Notices by James Cridland (james@bne.social)

One for @samsethi and @dave - the excellent @mijustin has added Bluesky podcast comment integration to Transistor. They pull the comments back from Bluesky to Transistor websites, too.

One small step further, and they could also support the socialInteract tag. And another small step, and they can put the comments in an RSS feed, using the <comments> tag, for podcast apps to display easily, as per my suggestion here: https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/discussions/680

(Thought for @js - is there a simple piece of code for "turn this Bluesky discussion thread into an RSS feed", or a service to do that? I wonder if I could build something to pull that from my auto-postings on Bluesky for the Podnews Daily? I bet I could.)

@glynmoody Rather good. I was last there in 2007. I loved the solitude at the top of the rock. It’s a funny old place, as you say. (The village the other side of the rock from the town, Catalan Bay, was nice. And it was fun to walk into La Linea, if only to walk across the border to a different country).

Have some photographs! #travel

The view from the kitchen window seems to have something magnificently extra today.

@jwz You didn’t. And it’s pretty clear that I haven’t been heard! Carry on.

@jwz There is a hairdresser which is cash-only (to make some kind of political point). It is very close to where I live. It did me a good haircut the first time I went in, only to discover that I had to go and find some cash, and the only cash machine near it was broken, and in the end I had to send him money via a bank transfer,p, and it was an aggravating, time-sucking, nuisance.

I chose there and then to never go into a place that doesn’t let me pay the way I want to pay.

(I haven’t paid for anything with cash since about 2018).

@tchambers @dave @johnspurlock It is not accurate as I understand it, in terms of how Apple charts work. Apple’s are trending charts, which reward recent subscriptions. https://podnews.net/article/understanding-podcast-statistics

@tchambers @dave @johnspurlock You will find some people who have taken databases of the Apple and Spotify charts - you could chat with Rephonic or Podgagement as two different people. However, the Apple chart is trending (not based on consumption), while Spotify skews younger and isn't representative of the industry as a whole; so not ideal. It's the best data that there is on a weekly basis, though.

Podscribe have their own data, which is a hybrid of their own data and estimates.

https://podnews.net/press-release/edison-research-us-ranker-q324 is research based (Q-on-Q), and shows that the top 50 really doesn't change that much from quarter to quarter anyway.

@bobjonkman @neil I host on Buzzsprout. Never had an issue. Buzzsprout's co-founders are @tomrossi7 @kfinn but your producer should just forward the error to support@buzzsprout.com and they can get that fixed.

@neil Two great questions!

Most commonly-used audio format is MP3, which is playable everywhere. Buzzsprout, one of the biggest podcast hosts in the world, defaults to 96k mono (44.1 kHz) files. That is just fine for most people.

For a long while, WTF with Marc Maron was 48kbps mono (22.05kHz), as was Podnews Daily. As long as you make it loud enough (-14 LUFS) then most people would be just fine with 48kbps mono. Rather annoyingly, 48kbps isn't in this old list I compiled. I wonder if it's worthwhile recompiling them all?

https://podnews.net/article/audio-quality-comparisons

Predictions for 2025 - and reflections from 2024. What do the PWR Supporters of the Podnews Weekly Review think? Why, glad you asked. Listen - and read - here. https://podnews.net/article/pwr-predictions-for-2025

Congratulations, @leo for using some new Podcasting 2.0 tags in This Week in Tech.

I see (HTML format) transcripts, plus the podcast:people tag to link to your guests, and the podcast:support tag to help people become a paid supporter with Club TWiT.

Really good to see! (And you've found a bug in my implementation, too!).

https://podnews.net/podcast/i7wj

no

Just posted a thread on Twitter explaining why I don’t post threads on Twitter. https://x.com/jamescridland/status/1852980105267519704

It pains me to see so many otherwise bright, rational folk still posting over there, keeping Elon happy.

Now I understand what's behind the rush to video in podcasting... ad revenue. That's it. Just ad revenue.

Google wants you to do it because they couldn't earn money out of Google Podcasts, but they *can* shove ads in front of your listeners/viewers if they use YouTube.

And Spotify wants you to do it because they can sell video advertising more easily and earn more money doing it.

Forget what audiences want. This isn't about them.

https://podnews.net/update/spotify-ad-revenue-2024

Wondering out loud…

So, Mastodon doesn’t support the “listen” activitypub verb.

Does that mean that Mastodon strips it from the API results, so you won’t see it in @IceCubesApp or @phanpy ? Or does it just mean that Mastodon strips it from its own UI?

If it’s still visible in the API results, then that means you could still do some fun things with the “listen” verb in third-party apps. Including podcast apps. And all the while, not flooding the fediverse with “listen” activities (especially for music listening).

Who might know the answer? @samsethi @evan @js

@js @samsethi @evan @IceCubesApp @phanpy Aha. That’s a shame. Thank you.

@evan @samsethi I would see it as a great thing if Truefans used the correct verbs here, paving the way for AP client support for them.

Oddly excited about Kamala Harris running for US president: such a good choice against Trump. Can they have Pete Butt-cheeks or whatever his name is as VP? He seems good too. #uspol

Google Podcasts is now turned off - everywhere. It would be interesting to see a special chart from @js ’s OP3, showing download traffic to Google Podcasts dribbling away. This is Podnews Daily’s data for “all time” (but, naturally, Google have deleted most of the data already). What a squandered opportunity.

Still wondering how @Podnews might use the fediverse (more than we do). First step might be to allow signin using the fediverse - if there is a standard way to achieve that on ActivityPub. (I am assuming there is only a standard way to do that with the Mastodon API). I’m also a little dubious of social sign-ins, since I think too many people forgot how they signed-in. I wonder how else…