Oh, podcasting 2.0 for September 25 2020, this is episode number
four. And we're making headway trying to stick with the
nautical terms for a little bit, see how that goes. Full speed
ahead underway. And allow me to introduce my partner and co
founder of podcasts. index.org. The one and only Dave Jones was
a it was a
I did did the work. I did the work.
You've been doing the work my friend, no one does the work
like you do. Holy crap. Am.
I did eyebrow clips.
Oh, wait, you did even more work. You did more work than
just the work you're doing. You brought clips. Nice. I did work
and work. I guess I should thank the folks over at Spotify for
the timing of proving our point.
What does it feel like to beat the platform?
It's really interesting. No, not at all. What you know,
obviously, I know that we're just one app, click away from
somewhere else. But what I liked the most is that without even
discussing it, and when we don't need to, I guess, my my partner
Dvorak. He's like, Yeah, we don't even belong there. What
the hell, of course, you know, so I'm glad we're off that. But
for those who haven't heard the story was quite interesting.
Where he a few weeks back, I I inquired with Spotify, and also
Amazon who were sending out emails to the owner emails and
RSS feeds clearly saying, hey, come in, and, you know, manage
your podcasts in our in our portal. And I know I hadn't
submitted. So Amazon, we're not they're not submitted. That's
good. And I think I tried to Stitcher, they never respond.
There's no way to do that to black humans there at all.
There's nothing going on there. And Spotify said, hey, you know,
it's not associated with my account. This is my emails been
my email forever. So I don't know how that got in there. And
then they sent me an email after I filled out the form and said,
Well, you go to this link, and from this link, you can submit a
copyright infringement claim and the end the link right there
says Do not fill out this form without lawyer link. Okay, so
But no, I forgot that. And it's my belief that they are getting
ready to roll out ads. I have some examples that I played on
the no agenda show where they definitely and they they made a
big deal of this in January, about their, you know, their
podcast, automatic dynamic, systematic hydromatic ad
insertion, which means they're rolling out there since it's
streaming they stream to their player.
I've got I've got a perfect example of what the future of
podcast advertising looks like.
Oh do tell when she got
clip. Clip to AP report.
I Mike Rossi are reporting to Republican led Senate Committees
release a report on Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.
Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the chairman of
the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
says the probe into Hunter Biden's affairs in Ukraine was a
good investigation and it was not politically motivated. On
Wednesday, Johnson's Committee and the Senate Finance Committee
released their report, which concludes Hunter Biden's paid
board position with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma
created conflict of interest concerns for the Obama
administration at the time Vice President Joe Biden was in
charge of administration policy with Ukraine. The Biden campaign
immediately pan to the report Mike cross the Washington
remember the
best time of your life has been eating Arby's pecan chicken
salad Wait a minute so did you get this from Spotify? Where
did you get this? Oh, no, I got this off the carousel on the
podcast index homepage. Oh, like this was so I saw AP report
right on there they have evidently they have like this
little
like It's like Ford or something that comes out? Yeah, yes. Just
like in each one of them is like a minute and a half right? And
45 seconds of it. You're kidding is the report and the other 45
seconds of it is add fresh in your memory.
You got the sliced grapes. And then what do you sit there and
wait to see if something else comes? Is there something I
guess
we have the meats and I'm thinking okay, next report. But
no, no, just when deciding how and when to another.
Another ad for this time is for IBM Watson.
And the thing that that Spotify is knowings from the way I
understand it, it first of all, it's highly targeted. They're
building the Facebook of ads for podcasts, and that's what they
say and that's fine. I have nothing against it. Obviously.
It'll be streaming so you can't fast forward. So non
interruptible ads, obviously. Although this format that APA
just showed you know that's an easy one. Once you've listened
to the report, you bail and everyone will know
it. Yeah. How can that even with that can't work that's not a
sustainable ad model. I come
from the advertising business. So I Understand and I, I know
what they're going to do and how they're doing it and what this
will mean. And it'll mean something for a while. But the
tracking is really what they're touting over at Spotify, the
targeted by demographic by race, age, gender, sex, religion,
probably that you can learn a lot from looking at someone's
music collection, and oh they associate with. So they do have
a lot of a lot of data and of course, what podcasts you listen
to. So anyway, long story short on that, is they pulled us down,
I believe, because they're shoring up all of their
contracts to make sure they have the right to do this. And it
would make sense looking at the terms and conditions. For a
podcast, you basically admits your typical worldwide, US
exclude worldwide license you give to them fully paid, it even
says fully paid, which means $0 are actually you paid on a
monthly basis you're paying. And they can do anything they want,
which includes copying, editing, creating, creating derivative
works. So that's all a non starter, as Devorah would say.
It's kind of the dummy contract. But we got a lot of dummies who
people don't read that. People just Oh, read the Terms of
Service. And
I mean, if you're a podcaster, you're making it and you've
you're in like episode 125. And you've never made more than five
bucks off of Patreon, right? I mean, you probably gonna sign
whatever they put in front of you.
Yeah. And there's a big draw, of course, like, oh, maybe it'll be
discovered. And but quite honestly, what I don't see is
them sharing any of the revenue, which they'll have to do
something like that. Because the Amazon will do it, and Google
will do it. And it's just going to be it. It's kind of making it
easy for us. Because, you know, yeah, there's all kinds of
endorsements and ads and all kinds of podcasts. But we're not
a structural outside of these walls, you know, so it's in
podcasts that you listen to, without advertising will not
you'll be forced to listen to at least an ad I believe, before it
starts. And so
the only, you know, the problem with the AP, like the AP report
and stuff that you just played and all the automatic insertion
is that it's so crude like, jar. Jar. Yes. Yes. Because that, you
know, it was like, you know, the Biden campaign immediately panda
report boom at Arby's, I mean, not even a second. Yeah, was and
you're like, you're like, Whoa, what just happened.
So when I started pod show, back in 2006, I think we did all
this, we experimented with all this, we had the automatic
insertions, tons of stuff, we I think the thing that I would
most proud of, is across the network of shows we had
something called the golden ticket, you can already imagine
what it refers to, yeah, it's anvil Monty, then it would be an
insertion into an X number of shows, at a predetermined spot,
by the way. So every one every every, everyone within our
network knew who was going to show up. And they actually had a
way to tag that where it would fall in their in their program,
we'd automatically insert if someone had won a golden ticket
or not. And there were some prize attached to that. And that
was a cool use of, of insertion technology. But everything else
kind of failed. And, and the main reason is there's no
statistics. And this is what Spotify wants to solve. This is
obviously what Amazon wants to do. This is what Google wants to
do. And that's all fine. I just feel and I think I define this
on on podcast, index dot social. A podcast has an RSS feed that
you can access. An a podcast app allows you to, at minimum,
manually add a feed. And and if Spotify would be very different
to me if they allowed you to do that
is not a podcast, if you if it's not publicly available through a
fee to more to multiple apps, if it's just a you know, that goes
back to the I remember at the beginning of podcasting, when,
like one of the first apps I ever wrote that had anything to
do with RSS, or podcasting or anything like that was a there's
a radio show out of California called standard raising that I
listened to all the time. And it was very hard to get to get that
show out here. So this was I don't remember what year this
was maybe 2005. And when they jumped on board, the the the
downloadable show, train and so this was before they had a
podcast, they would just post their mp3. So I created this and
then we'll about a few months later after they did that they
turned it into an XML feed with full blown podcast feed. Oh, so
I wrote this Windows program in assembly language that would it
was crazy. I still got it. I've still got all my sources. It's
weird to look at it now. But this thing that would parse the
feed and down Look at the download at all, and I'm gonna
jazz. But you know the thing, the thing about that is back
then there was quite a few things like that where people
would have an app or make an app or a script that would just
handle one show. And so I remember, radio shows would do
that to like, think Glenn Beck at the time, or one of the I
don't remember who it is one of the right wing talkers, would
they they had an app for their show. And you could it was a
quote unquote, podcast, but you could only get it through their
app. It feels like that's what you know, that's what we're
going back to. In a sense, it's like we're coming back around to
where people are making cific apps for specific shows.
I was thinking about that. And there's something to be said,
I've been reading a lot about progressive web apps. And mainly
because a story came out. Believe it or not on the verge,
I think, let me just see if I can find it. I didn't prepare
for this. The Verge by the way, I found is the website that
developers go to to see how much bandwidth they can use on one
page. Apparently, the verd most trackers, the most ads the most
everything of all like, hey, I want to see some performance of
your machine. Yeah, let's go to the verge.
Like uBlock Origin is good. Just quit. Like it just stops when it
is like nah, can't handle this.
It was it was gaming. Here we go. I think it's Amazon's Luna.
The gaming is lame. Note that it's a gaming cloud service.
Oh, all this? Yeah. Like I like x cloud and stadia,
right. But what they've done is instead of because of the apple
penalty of if you want to make money or charge money through
the App Store, then you have to pay the 30% Vig. So what they
did is they built a progressive web app. Because apparently, I
guess has been known for a long time, you can really stream
anything you need. I mean, the the web, the Progressive Web,
app architecture is apparently so good that you can really
build an app like experience with it. And you can even Of
course, you know, put a an icon on the launcher of your phone.
So it looks just like an app behaves, as they say just like
an app. And that's for gaming. If gaming is doing it, then it's
got to be, it's got to be pretty good. So what that led me to
think about is, I liked the simple player, so much Martin
simple player, and we got to talk about this thing is great.
There's nothing I have nothing against the concept of you being
able to go to a template and say, Here's my show, here's the
artwork, and I just want a simple one click app for people
to put on their phone that is just so they can catch up with
my show you what I mean?
Yeah, I could see that.
I can see people wanting to have that. So yeah, it's not a full
blown podcast player. But it's a totally valid use of it. So I
don't really mind that. Why not?
Wait, we already pull images. The you know, so a feed, you get
the down, you get the mp3? Well, that's
my point is you could do that yourself. That could be a
template where and if you just wanted that for yourself for
your show, that you want people to use that just for your show.
That's also possible.
Well could could you deliver the pieces of the web app in the
feed as well? Like, I don't, I'm not up on amount up to speed on
all of the progressive web apps I know is basically I just think
it works like a web browser. Yeah. It's like you
deconstructed the web browser. Yeah, put the parts of it in
that
just launches in its own in its own environment, I guess. So
it's just thinking,
you're delivering the image. And in the end, the mp3 already in
the feed, you can probably deliver other parts of the app.
Interesting there too.
Well, so we're kind of jumping ahead, but I did want to Well,
since we're talking about it, I need to have a list and you've
already started to help me day. And I'm thinking maybe we get
drunk playdough involved in this drunken or drunk things drunk
play No, I don't remember drunk playdough is doing a version of
the homepage which I've seen the the mock up of it looks really
good.
Oh, yes. Beautiful. Drunk. Drunken I think is known as No
sir your restaurant play drunk play? Yes. Oh, so pretty. And he
keeps teasing me with screenshots and like give it to
me, let me have it.
So on this, whatever he's building, I'd love to obviously
have a place where we can say Oh, and here's all the different
people who are using the index and I'd like to have the apps
there I'd want to have you know, whatever publishing systems just
all we need a page or something where that's up there and and
honestly, where if someone puts it on there so that I don't
forget about it because I'm notoriously bad at this stuff.
Because we need to be promoting all these different, all these
different initiatives. And what he looks like he's Korea. Seeing
some functionality on the homepage itself, you know, we've
got all of this. Just need to be able to push more people from it
to other places.
Yeah, I agree that I like that I like his direction for this
design, because it's not. It's just basically, you know, the
pieces we already have, but they, they look better. He's not
like, okay, let's, you know, we're not our thing has been,
we're not going to compete with with app developers and that
kind of thing. So I like this, it just preserves the
simplicity, the existing components, were just okay,
here's what we got, here's what you can do. And that's it. But
it's, but it's so much more, you know, easy on the eyes to look
at,
oh, well, he's he actually has some design skills. And like you
and I, I guess,
agree that it would be so it'd be so easy to just add an extra
piece on this where it just lists all that. And we can pull
that dynamically out of the law? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Nobody has to touch it. Oh, I
love automation. Yes. So the last time we spoke, you declared
heads down for the week, you were working on the shoring
things up infrastructure, load balancing servers. And of
course, the place where most people can follow along is
podcast index dot social. I also follow the GitHub for that what
I understand seems like you kind of have like a 6040 mix of 60
infrastructure and 40% still working on different different
things to pull out of the you know, to expose in the API.
Yeah, so as usual, what I say that I'm going to do in advance
is only slightly related to what actually gets done. You just
pretty much have to take the take my aims with a grain of
salt, but the what, what I'd spent a lot of time on earlier
in the week is loading, some is loading an extra batch of feeds
that Mike had sent to us, Mike, on the note,
this, if this is interesting, I've seen, I think multiple
people show up and say, Hey, I've got a database of this,
I've got a database of that. And it's not all the same stuff. Is
it? What do you what do you see? Well, I
had to write a, I had to write a script, and they would import
that and do it in a way that was, you know, kind of sane. And
so the script just looked, you know, looks to make sure that
it's not that it's not something we already have all the all the
stuff you would expect. And so that just took a while to get
that constructed, but then, you know, and also a way to import
it. And it's not going to do it in mass in a way that's going to
hurt performance on the side. So that's all run in. And it's just
important. It's been importing since Monday. So we're at about,
it's Eastern, it's like one and a half million feet.
And where did he get these from? You just collected them over the
years? Yeah, he's got
he's, he's got his own project that he's been working on for a
while. And, you know, just he saw, like, you know, like minded
like, and he was like, Hey, let's, let's swap databases. And
I'm like, Yeah, sure. I'm gonna post our database anyway. So
he's like, Well, here you go. Here's a here's my database.
So part of the philosophy is we want people sending stuff in so
we can send it out. So he gets this back in multiple ways he is
he is integrating. Is he using this using the index?
I'm not sure I hadn't heard from him in about a week or so. So
I'm not sure what he's doing on as far as hooking into the API
if he's doing any of that yet. But, like, right before, this,
maybe an hour ago, I posted our first download to archive.org,
which is just our faces our feeds table. Yeah, I saw that.
Very cool. Yeah. So that's every feed we've got, whether it's
garbage or not, or anything like that. It's the full thing. It's
about a little over 1.2 million feeds. Yeah.
1123. Yeah.
Yeah, that's as of right now. So I was wanting to originally wait
until, until we got everything imported from Mike's batch,
because I was like, Well, it'd be more complete that way by
laying it down. But I'm just procrastinate too long on that.
So we went ahead and did it. And then I'll just do another, you
know, I'll do another dump next week. I mean, takes five
minutes. Right? And, you know, it'll, we'll just begin to
update that. Hopefully, at least once or twice a month would be
it. If I can automate it. I will. And then it'll just be a
thing that just happens on a regular basis. Nice. That'd be
great. Yeah, but that is just the fees for now. It's not the
episodes because the episodes table is about 25 gigs. So I'm
just gonna have to figure it out. I'm not even sure if
archive.org lets you do that to the side. I think you can but I
think Ain't they want you to go a different route with that?
Okay, I gotta look into that. But I would like to because I
think that's valuable information. But you know, it
takes Well, other than other than that work. The other part
of, of what I've been doing really a lot this week is
categories. And I think, you know, we've got, I think we've
got that pretty much nailed at this point, anything
different from what we discussed on the last show, but the
categories, which is, I guess, in essence, one big flat list?
Yeah, one big flat list, which is basically a deconstructed
version of the iTunes category list. And you can there's an
there's an API, did you see the current list in that? Category
slash list? Oh, it will just give you every category with its
with its category ID
that was that nailed down? Does that mean That's it no more
categories? Is there ever going to be an addition? Or how does
that work?
So I don't think it's, I don't think it's, it's a once and for
all thing with it can be added to but since everybody puts only
iTunes categories in their feed, we're not the way the way that
the system is picking up the categories for each podcast, is
it's pulling the existing iTunes category tags out of the feed,
and then breaking them apart and finding where they're positioned
in that flat list. So you're never going to get anything much
more than that, right? Anyway, unless somebody manually adds
it, or we pick up new namespaces that may have other categories.
Can you explain the namespaces for people who love to listen
along and aren't quite exactly sure. Because, you know, you
read stuff about well, this RSS, and we can expand it with a
namespace.
Yeah, so namespaces come from XML. And it's just a way to
define which tags are valid within that XML. Document. You
so the namespace, it's a way to, you know, if you want to change
an XML document, the right way, what you do is you define a DTD,
which is a date, something trend. Something to add on to
that I forgot what the acronym stands for. But it's basically
just it says, here's the way we expect this document to look.
And then if you want to add, but you can namespace it. And it's
easier, because you don't have to go through the whole process
of defining the document definition. So basically, then
you just at the top of the of the XML document, you add that
namespace link, and
then okay, so you're telling you're telling the machine
readable part, you're saying, Okay, if you see this tag, this
is it's valid, and here's why.
Yeah, okay. Yeah. And those are always appended with a colon. So
iTunes, colon, whatever the attribute name is, and whatever
the element name is, and that's part of the iTunes namespace and
it just lays over the top as far as,
okay, okay, I see, we handle
about, we handle probably six or seven different spaces, freedom
in the freedom controller? Yeah, no, no, in, in podcast index, we
only handle that in his namespace and the Media
namespace currently. But I would like to, I'd like to handle
others. But I don't want to go down that rabbit hole until we
get a good idea of right of which ones we want. And whether
it's valuable because they that does take time. That's a various
kind of tedious work is to is to troubleshoot. Once you get your
XML parser working well, then you start throwing new things at
it. It wants to barf all the time.
What you've come up with a lot of new endpoints, I think
they're called on the API, which to me is like, that's the thing
that works. Yeah. That's the thing you talk to and it gives
you something back.
Yeah, yeah. This is the URL. So the new endpoints just a new
URL. And the ones that we have currently, I guess, I don't
remember if we talked about this last year, it was the recent,
right, we didn't talk slash new feeds. Okay. Yeah, that's the
outbound pipe, that's the fire hose. And then the newest one
was yes, it was categories, that category slash list. And then
there's also the one I posted yesterday. I've been using this
one as sort of the beta test for the category work, and it's
recent slash fees. So we've had recent slash episodes where you
can just get the newest episodes, but this one is
basically the same idea but with fees. So these are just the
newest fees that have updated in a certain
timespan updated or added updated
you the most recent phase that have added a show pocket. So if
they're still in the way did it looks for that is by looking at
the looking at the episodes table to see which show which
feeds have shows that have just published. So that's if, if the
feed itself declares that it has updated, but it didn't actually
post a new episode.
I see okay. You all were down to that level. That's pretty good.
That's pretty. That's, that's pretty fast.
The only way to do it another way to do it really, because
fees are so untrustworthy. And wrangling a world to cats damage
you. That so in? Well, I've got in honor of Brene Brown's new
exclusive podcast. So
yeah, she signed with that. She also she spends time with
Spotify. Right. I think Spotify? Yeah, I think so. Is it Spotify?
Yeah. Spotify. Yeah.
The since you mentioned cats do a clip for Brene. Brown. So
you're not crazy. You're a goddamn cheetah. We're using
Brene. Brown now for developer motivation. Yeah. That's the
index.
That's the you know, I mean, it's a beautiful day, we've
we've lost another podcaster to Isalo. So we have to honor honor
her memory.
Oh, man. That's too funny.
So the that but that if you got time for this, I want to make I
want to have a discussion and get your opinion on exactly what
constitutes a podcast this worth keeping. Okay. So some of the
discussion that happened this week, I posted a had a reply.
And a little bit of a back and forth with Daniel J. Lewis, on
the read on a Reddit thread. And they were just talking about
seems like a nice guy. They were just talking about like numbers.
Okay, he was mentioning that, you know, when the podcast
index, as it as it was about a week or so ago, was about
300,000 Short podcasts.
And he was short of what short of his his short of his
numbers short of his question. Yeah. So everything seems to be
in that 1.3 to 1.5 million range. And so and we were at
like one point, just shy of 1.1. And I knew that we have many
people that had donated other batches of feeds, as well, I'm
not too worried about this. So we started adding those feeds.
And then, you know, just was thinking, you know, as I'm
adding them, what I'm seeing show up is things like sermon
audio keyword feeds, to where, okay, so the in the first place
that showed up was in the recent, the recent episodes API.
I'm looking at the recent episodes API and watching what
it returns. And it's returning what looks like 10 copies of the
same episode. I'm like, this is weird. So I'll start looking and
they're all different feed IDs. Will they was there 10 episodes
coming from 1010 different feeds? Do we have Do we have a
duplicate problem? Well,
let me guess. Someone misunderstood how it works and
thought they had to do a new RSS feed for every episode.
No. Okay. So sermon audio,
yet, which I see a lot of we've all seen sermon audio pop up.
Okay. See, I want to have a discussion about whether to even
purge sermon audio from the entire like, I'm not, you know,
I'm a Christian guy. But I got my limits. Okay. So
what's what do you think they're doing? What's going on with
these? Well, I know what they're doing. So
they they have they have keyword feeds, where so they'll have one
like, for instance, they'll have one on faith. And so the key
word is faith.
I already know what's going on. They're trying to spam the
index. Well, they're they're spamming. That's why I mean that
to show up in search, it's exactly
what they're doing. And every one of the there's I looked at
it and there was 800, sermon audio feeds that were just pure
keyword feeds.
Now, when you say just pure keyword, that means
that means across all of their shows on their platform. If you
search for the term, let's just say faith, yeah, and it returns
all the all the feed all the episodes that have that in the
title or that in the description, right, but it
returns it as an RSS feed. So then they add that
oh my good This.
So you have the original show that posted and then you have
every other keyword that hits actually ends up being a hit on
that. And they all post the same show at the same moment. And so
you end up with mass duplication of episodes across across all
these and every one of them as a as a valid, unique iTunes ID. So
that they're all in iTunes as separate podcasts. Hmm. But
they're not. Yeah.
And basically everything is a duplicate except for the keyword
in each individual feed.
Yeah, yeah. So if, if I don't know who's a big preacher these
days, but you know, is it just say that Rick Warren posts, you
know, some something on you know, and it's got 10 different
keywords, we could possibly show up in 10 Different sermon audio
podcasts at the same that one episode at the same time. Right.
Right. Which, which just sucks when you like, I don't want I
don't want that in there. But I don't know how you feel about
stuff like that?
Well, first, I think we should pray for them no matter what.
Yeah. And I am not really mocking that. Not really, no,
I'm a little older nowadays. And like, I pray for you, I pray for
everybody. So let's look at what they're trying to achieve. What
they're trying to achieve is, is exposure through searches. And
they have obviously a very wide range. I mean, I don't really
know how many categories they could be, they've got to be
duping categories to if they're doing this across, how many did
you say how many different feeds? Are they creating?
800? There's eight in as of two days ago, in the pot in our
index, there's 800 unique iTunes IDs that are that are sermon,
audio, keyword fate.
And of the 800 Is it like, is it so it's 800 feeds, but but they
don't all have 800 different keywords is all different
combinations of keywords, we find different combinations,
though the duplications of the combos, just different order,
as well. And yet, they're all different keyword combinations.
And I think the individual shows span the key words so that they
show up in all the fields, or the individuals, sermons or
whatever you want to call it those things?
Well, let's just the way I read, let's start with the result,
what would be the correct way for them to get the same
results? I don't think I follow. So if the result they're looking
for is that they show up in searches. That's why that was
done. Right. Right. Right. So what can they do differently
that will achieve the same result for them that when they
when someone types in certain combo of key words that they at
least show up? Nothing, it just works is
my what I want to say is they could just not be a douche and
don't do well. But here's what
I'm feeling. I'm feeling that this is possibly a consultant.
You know, consultant came in and said, Hey, like it's like SEO,
you know, this feels very SEO consultant like to me, like
I get sermonaudio maybe sermonaudio told them to do it
themselves.
But maybe sermonaudio doesn't doesn't know what the what they
agreed to
house right now.
But beyond that, what is the solution?
Yeah, that's what and that's what I don't know. And that's
what, okay, so it's a broader topic, because there's not just,
here's the way I think about this, and tell me what you think
is when if you walk up and say, podcast to anybody, what's your
favorite podcast? What podcasts? Are you thinking about these
days, blah, blah, blah. If you say that to anybody, there's one
thing that comes to mind. And it's, it's an independently
produced show that has, that anybody can listen to from
multiple places. And so and it's typically free. So if you think
about it like that, there are lots of things that are in
iTunes and in podcast indexed by default, that don't fit what
anybody considers to be an actual podcast, thinking
sermons. Okay, yes, it's in a feed blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but
isn't it it's, it's not what anybody thinks of as a podcast.
That another one is you drivetime radio, a lot of those
shows are putting their stuff into a podcast feed after the
fact like morning radio, sports radio, they're doing you know,
all those kinds of things are being put in there. They the AP
report, things like that. And so there becomes, I don't know how
you define like, My instinct is to say, I don't want a bunch of
crap in there this like okay, I'll give you I'll give you a an
example. There was one that popped up in the carousel the
other day a podcast from East Side Church of Christ in
Singapore. Now, now isa Church of Christ and Singapore. Now
their parishioners may may want that. But there is it is rare.
If If not, is rare. If a if a churchgoer listens to a sermon
from a note from some other local church, that rarely if
ever happens. And you so it's valuable to the people who want
it. But is it valid? Is is having 75,000 local church
sermons available as podcasts in a podcast index? Is that
valuable to a large number of people? And I'm not I don't know
the answer to this, I'm just kind of broaching the topic.
Yes.
I'll take that one. I believe anything that is an RSS feed.
And I really don't, I would like it to be media only as well as
in audio, video, and not to PDF or anything like that. But you
know, attachment, a, what we call a media attachment to be
valid. And I completely understand that you do not want
a podcast app experience. That gives you what you don't want.
So if you're searching for something, and for whatever
reason, in your results, show up sermons that you don't care
about lectures from professors that you don't care about cat
videos, that whatever it is you don't care about, then that is a
function of a bad search, in my mind, not a bad index, I would
personally never want to say any group is too small for their
content to be in the index. One person who makes it one person
who listens is good enough for me. In fact, one person who
makes it know people who listen is good for me. And if you look
at the mission of podcasts, index.org. And I think we're
already, we're already kind of down this path. And it comes
back to what I was saying before, and I don't think you
quite are on the same frequency as me that it's not bad, by the
way, about about a podcast app that does something specific. So
I would love in my vision. wishes may not be shared. But I
believe the ability for a church or a group or a religious group,
to have their own podcast app that filters from the index in a
way that they get results that they want and is relevant to
their listeners. I want that I that is exactly what I want. And
And as we're sitting here going, oh, man, not another sermon
audio. There's someone over somewhere else going, man, not
another NYT not another PBS not another NPR thing, you know. So
that's very, very subjective. And that's that's what I keep
coming back to is we don't nest a my mind. We don't necessarily
have to have, every podcast app has to have every podcast
displayed. The index should give everybody the capability to
slice and dice whatever the hell they want. It's not about
promotion. It's not about reach. I do not confuse search with
exposure or promotion. Although completely valid. Our job is to
have it all so people can get it out. And I know I predict that
now that we've made it so easy to create a podcast listening
experience that will if I cared and if I could, I would make the
Catholic podcast app, the Christian podcast app, the
Jewish podcast app, and curated but curated with the help with
the help of the index. So the index can give me what I want.
So you're
saying that And I think I'm Javon with you. You're saying,
if you have for me, if I'm going to be curating, let's just say
I'm doing get recent episodes, and I'm, and I'm filtering, and
I put in to filter out category 65, which is religion,
spirituality. Yeah, if I put that on there, you're saying
there's also going to be somebody somewhere else who's
going to do the same search? And they're going to filter and say,
show me only categories?
Yes, I would hope so. I really hope so. Now, I really, really
hope so.
I think I jive with you. What about, what about the keyword
spammy stuff, though? That's, that's the same podcast being
delivered in 800 different feeds? And I don't like that.
No, no,
I understand. And I also think that I mean, in a funny way. You
know, giving them exactly what they asking for is almost kind
of perfect medicine. Like, if you're asking for this, and this
is what you're doing. You should get your 800 results back in
your favor. Yeah. But yeah, so
I don't want that Diego. No, no, no, no, just podcasts
are really important. I think that the easiest way is to reach
out and say, Hey, why are you guys doing this? How can we help
you? Now we can't do this for every person who comes up with
some search scam ID in the first place. But I think we can
probably say, hey, you know, why are you doing this help us
understand, so we can make it better for you. Because what
they want to achieve, if anyone thinks that because you have 800
different keyword feeds feeds, in the in the index at Apple or
in podcasts, index.org or anywhere, that you're going to
save souls and convert people to Christ, you got another thing
coming. So that's just not that's not helpful. If you
however, I just don't think so. You know, I mean, I've been
trying to convince people to stuff for a long time, it
doesn't work very well, that way. But if you say, Hey, here's
a website, here's an app you can get from the App Store. Here's a
web app that you can use on your phone, just like an app, and it
has our sermons and other sermons, and we're curating it,
without having to do all the bullcrap of curating. All you
have to do is look, you know, do your your endpoints on the API,
put an exception if you don't like something that's coming
through, and Bob's your uncle. That's really interesting,
because I have the same conversation with Tina, when my
wife say, Well, if everyone's doing the same thing, then you
know, so what's the differentiator to well, there's
always UI and concepts, but I think pretty much everybody
comes down to some basic concepts. It's like an inbox.
You know, it's, it's what RSS kind of the default is, there's
not a lot of out of the box thinking, and maybe there's not
out of the box designed to be made with that. But features, I
still use overcast for the Share feature which shares a link or
you can create a clip, I think that's incredibly helpful. So
it's different feeding a wire people loyal to podcast attic,
you know, that for whatever features it could be, it could
be just the dark mode for you know, it's really weird things
that people get attracted to have learned over time. But
getting the proper results and having the things displayed that
you want displayed, I think is number one. And yes, we all want
some serendipity. I can just see I want 10s of 1000s of apps and
people being able to create their experiences for their own.
Why wouldn't we have a Antifa app? Why wouldn't we have a
proud boys app? I don't care. I think that's that's what it
should be. And then build, build your and build community
features into it. If we don't, if we're all going to sit here
and build radios, then there's going to be one radio guy left
at the end and he'll be some kind of winner and there'll be a
couple of also RANS. It makes no sense to compete with each other
on building the exact same thing. So for instance, I get
the randomizer. You know, the what is it called? It's not
called the randomizer. It's called the cast coverage cast in
Rofi. And its design is much yet there. But it's really simple.
It's like, you want to just like find a random guess what? Yes,
everyone does. You want to find
this was starting in the middle of starting at random locations
in the podcast. That was great. I did, I was like, Oh, that's
weird, man. But he's actually kind
of cool. It's like a needle drop. This is a needle drop
right in the middle of a podcast. So that to me is like
wow. And maybe he pairs that down and says or select this
flag and only get random German podcasts. So now we're cooking
Now we're thinking that we're all and this is so normal. It's
just to me, I've studied media, and I don't think coding is much
different, really than any other kind of media, we all get stuck
in these patterns, you know, and it's like, okay, it should be
this. And this is how it should work. And this is how a player
works. And this is no, of course, there's the, the Silicon
Valley's good at doing the, you know, the exact weirdness of
that and creating some kind of swiping thing you got to do and
it's, you know, that stuff either catches or not, but just
in general, to have a, I call them listening experiences or
viewing experiences. You know, there's no reason why you
couldn't create some so Apple, here's an example. Apple, I
guess they bought some company that that is that makes radio
stations out of podcast feeds.
Yeah. What do you think about that? That's
because I've done all this. I did this. 14 years ago, I've
been through this loop. Now I did it with less bandwidth, less
coders, less understanding, just less of everything,
unfortunately, with a shitload of money, which is a very bad
combination. Just the money. Yeah, the money got spent, but I
don't think we ever got close to what we wanted to see. Burn it.
What's your burn rates on God? I'm glad we're not doing that
anymore. Oh, I was gonna say, because now you got me on.
I gotta go. Sorry. The radio, the record. Okay.
But yeah, so the idea. And I was doing it with OPML feeds, which
is kind of interesting, since that popped up on the no agenda,
or podcast, index dot social.
Christopher, I seen, I think that's cool stuff. But
yeah, so the idea of an OPML feed. In this case, if you have
an OPML feed that has RSS nodes in it, then you could arrange.
And I did many different versions of this at pod show.
You could say, Okay, I want this, this this and, and I
actually helped create little buckets for people said, Okay,
so your daily commute? Cars coming back to me, here's how we
did it. Your daily commute is how long? One hour? Okay, what
do you like to hear, I like to hear a little bit of news,
little to show business and a little bit of, oh, I want a
little bit, I want a latest church sermon. And now that's
and then I want to know, at least start on a new episode of
Joe Rogan. Because I know that's a three hour show. And you would
arrange those in that order, which I call a format. This is
where it looks just like radio. So the top would be, and I'm
just this is just single choices. So single choice is AP
news feed. Now with commercials. The second one would be like the
daily tech news show or some shorter version of that. And so
what happens is, that renders and it creates a single feed,
synthetic face, yeah, of feed it in order. And that's the key in
order that you placed it so you get the aid the latest AP first,
then you get the latest tech news podcast, and it kind of
flows one into the next, if you have that. Now, I think today's
podcast apps don't really allow for that anymore. But there's
there's nothing to say that you couldn't then just convert that
into a stream of bits, you know, it's all, it's all the same, but
you give the you give the listener control over the type
of stuff they'd like to hear that type of sources it would
come from, and the order in which they want to hear it. And
then from then on, you basically flip the switch, let it run, and
you see what happens. And it should, in theory, create an
hour long commute podcast that exactly the type of content from
the type of shows you want. Now, there's a lot of shit that goes
along with that. And what we didn't have at the time, is any
kind of real deep knowledge of algorithms, machine learning,
this is the kind of stuff that I think can can play beautifully
alongside of the index is figuring out what people want,
and then putting it into maybe even new feeds just for them.
Not necessarily that that feed goes into the index. You know
what I'm saying?
Yeah, what's cool about what you're saying, I think is that
there's a lot of time spent around around figuring out what
content people want, and not the way they want it. And so like
the for the the content itself. You can slice and dice that a
million ways you can cat you can do categories, you can do you
know, AI, you know, figuring it out based on transcript. You can
slice and dice that a million different ways. I think Spotify
is doing something where they're trying to, you know, they're
opening up parts of their database for machine learning
people don't remember it did. Yeah. Somebody posted that in
the social guests. Yeah, and social. And, but, but there's
really no time being spent trying to figure out how you
want it delivered
and how you want it. Yeah. And how you want it to displayed?
Yeah, that's what you're saying is like, it's like, I know, I
kind of know already what I want. But I don't really know
how maybe I don't even know how I want it delivered. And if you
have, if you have 50 different apps that are all doing
experimentation, with different with different delivery formats,
like, like the needle drop, you know, cast coverage. I never
knew that that was a thing that I was interested in. But now I
do. I think it's cool. I think then I'll go ahead and hit it. I
hit it about once a day. Just to see, it's like, you know, drop
the book open to see what page you land. I
think that that should be a little quote on the page. Dave
Jones, I hit it at least once a day. That's a quote right there.
And he also in and by the way, he hates sermons.
So well, that's yeah. So I think the fallacy is that there's it
really started with the with with the Apple index, and
Spotify, it's very blatant. People believe that by being
searchable, you're going to gain audience, I am here to tell you
after 16 years, bull crap, the amount of times that someone
will actually use the search and randomly find you and think
holy, this is the podcast for me, I'd say is 0.1.
Typically, that's why I didn't care that much about categories
at the beginning, because I'm like, nobody, nobody clicks on
tech, and just randomly chooses a podcast. I don't
Well, I think it's more than just searched like, what am I
going to find today? That's why I like cast coverage of the
randomizers. Like, okay, and even every day, I always hit the
carousel at podcast index.org. And I, and I listen to these
funky podcasts, you know, and see if there's anything there.
And there's something to be said for that experience. You know,
it's not right yet, but who knows what, what would drink
Plato will come up with. But this is this is exactly that. So
what here's what is missing on our player? Our carousel is the
immediate way to subscribe to that. So I just found a podcast.
Oh, this is pretty funny. Yeah, I want to subscribe to that. I
can't do that right now. There's no link. Right? So that's,
that's what I was telling roofie. For, for the randomizer
to the number one feature people are asking for is I want to be
able to download that mp3 and or subscribe to it when I see it. I
don't don't make me go and search for it somewhere, which
is what's happening. So how do people find podcasts? Number one
place? Number one, it's going to surprise you Google.
Okay, because I was going to ask you about that. I've got them.
Head. Literally, oh, my notes here. How do you how do we find
podcasts? I always search. Like I don't typically go hunting for
podcasts.
You hear from somebody else? You hear podcasts. And then you go
into your podcast app, search it subscribe done. That's the
typical use. Yeah, we have failed at coming up with any
other ideas. And so it's not just, oh, I'm looking for a tech
podcast. It's more like the randomizer. Where I just hit
that. And oh, it's also how can someone else? How can we create
a widget that I that I can put on my WordPress blog of my
podcast, my favorite Podcast, the podcast I love like how can
I have something that is actually functional, not just a
dumb player that plays my feed. But that allows me someone who
I'm sharing that width on my page, find other things or
subscribe to it or join or you know, there's there's just none
of that thinking has happened in over a decade because we all got
kind of subdued into this. Here's how it works. The simple
player from Martin
everything is so good.
I got I got people who follow me on on Twitter and stuff. So I
get a pretty good gauge of what people are thinking of
something. And what I felt immediately was people saying
holy crap on it's fast and it's on a website. They do not
understand and they have been already conditioned from birth.
Podcasts happens in an app man. That's a complicated business as
go going on in there, you know that's an app and the app is
doing something I don't know. It's, it's doing something
really important. And that's it. I can't live without that. So
when they see it on a webpage, and wait a minute, there's code,
I can spin this up myself, I can, I can do this on my own
little thing, and I can customize it. Thank you, Martin,
by the way, for adding the GitHub link. That's phenomenal.
And people are responding that way, like, Oh, crap, this is
kind of cool. I can do so
glad that he made that public that open source because that
means people would just fork that thing and just go go to
town.
So to bring it around. I believe that anything is valid. And I'd
really prefer media URLs if you can't hear it, or, or see moving
images, and it becomes kind of difficult, but I personally
subscribe to one or two. Well, I think one is different sermons
from Ministry like is funny. Now, do I listen all the time?
No, do I listen to Joe Rogan all the time? No, on the podcast,
we'll roll in. I, I think we said in one of the first
episodes, I want a professor to be able to say, Okay, I'm going
to put this on a feed right now. And my students can subscribe to
it. And all I have to do is publish and it's working. I
don't have to figure out Apple, I don't have to do all this
stuff. I can just do it and put it up and it's working within an
hour and I can see it show up. And it's I can tell my students
to use whatever they want to use. Why wouldn't a university
create their own player environment of Sir of, of their
professors, lecturers, or the president of the University
speech and just have it work like a normal podcast player
would be limited to certain categories, or certain fields
that they want to do this into? It's completely valid. And they
could make a beautiful experience without any of the
hassle? No, Webmaster has to update the player and all that,
oh, oh, I'm putting it on the shared drive. I know how this
works in these companies. By the way company, another perfect
example. I've always said, you know, the the idea of not then
this is a whole different level of stuff when you get into Okay,
so what if I want to have a feed of best dogs, you know, then you
get into a whole whole nother whole nother? Barrel of Monkeys
really?
Yeah, that's kind of like the keyword fades thing.
Right. So yeah, so the keywords, it's, I think that they're
trying to achieve something that and a valiant effort, obviously
on doing it. Whereas, hey, you know what, you don't need to
spam every index everywhere. But what is your audience who you
trying to reach? And you just want to make it easy for them to
find your sermons in their podcast app? Why don't we help
you create a little podcast app for yourself? That has all that
in there? Because now you don't have to? Imagine this. You're a
church. You are multi. In fact, you can imagine very well, I
know you've you've worked on lots of podcasts for sermons,
etc. So wouldn't it be beautiful just to have a player that works
for that? And and if you want, Oh, and here's the other Parish,
and you can add their feed to it?
Well, perfect, perfect example would be like, podcast player
that only searches for it only returns results for sermons.
Let's just say sermons from Alabama.
Hello, kid friendly podcast apps. I mean, hello, apps. Wha?
Hey, grandma. You want to Yeah, I got my phone. I find it all
kind of confusing. I'd like to listen to, you know, to NPR. And
I'd like to listen to these shows will click the clickety
clack clock, here you go. There's no confusion. There's no
stuff buzzing around flying around. It's cheap. Now. It's
cheap to make it we were doing the shit on the back end. So you
don't have to.
Yeah, and in, in regards to that. I think these categories
are the category stuff is going to really help with
prioritizing. And well not prioritizing, but it's going to
help with segregating the workload on the aggregators as
well. I've even thought about taking those sort of top level
categories and assigning each one of them to a specific
aggregator interesting, I think it does help because when you
you know so
well you know that on Sunday or you're going to need some extra
aggregation power right that for for exactly
that reason exactly what you're talking about. You're you're
gonna get you're gonna get an onslaught on Sunday and Monday
of sermon podcast going out out of all the 1000s of churches. So
you just segregate that off and say okay for for the duration of
Sunday and Monday, this this agreat specific one or two
aggregators are going to handle this load, and it's going to
just be best effort. So it's gonna let you know, we're not
going to try to hit them every five seconds, as soon as they
come out,
right? Well, this kind of flows into another topic that we were
going to get to today. And that is really the time based
aggregation, understanding when a feed updates, and what
frequency and kind of sniffing and being ready for when it's
expected to do so am I saying that right?
Yeah, that's right. And, and I would like to get other people's
input on the mastodon server, or wherever, on how best to go
about doing something like that. I don't know if it's going to, I
don't know if it's purely I can imagine ways to do it, that
don't involve like machine learning and that kind of thing.
But maybe it's easier with machine learning. I don't know,
I just don't know enough about that. But it would be nice to
look at the history of a podcast, without having to be
told in the feed is in the feed and XML itself, when it updates
to be able to look at his update history and say, Okay, this,
this podcast, clearly updates on Thursdays and Sundays. So
I see that as an external, I think it would be perfect
actually an external machine language, or what do you want to
call AI ml project that takes the firehose and analyzes that
for a week, or a month or whatever, and then starts to
spit back some ideas.
Yeah, and we can put an A, we can put an endpoint in there
that just except,
you know, you know, where this is going. I mean, I can tell, I
can already tell you where this is gonna go. Ultimately,
someone's going to figure out a way to ping us, which means
aggregate now. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's ultimately what's
going to happen.
Yeah, and see, that's why we have the, we have the API
permissions level, so we can give trusted parties, that
ability to give us trusted data like that. So they can say,
okay, ping, ping now, but I'm not just going to randomly
accept everybody in the world saying, okay, ping me now, you
know, so it's like, if we have people that or somebody pops up
and says, I want to do this, I want to do this service for you.
I want to tell you, Okay, paying these things now, because this
is what my, you know, software is, is showing, give, give them
a readwrite key and republish give me a publisher key, and let
them let them do that for us. Yeah, it'd be great. That way,
we don't have to do Oh, we don't have to run all that horsepower.
We'll do that yourself.
So I would say the quote when when, say who was pinging us now
what hosters are pinging us the rss.com? Guys?
Yes, yeah. Since you think I sent you.
Yeah, I have it here. And you sent me a lot of signal.
And know that pod. podcast,
we have station. Okay, we have pod news Captivate fireside
rss.com, add my podcast. Now they're adding feeds. But
they they're all adding feeds and pod. You get them adding
feeds, and then you have some that are are integrating doing
search with us.
So when we. So do you know, is blueberry integrating with us or
not yet?
I haven't seen anything coming from them yet. Because
that would be the way to do it is hey, when someone publishes
on your hosting platform, then you send us a ping and we'll
we'll parse right away.
Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's the whole idea behind poke, you
know, well. But the thing is, they're just not not all the
services and platforms, do it? Sure. So you end up having to,
and this is the same reason why, you know, the independent
aggregator guys that have infrastructure backing their
apps, they they had to fall back to this as well is because they
just, it's just not a real lot. The Pub Sub stuff is not
reliable enough to purely depend on it, you're
always gonna be aggregating, always gonna be doing that,
well, well aggregate for as long as we have to, and for
whatever's needed that speaking of such, this entire project is
built under the value for value philosophy. And that goes for
everything. So we look for time, talent and treasure, whatever
you put into the database, that's your value, you're going
to get it out and if you don't, then you'll just stop putting
stuff in so we understand how that system works. The same for
the work that Dave and I are doing that all the other devs
are doing. This is you know, it's something that needs to be
done. It's clear that a lot of people saw that it had to be
done. They've witnessed the people showing up with with feed
databases, but when it gets down to and you're running what? What
are you running now? 1112 servers. What do we have spun
up?
Yeah. 11 servers right now. And we'll what's our what's our
current?
What's our current run rate for costs like 300 a month now?
It's about it's still about 250? Well, it's not including backup.
So it's about it's about 270. Okay,
so donations have dropped off a cliff. Yes. Appreciate the I
think someone showed up today with a $6.66. And monthly
donation. Beelzebub, we appreciate it. We feel good
about that.
We always love doing the dark work here.
Yeah. Well, I saw it as two times 333. So I just I just
stripped that down into what makes me feel good.
Maybe it's appropriate that we had a discussion about not
having pot.
Hey, we've been influenced, oh, my Yes. Oh, boy. Look up. So
obviously, support is, is highly appreciated and necessary.
Again, it's the time your talent, your treasure, not
everyone can support financially. We have a lot of
people showing up with their talent and their time, but also
spreading the word. You know, I'm seeing more and more people
tweeting about it. And we will, just on I mean, that's all the
social media monetarily, except for the mastodon stuff. Having
well, we'll have a better page when people go to so when they,
they land there, and then like, okay, I can, at least they
should kind of understand what it does. And also, that page
should immediately send people somewhere else. So I don't want
people coming to podcast index.org and going, Oh, yeah.
Okay, cool. Thanks. I want them to add something to do. If even
if it is search for something or hit the hit the carousel, I want
them to go somewhere else. I want them to play with an app, I
want them to find a random podcast, I want them to maybe
look at a player that they could customize and make their own. We
need places to send them. And all you and all y'all out there
need to do is send me emails and links of what you got and and
what the link is. And we'll send them we that is that has to be
the point of the index is sending people away.
We've got a few different people that have now done subscriptions
for like 10 bucks a month. Now, which is which is fantastic.
Because those types of things. Yes. Just to sustain like $10 a
month, pay a one of our each of our crawlers, each of the
aggregator servers is $10 a month. There you go. You're
spawning bucks a month gives you an aggregator
Yes. And we'll put your name on it.
Here it is. I don't know how we want to peerage this thing. If
you if you donate five bucks a month do you get Are you like a
thumb drive? If it's like 20, you upgrade it to like a like a
Raspberry Pi or
something like that. Yeah, you're paying. That's funny. I
like that paying for servers. So speaking of such an which, and
then last time, we talked about the mean IO Server for the
images and one for the feeds. Yeah. So where are we at?
Nowhere. Okay, it's just not just no time is just not dropped
off. Okay.
Yeah, I've had to get these category things out of the way.
And I'm still refining that if the category stuff is really
part of the of a bigger. I'm saying that I'm working on
categories. But what it really is, is a RE is a refactoring of
the way filtering works across the API. That includes
categories and language, right? And timing. So basically, once,
once this quote unquote, category stuff gets fully baked,
which is, it almost is I'm kind of finishing it up right now.
Then, though, the way you call that, that recent feeds API,
with all the way you can filter that will be applied to
everything. So then we can just, you know, you can. So it's a
bigger project than just categories. As I'm refactor, I'm
just going to refactor all that stuff to match. And then the end
it'll it'll solve some of the issues that developers are
running into, like the recent episodes API. Sometimes you go
back and you hit a wall, where it just stops. And it's because
it's because there's, there's gaps. If anybody you know,
there's guys out there familiar with, with databases know that
when you have an auto index, an auto indexing ID, every time you
insert a record in increments, the auto ID number, for that
record, it just goes up by one. Well, there's a lot there's lots
of different ways that you can get gaps in that. And one of the
ways that we were inserting item episodes into the database
initially, was with a, what's called an on duplicate key
update. And so you try to you try to put a new episode in
there if the episode already exists, right? Then you just you
say normally it would fail and say it's a dupe is already in
there. But you can say on duplicate key update. Now wait,
it'll update key certain, it'll say, okay, it exists. So I'm
just going to change it. And it'll update certain key
information about that record. And we're doing that in order to
pick up some metadata that we were not initially getting.
Okay? Like, for instance, we were not initially pulling in
iTunes episode type. So that's the one where it's like
episodic, or serial or whatever. So we added that and so I
started doing an update on that, well, every time you if you use
the own duplicate key update function, then it auto allocates
a new record ID every time and if he if it doesn't update, it
just discards it. So what you would end up with is you would
end up with episodes, being incrementally ID up till let's
just say 1,000,030 5 million, and then the net and then it
jumps from 35 million to 36 575. To You know, it's gonna jumps
huge heart gap. So anyway, this, that's a long way of saying that
the the category work, the reason it's taking so much time
is because it's encompassing more than is encompassing all of
these issues. So that can just fix it all at once. What and
then move on,
what could you specifically use help with right now?
At this very moment, not much, but once there's a couple of
people that have offered help on on infrastructure. So they've
offered help with Docker rising some stuff. Good, cool. Yeah.
Yeah. That's going to be very valuable. And I'm going to
follow up with those guys. As soon as I get to that, and
that's,
and it's valuable, because we can easily move infrastructure
from server to server or wherever. Yeah, that's totally
Yeah. Yeah. Makes recovery easier. All that kind of jazz.
Yeah, no, Docker. Docker is awesome. And it's just not the
something we did from the beginning. So we're gonna have
to bake it in after the fact? Where
do you think we are in the process of being somewhere where
you can sit back and say, Okay, today, I'm just gonna watch how
it runs?
I think we're, I feel like we're probably a month or so away from
that. And then maybe that's optimistic. But I feel as well,
I feel like just based on progress. In the one, well, I'll
tell you another area of help this directly related to that is
look, looking at the database, and sanitizing it somewhat just
just kind of what related to what we talked about earlier. It
would be nice, it's a now if posted the feeds list. It would
be nice to have people look at it in and play with, with those
with that list and see, take a crack at finding stuff that's
just garbage. And there's going to be plenty of that in their
feeds that are garbage or just or yeah stations or like the 800
sermon, audio feed stuff like
well, that those will be good to know. But I'm thinking more
specifically, like I saw my first fraud feed yesterday in
the index. Ah, and it was Scott Adams, somebody cloned Scott
Adams podcast on Anchor. All this stuff always comes through
anchor. Yeah. And they clone this is feed on anchor and put
like some kind of donation link up. What did they and they
called it the real Scott Adams podcast.
So how did you catch it just by seeing it?
I searched for I was doing some timing stuff, trying to figure
out where the aggregator was. And I was just searching for
random stuff that was coming to my mind and I searched for Scott
Adams to check his part because I know he does an almost daily
podcast and it just came up in the results there was another
one there.
So again, this is something that we could use AI or AI or ml
external to us with HMI human human intelligence. Oh okay. So
from I know you'd like to so there's nothing that says that
we can't have a page that shows the version of the fire hose
that people can look at and say hey, that looks bogus. Let me
take a look and then could tag it flag it market whatever.
I would love that
well that's just just brother make a page I'll promote the
crap out of it. And people love sitting there personally, that
was always see you made the carousel which was never my
vision but I I love it. My vision was literally I want to
see almost like a, like an IRC chat, I just want to see line
line line line, as I see part witness coming in this updated
this updated. I mean, give me an SSH or whatever, you know, give
me a terminal to do that.
And I like the dashboard, your dashboard.
I'm not a douchey dashboard guy. I'm a command line guy these
days. So I really like I have a Twitter client, that's Command
Line. You know, I like oh, I just love it, you know, because
I just logs. I love watching that stuff come in. So for me, I
look at that. And if I say hey, wait a minute, here's something
that's three of the same in a row. I'd flag it. Yeah, and we'd
go somewhere. And so that's the human intelligence. I see no
reason why you couldn't hang some kind of reader off of the
off of our endpoint for the hose. Oh, God, I'm speaking the
lingo. Not for
endpoint hang, hanging, hanging it off the hose. Yeah, I'm
hanging off the endpoint for the hose. I'm sipping,
clip the clip, clip three Brene Brown Assa God,
I just got goosebumps from head to toe. You I love you came
prepared. I'm doing the work. Or you know, someone who just has
some AI looking at it some algo and says, Hey, I saw this I saw
that come in. And that stuff. By the way, no one can compete with
us on Apple can't compete. Spotify can't compete.
Obviously, anchor FM can't compete. And why wouldn't we
make that list public to the world? Why wouldn't we say? Why
wouldn't we put it out there and say everybody was running an
index? Here's what we found, you may want to update
it. That's exactly what I want. I would love for somebody be
analyzing every every feed in the database sort of constantly.
And as soon as they find something that looks fishy and
fraudulent. It just they just paying it back to us. And then
we and we publish that list. We publish? I don't know call it,
you know, suspicious that
problematic last year problematic. problematic. Yes.
You made it to the problematic list. That's right, I guess
index. Me that'll see that, that that's a service do is everybody
needs? Yes.
And if anybody can participate, why wouldn't it be? Look, if I
go right now to our search, which I love. Right? Okay. Now,
let me just see, I kind of kind of liked that idea that you were
using Scott Adams as an example. So if I put Scott Adams in hold
on it. I'm a developer, right. Get in here. Oh, yeah. Come on
developer API. Yeah. Here we go. Search. So I do Scott Adams.
Let's see what pops up. So I've got Scott Adams show which is
apparently some different Scott Adams real coffee with Scott
Adams coffee with so real coffee with Scott Adams is an anchor FM
podcast looks both fraud
fake? It's a fraud. It's that's the fraud fee. That's the one.
Yep. And like you can tell because it says support this
podcast, anchor FM blah, blah, blah, slash support. And so like
that's, they were talking about this on the new media show, I
think.
Yeah, this is this is a big problem. Is this fraud? Yeah,
exactly. It's all coming from in
a lot of his drop from anchor, Rob. Yeah, yeah,
he was saying that. The reason is, so that is such a bad
problem on on Anchor is because they allow one person to set it
to buy an account and create as many phases they want to off one
account. And you can just directly link back and get
support for your, you know, that way, and so it doesn't cost you,
you can just dump a million things in there, and it doesn't
cost you anything. So if it's just like the it's like the spam
payback scenario, if you you know, if, if it's if sending
8000 spams cost you just the same amount is sending a
million, then there's no deterrent. So So what you're
saying the decimal?
Go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna
say what would it say that that's why that exists? Yeah.
Why? So what is the appropriate action? Here? Since okay, we're
looking at this, we're pretty sure it's a scam, feed, spam
feed, everything points towards it. There's no evidence that is
actually Scott Adams property other than his property is being
ripped off. So what should we what do you feel the appropriate
action is?
Well, you know what, one thing that I could say is if we had
the problematic feed, where we were pumping out things that
look problematic, then each individual podcaster could To
filter for just themselves, and then be looking themselves for
things that pop up.
So it's almost like a UBL, black block list.
Well, I was thinking, I could see that. What I was thinking
though, in my head was that if I'm Scott Adams, and I just
subscribed to the problematic feed with a Scott Adams terms in
it, and I know what it always looks like, if a new one pops
up, check it out. Like I just refresh, you know, or not
refresh, but I subscribe to it. Maybe I subscribe to it as an
RSS feed. And if anything ever comes up with a new, like,
there's always the same five results in the index for Scott
Adams. And there's mine and maybe a few others that are
other.
Okay. Oh, so I think what you're saying is, so for no agenda, I
would, I would have a feed or some place, I can see what pops
up continuously on new no agenda. And if something pops
up, it's like, Oh, hold on a second. That's bullshit. And
then I can take some action, supposedly, that the, if
you're subscribed, yeah. And if you're subscribing to it on a
regular, you know, on a regular basis, and where you can see all
the time, then, you know, you're subscribing to the problematic
feed and some new no agenda thing pops up. And you can see
quickly, you can just eyeball and say, well, that's just a
name collision, that's not a big deal. And then, three weeks
later, another one pops up. Well, that's
okay. So here's something that somebody can create right away,
then I think this would be very helpful, particularly since it's
an industry wide problem. Everyone's bitching about it,
I'd like to do something, let's let's create this functionality.
So that when a spam feed shows up, we can publicly expose that.
And privately Of course, we say, hey, anchor, you know, I don't
know if we have any contact or not. But we have to have the
whole the whole podcasting. I don't, I can't bring myself to
say space, because it just makes me want to shoot myself.
Ecosystem, know that this is going on. And you'll maybe see
this, why come back to the almost like a block list, we
have to have a way that people can say, hey, I'm tagging this,
this looks fake, I'm really sure it's fake, a way to propagate
that and a way for people to take action.
It See, this is what I was saying on on Reddit the other
day when I was talking with Daniel is that I feel like so
James critten. On the saying this, too, he's he said that
Apple is so their iTunes database has tons of junk in it.
And there must be some special relationship between iTunes and
anchor. Because if you can, you can find all over iTunes, you
can find test feeds that come from anchor, and I see him in
our index as well. It'll just say it'll be like, as a list of
of A's, it'd be like six A's as the title of the podcast, you
know, we'll have one episode in a dish called test. And like,
you find that all over the place. So those kinds of things.
I feel like if we create the proper linkage back and forth
with the other platforms and other podcast networks, so that
all of them are feeding in or feeding to us and in and then we
feed back out. So that in that makes it enough in effect, where
everybody's linking to each other, then what what you
develop is a humongous platform that is more trustworthy, single
entity. Everybody can police. But because when live, you know
lips, Lipson can look at its podcast, and they can be
monitoring the problematic feed or whatever, and when and they
can automate, being able to detect when something pops up,
it's a clone of their stuff.
So then ultimately, we're not ever really going to delete
something necessarily from the index, but we have very clear
ways to filter out what is bogus.
Yeah, and well, hanging off of that whole idea would be like,
what I would love to eventually get to would be like a quorum.
And you say, Okay, three other podcast networks and also my
guys. Like it's like a Bitcoin confirmation.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hit prove you, you give. There's this
thing just popped up in the problematic feed because you got
this guy over here who's analyzing it all as it comes
through. And he's pinging back and saying, Okay, thank you. My
system says this thing looks like it may be bogus. And then
you give it you give that problematic entry and Id maybe
it will say whatever. And then everybody else looks at it and
says, Well, yeah, I think that's bogus, too. Well, then you just,
you just block it. Right and take it off. Or we take it off.
Yeah, right, either from search or what? Are we put a confirmed
problematic tag flag on that feel? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good
way to do it. And everyone can make their own make their own
decision what they want to do.
That's a great, yeah, I like that better, like putting the
problematic tag,
just put it exactly. put a tag on it. Yeah. Because then you
didn't
everybody else's apps can choose to not show it.
And we're the, we're the perfect place to facilitate that. And
this is, this is another one, those beautiful things that I
think that we can really, really make work. If people are willing
to step up, and put that together, we certainly have most
of the pieces. And if you think you know somebody who can help
with this, let's solve this real problem. By the way, you know,
anchor is Spotify. I mean, that's, that is,
seems to be another company that it's like, teachers like there's
nobody that actually works there. It's just a robot.
Oh, yes, well, I know that they're integrated on the back
end with a lot of the hosters. I don't know if we discussed this,
maybe last year, or the show before. It, there's all kinds of
requirements for a hosting company, I know one or two, but
I don't want to call them out by name, because I don't know. It's
their business. I know if it was told in confidence or not. But
you have to actually host your media file on the hoster
servers. Because there's a process that goes from them
direct to anchor, and anchor does something and it goes
directly to Spotify. That's basically it. And I have a
feeling that and this will be very typical for what are they
calling corporate relationship management, CRM, for Spotify, to
have sat down at the you know, in the smoky room with the Apple
guys and said, Hey, you trust us? We're big, and we got lots
of money, right? Yeah, you got a look, we got this ingest system
where, you know, we, we checked everything. What do we got? We
got paper and all these people. It's all good. So you'll just
take our submissions sight unseen, right? That's probably
what's happening.
That's That's what, that's what James was saying that it's clear
that that's happening to some degree, but you know, just
nobody's. Everybody just acts like it's not Yeah,
but but we so and this can be expanded to your player, if you
have a podcast player, and in search, something shows up, let
your users tag it like, Hey, I think this might be a problem.
And this could feed right back into Apple. Let's give Apple
this beautiful news. And g Hello, Google. I know there's no
one there. I know. It's just a black box. But you could you
could take our feed that says, hey, you might want to look at
these you know, for spam. You want to make your search good.
What was it always the biggest companies that make the most
money? are the ones that are impossible to get a human being
to answer the phone? Well, like,
Well, Dave, look at where all the religious podcasts are
showing up. They're showing up with us clearly the devil the
devil is on their side.
Hey, we're getting sick, sick, sick, delicious.
Man, some soon someone was telling us to do something.
Okay. So to summarize for this for this next week.
To summarize, we solved podcasting.
We saw podcasting is very good is there so we kind of know what
what you would find helpful. I really love the idea of, well,
I'll work I'll work with drunk playdough. And make sure we know
when he's ready. We'll get all the right stuff on the homepage
and get some of these lists up. Get all that going. And
hopefully, we've inspired someone to come up with some
some something that does some of what we've looked to solve. So
whether it's the the problematic lists, whether it's different
kinds of filtered players and examples is what we need. That's
again, that's why I love with the simple player and cast
coverage. Do they show great examples of what you can do?
That is not your typical, hey, here's a podcast radio receiver.
And here's where you turn the dial. Here's where you know, and
by the way just thinking of that, I mean, why couldn't you
have the randomizer like oh press this button for something
from tech press this button from something from God casts or
press this button for something for something else. And after
you've done that, here's your breadcrumb trail here's what you
checked out. Do you want to subscribe to any of these do you
want to recommend any of these? I can go on forever.
Oh, yeah, you know, don't get Adam stories. Here's the idea.
The idea machine. It did just come out it's rollout.
I'm long on ideas and short on code, my friend And I guess
champagne wishes and beer money is all part of the same problem.
Give me Give me clip, clip five Brene Brown NASA. Oh my god, the
polar bear Holy
crap, that's good for no agenda, I'm using that one. Alright,
we got we lost one. So this is,
well, we'll be playing these shows that we lose as we go
along. And remember, this is just phase one of the mission
everybody. This is preserving podcasting as a platform for
free speech, that message has gotten out that message is
propagating, keep that message in mind and keep telling that
that's what we're doing. We're trying to fix all these horrible
things, trying to make it better for everybody. And one of these
days, we'll get into phase two, which is retooling podcasting
into a platform of value. I'm very excited about that part,
Dave, and I have some ideas. So we know the timeline is a month,
something maybe longer, whatever, there's no rush,
there's no payroll, all we need to do is keep the servers
running and keep a keep us sane. And I'm looking at you in
particular Dave, make sure you take your days off. And so
please 12 Plenty of bt 12 d3, please consider supporting the
open and freely available and just beautiful project that is
the podcast index podcast index.org There's a Donate
button there and I'm I'm gonna get a BTC pay server or
lightning link on there. I've been playing around. We've got a
full node now I'm I'm learning lightning and Bitcoin and it's
been fun just to watch bits fly around and understand how this
stuff works, which is the opposite of everything you've
learned about money. But once you understand digital money, oh
my god, it's a whole new ballgame.
You keep explaining it to me and I keep forgetting it to five
minutes after you explain it.
Alright, Dave, I'll let you get back to your Friday. You you
work in today. Are you the office? Yeah, I'm on lunch break
right now. Well, okay. You have 10 minutes. Perfect. Don't wait
10 minutes. You're an hour late. Jones pushing the timecard Hey,
Dave, have a great weekend, man. It's always a pleasure to update
and get a board meeting out of you. Yeah, you too, man. Have a
good weekend. Everybody. Thank you so much. Make sure you
propagate. Let everybody know about the podcast. We'll be back
next week for another edition of podcasting 2.0