That's just their vision of it.
And they're so busy. Right now. They've got all kinds of
problems with with rogue feeds, etc. They're, you know, we know
what they're going through.
Like I saw so you sent me something that day is like half
their guys are like walking out in protest about Rogen or
something like
that, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a there's
a lot of stuff going on and No matter what happens with, with
Joe or any other show that may be exclusive to someone, The
speculation is enough. And that's what I've always said,
it's like when people know that there's a walled garden, just
like America Online eventually that like, you know, all you got
to do is get this one other app or here's this web app called
now liquid I can get, I can get everything I want. And if I want
to have, I want to do a podcast tomorrow, and it consists of me
burping, and do an ASMR, and a microphone, and I put and I put
it up through through blueberry, or any other any other system,
it'll be in the index and available immediately to however
many apps way before you get on to Apple.
And that that's the thing is is like, isn't that what we all
want is that is that if I add something, let's you know, going
back to the what we talked about at the beginning of this show of
this episode is like I think we all want a system where if I add
to blue, add on blueberry, or if I add on transistor, or if I add
on Lipson that it immediately becomes available and all these
apps that we don't have to wait for it to go through iTunes
review, or whatever they do. I mean, like, I think we all want
that thing to happen. Because that's a that is turning the
distributed world of podcasting into its own platform that does
not depend on someone.
And this will, right now if you have an idea for an audio book,
let's say you want to do chapters, with with with an open
system and an open platform, you can kind of do it however you
want. I guarantee you that Amazon if you have an audio book
that you want to publish as a podcast. I can't guarantee you
but I'm quite sure that eventually if not immediately,
they will say not enough. You belong over here in the audible
section. You don't belong in podcasts, and they're going to
tell you what this is. My problem with this academic book
is telling me what a podcast is bullcrap. A podcast can be I
just subscribed to one that I found in the index. I found that
on the carousel, it said President Trump's speeches and
well that's handy. And really and lo and behold
podcast of only the speeches. Yeah, Trump
that is so interesting is
that should be that should it be for every president.
Oh my god, it's it's actually this has speeches by the First
Lady by President Trump. Someone's also doing
Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. In that cool. That is so
interesting, man. What? Like that.
So that's what there's nothing against that doesn't have to be
a show. That's a service that's a public C span should be doing
this. Oh, yeah. I've already said before, I think I know
agenda C span should do a podcast feed which is called
that we call it podcast of the callers with all the crazy
callers crazy callers, man, that's that I would listen to
that every day. Just give me a couple of those.
That'd be great.
I mean, the way I saw it the way I envisioned it, original way
back in the day, even before pod show slash medio was Why can't I
just have a weather report prop up for my area code, or my city
or my state? Then every morning when I when I go to look at
what's happening? What's new. Oh, there's the weather report.
Now it's a silly example because it's probably easier just look
at it on your phone and look at the pretty sun and the and the
clouds. But there's a lot of things that can be done like
that.
Oh, yeah. podcast I listened to called storage center from the
internet storm, the internet storm cast, that's what's called
for the guys that I've seen. It's basically just a five
minute daily publishes every morning, a five minute daily
review of the previous day's cybersecurity news. And I have
to listen to it every day on my way to work just to make sure
that I'm not missing anything. So if you had lots of those
types of deals, you know, and
and I'd love for for a professor to say okay, I hope you enjoyed
the lecture. It'll be on the podcast in 10 minutes. I just
got to upload the mp3 and Professor doesn't have to worry
about getting approval and going through this whole process. I
mean, ultimately, if you want to be listed through Apple but who
knows where they're going, I mean Apple could could see the
writing on the wall. I mean, Apple has also tried to compete
with Netflix with Apple TV plus, you know, they have a creator
relations person, which sounds like an illness. Creator create
I never liked this one. You don't like that? Or no, I don't
know why it hurts me so bad. But it's like, I'm a creator now,
man, or podcaster
does it bother you because it implies that other people are
not creative? Is it because of the exclusivity of it?
Honestly, it feels more like a God thing to me, You are a
creator, I'm like, I'm doing a podcast, I don't know, if I'm a
creator, it puts a false, it's also a back to my example, a
university professor who puts his you know, puts his stuff
online, and, you know, it can be every, every session he does, or
every class or whatever it is. It's not necessarily creators
professor who has a shit out there and a podcast, you know,
it's it sets this false sense of okay, here's, here's my problem,
I guess. And it's deep within me, because I haven't really
thought about it. It sets the tone of this has got to be
entertainment, this has to be a show. Whereas I've never agreed
with that I've never had I've used enclosures for PDFs. Now
that on me, I had reasons to do it. Now, technically, there's no
reason you can't do that. Just depends on what you're reading
it with. But the idea that a kid can say I'm gonna do a podcast,
and within an hour can go to his or her friends and say, hey, get
that app over there and search for my podcast. That's you,
that's a big deal.
In that, that can't function without this idea. I mean, that
can't function without the open platform. Yep. It really just
can't. I mean, like, if there is, okay, President Trump's
speeches, for instance. I mean, there's, there's, I mean, it's
no, it's no secret that half the world hates Trump indefinitely,
you know, and so, and there's plenty of people that would love
to, like, if this podcast had to get approved through, you know,
some third party, I mean, some of them may not even approve it.
It's possible. I mean, there's, you know, rigor in the thing is,
it's not just, whatever your political bent, the things
change, and you have to be aware of that political social
movements shift over time. And so what, you know, we hear, we
heard this with, with, you know, by Biden, and even Obama to a
certain extent, you know, years ago, they ran on a platform of
being anti gay marriage, right. And then they changed over time,
because the, because the, the society moved in that direction,
and they changed, and now they don't hold those positions
anymore. Well, society changes, and what is wrong, what is
considered, you know, bad or good, or whatever moral
objection you have to that now can change over time and, and
also with your political leanings. So you don't want to
tie yourself in to any one? You don't, you know, just because
you feel that it's okay to censor Alex Jones, or Trump or,
you know, whoever it is that today? Well, five years from
now, they may be Trent, those same entities that tried to
dismiss, you know, Alex Jones may be trying to censor somebody
that you actually agree with, because the society, the
proclivities of society moved and shifted out from under you.
And so, it may be, it's easy to say, well, I don't have a
problem with them taking down Spotify, Apple, Amazon, taking
down, fill in the blank podcaster, because I don't agree
with their political views.
I'll give you a better example. Okay. Apple recently removed,
either a category or certain podcasts from its Chinese
podcast index, related to some Catholic podcasts, which is a
huge issue right now in China. They're basically creating the
CPAs like, their own Catholic Catholic Church, with their own
people. And somehow the Pope is blessing him. So Apple had to
comply. Now, we're not in China, but you know, what can happen
here can happen anywhere, all this kind of stuff. And that's
just the pure censorship part. You know, we say it's a platform
for free speech. That's the idea. No one's gonna die from
this index. The bottom line, no one's gonna die from this index.
It's constitutionally protected. It's a bunch of feeds, and
pretty soon just be a bucket of feeds. And everyone who was in
here now is developing. I have Dave and I both have a lot of
things we could be doing with our life. This brings us much
joy. We're very happy that we're doing it. And I think we're
gonna see some opportunities. You know, the second part of our
mission, which we're not there yet, is to retool podcasting as
a platform of value. And when we get to that, you know, that's my
hope is that there'll be money flowing through the system in
the form of actual money or value or something that people
will be able to measure, we'll be able to capture, we'll be
able to feel good about. And once we complete that, I think I
think it's off to the races, I think. And I'm, I'm just so
stoked about IPFS. And all that. There's so many opportunity, my
head is spinning right now, so many opportunities. And we're
looking forward to anybody who steps forward with any any
thinking any idea, we got to GitHub, we've got the mastodon
server. And we'll just keep updating on a weekly basis as we
go forward. And please remember that we need support for this.
It's the three T's time, talent, treasure, if you can support
with the with some funds to keep it going. And to ensure its
future for now, until we get to a point where this something
else is going on. We'd really appreciate that at podcast
index.org.
Yeah, and that's the donations, we got a lot of donations at the
beginning. And that was those. So it was fantastic. It was very
encouraging, really encouraging. And then they kind of fell off,
you know, predictably over the last week. But if if anybody can
donate and it's not just obviously, you know, citizen,
Pay Pal, if you can, but it's not just that, if you're if you
work at a hosting company, and you can, can help us out with
hosting fees or something like that, that would be fantastic,
too. I mean, anything like that is helpful.
And podcasters podcasters, talk to your talk to your hosting
companies make sure that they integrated as send them a link
to this show, so that they can, they can follow along. And I'm
happy now we're always open for email and questions. And the
mastodon is a great, great place and other people jump in, and
we're really building a community I'm quite, I'm quite
proud of the work that everybody is doing. And Dave, I have to, I
gotta kiss your ass again, man, you are really, you're really
doing yeoman's work here. It's unbelievable how much, you're
also just really good and fast, which just blows me away every
single time.
One of those two. Sometimes, you know, you only get one you get
good or fast. And it alternates between the two. Sometimes I'm
good. Sometimes I'm fast. Maybe not. And maybe not both at the
same time. I
never had a complaint. Alright, is there anything else we need
to cover? And we close down for today?
Yeah, I guess the only other thing I would say is that there
was some concern about this, just being a free for all. And
like, they're just being a big ad your feed button on the page.
And that is not going to happen. That's not going to happen for
maybe ever Instagram. I don't I still don't think to this day.
They allow posting through their API. People, people, you know,
route around that and try to do it illegally. But like, I would
much prefer, like we talked about at the beginning to have
integrations with publishers and networks. Yeah. I don't want the
big add your feed button. It's on a main page somewhere where
it's a free for all. I don't think anybody wants that. I
don't think we want that
either. No. And as we pointed out, by doing it this way, we
really do create a platform, a platform that is bigger than
just one individual piece, and it becomes redundant. And when
that happens, and it's an everybody can, can start coming
up with some some different ideas on what to do with the
data and the feeds and what is possible. I think it's going to
kick everybody's ass.
Yeah, yeah, I hope so. Good. That's all. That's all I got.
And if not, then we had some fun with some servers.
And we have a 30 gig database.
Hey, David, have a great weekend. Thank you so much, was
good week. And we'll catch up again next week. And pretty soon
we'll bring in our third partner, the shill. Guys, he's
running the back office and he has some thoughts and, and we
love Him because then brought him on board because he has all
the boring, and all the questions we don't want to
answer. And
I'll need a terms of service. What do you do? And?
Well, it's important. These are things that we need to talk
about. And I think we're coming up to that within a week or two,
we'll probably be pretty close to some of those questions. And
that's what he does. And that's, that's why I've learned I've
started a lot of companies. And if you can get the guy who will
ask you those irritating questions. That's it's a good
thing to have. So it's a very good thing to have.
Hey, can we interview some uh, can we like has interviewed
somebody on this show sometime? I'd like
to, but let's do it next week. Who do you want to have on?
Oh, whoever will talk to us. I mean, we get We get out. Well
James is in Australia. That might be a mix timing as
possible, but it sucks. We'll figure somebody out.
Raise your hands everybody. Okay, that's it. Episode number
three. We're gonna leave it there for now. We will be back.
We'll do another show on Friday. We'll see if we can bring
somebody in. If someone has got my eye on the mastodon info ID
podcast index.org I'm Adam podcast index.org and David
podcasts index.org. If you're not a developer already. If
you're a developer, you're not there already. Probably get in
on it. And, and give me a web app. Dammit. I want to give me a
search or something. Something fun to look at. Hey, Dave had a
good weekend, buddy. So much okay, ma'am. And we'll be back
next week to continue podcasting 2.0