Podcast Listening Late 2024 Blog Chain (plus peeking at the uncontrollable ecosystem of data)

Gotta love a spontaneous series of posts. This began with Bryan Alexander sharing his late 2024 podcast listening habits -kudos for both his non-diminishing blogs style and attributed reuse photos, sometimes mine. And this is not his first of this topic.

This was picked up perhaps in the socials and chain blogged by Doug Belshaw and then blogged on by his colleague Laura Hilliger. I found a similar chain I jumped on in 2021, so why not again?

This is hardly new, I found references to a podcast workshop I did at Maricopa in 2006. As a side web glory note, that was where I had discovered the Hetemeel image generator that did and still does allow you to put words on a chalkboard as if Einstein was writing it.

This lovely generator still works 18 years later! Can even dynamically share my image by a link

Ahh, I wandered off topic. Like 2021 my current listening in off my iPhone when I have driving to do, less frequently I play at home maybe while cooking via blue tooth speaker. My app of choice these days is still Overcast made for us to use free by a single person, Marco Arment.

And huh, my listens are not too dramatically different from 2021, five top ones are:

Still always, This American Life remains top of the form in narrative style. I did catch that they were moving to some kind of optional subscription form of “Life Partners:, noting the dwindling loss of ad revenue. Free listening likely will remain, but this is so good, I’d consider some pesos. One that did and still does move me is The Speaking Part where we hear of Youmna’s journey to get her family out of Gaza. Also Children of Dave had a particular family story impact.
I’ve gotten regular to listening to The Big Story which does daily insights into news and issues in Canada, everything from Toronto’s battle to control racoons to speculating on nuclear war, and lots of consumer focused issues in between.
Almost as nice pairings (and the do cross participate) is Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 and Tech Won’t Save Us for its critical perspective much on AI (and more topics with Paris Marx). I would listen to Emily Bender read a grocery list, but I respect the style of The Hype Theater show for doing it via Twitch and involving the audience, some of its free form improv portions, but also this idea of bringing in excerpts of papers and discussing them at sentence level. I had speculated trying that for academic papers, but never got far from it. And it was listening to the Tech Won’t Save us intro style of including a key quote from the guest as first thing you hear that I stole to use in my own OEGlobal Voices podcast (that’s another post)
99% Invisible remains one I keep going back to often as it makes such fascinating stories of things I might never think about or know to get interested in, like the LA War on Leaf Blowers and the story of jet packs in Rocket Man.

Well there are 5 links in four bullets. I am still a regular listener to Terry Greene’s Gettin’ Air, Bonni Stachowiak’s Teaching in Higher Education and just starting to enjoy WFMU’s Techtonic with Mark Hurst, and one I found via a suggesting in Mastodon from Kate Bowles, Really Specific Stories (check the acronym) where Martin Feld is hosting conversations about podcasts and in turn what RSS enables. My first listen was the interview with legend John Gruber who’s biggest accomplishment is not that he invented Markdown 😉

I had one of this half wonders about sharing lists of podcasts, and would think since they are RSS feeds that it is viable with the obscure but every useful OPML file format, essentially a data file for a group of feeds. They still work well for RSS readers but I could not discern much support for podcast players. I did not go too deep in my searching, but did not hit anything.

Sometime on the recent blog past I wrote about On Demand Smart Links which I found as an interesting way to find any song, album, or podcast available on a public listening service. If you look any one up in the search, it creates a “card” of sorts showing all the services its available on. Try it yourself.

For podcasts, it will find any show that has at least been published to one of the many listing services, and I suspect pushing your show to Apple Podcasts will definitely get it discovered. Since the one I work on OEGlobal Voices was set up on a WordPress site using the PowerPress plugin, it did that pushing to Apple and a few more out of the box. I was able to not only find it in On Demand Smart Links, but they offer a free facility to make a custom version (mine embeds the youtube versions and a few more things), and it also enables adding to the site as a footer widget for subscribe links.

I did idly wonder where they got their data from, and maybe it was through that site or other places that I found Podcast Index described as

The Podcast Index is here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem.
We do this by enabling developers to have access to an open, categorized index that will always be available for free, for any use.

It indicates it has indexed over 4 million shows. So I searched on one of the shows Doug Belshaw listed “No Such Thing As A Fish” and quickly got to it’s full listing that includes the RSS feed (not always easy to do, a few services make that hard to find), but all the latest shows one could listen to right there.

No Such Thing as a Fish podcast listed in Podcast index. There is lovely functionality here from listening to getting feeds, links to the host site, and more.

I can copy the feed right there, but I then notice the fingerprint icon that leads me to…

A listing on Episodes.fm that shows all the apps the podcast can be heard through. Wow. The apps are listed I believe in order of popularity

No Such Thing as a Fish podcast listing on Episodes.fm where you can find the ways to subscribe in your preferred app or just as will listen to the shiow.

As I explored Episodes.fm it unveils much, I can set it up with my preferred listening app, so when I follow those links listed, it takes my directly to my preferred players service to add to it directly. You can just search for a podcasts from the main site, and quickly listen and choose to subscribe. This is as they say, “cool”.

I note that its Episodes.fm URL indexes I am guessing from the ID number on Apple Podcasts. Hmmm. And it is being developed by the same person who originally spun out Podcast Index.

This is all an interesting data layer running out there that I imagine other podcasting services are using, maybe. But it also underscores this observation from Dave Winer that no one owns podcasting, its broad, and not controlled by any one entity.

I think. I am just quickly surmising what I am seeing in Podcast Index and Episodes.fm, the latter looking like a wonderful way to link your shows to a means for the widest subscription offering.

Indeed pick up the chain of listens! Who’s next?

Featured Image: My very first iPod circa 2005, I don’t even recall the model? No screen! MessPod flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)