15 ms·

RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technologic

RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.

Zhyl 9y ago
Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.
- thinkloop 9y ago
  Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email, being federated as well, is easy for anyone to grok.
  - afterburner 9y ago
    Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.
    - CAT0 9y ago
      They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/ https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/
      - _asummers 9y ago
        There's a native OSX app, too, which has been mostly ok for me, so far. A few bugs occasionally, but it's better than running in browser in my experience.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - princekolt 9y ago
    The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.
    - jon_richards 9y ago
      An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: <the original subject>" and my followups no longer thread. I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread. This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading). And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.
      - iforgotpassword 9y ago
        Just don't use the web front end, access them using your favorite mail client using IMAP. Oh wait, google fucked that up too. Luckily most clients worked around the google bullshit over the years.
      - thinkloop 9y ago
        Good points - so federated email works so well because most of us decided to federate to a single server. Something sad about that.
  - nicky0 9y ago
    Open solutions are always more confusing than centralised ones. End user podcast apps try to hide all the details an make it look like "here's an app with podcasts in it". But behind the scenes it is wonderfully messy. Same with email. Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Yep. It's perplexing that a YouTube for podcasts (with centralized ad serving and similar profit sharing) hasn't emerged. The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native advertising. > The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant? That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of (except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation by itself) really captures it.
    - jhauris 9y ago
      I think it's decentralized partly because itunes doesn't integrate with any other services. So to serve android and IOS many podcasters NEED a single RSS feed that they point iTunes and other services to. Many relatively small services exist to help with hosting, and usually provide a hosted RSS link independent of itunes/whatever. I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull content from other places. I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially compared to getting an app on the App Store.
- orbitur 9y ago
  Some "players" like Stitcher are trying their best to get away from that, though. And they're seeing moderate success, too. I feel like podcasts have simply been overlooked by big media types, and the day is coming where enough power will concentrate and advertisers will only want to give money to networks instead of individual podcasts. Enjoy the freedom while it lasts. I think 5 years from now, no individuals will be able to make money from it without joining a "network."
  - singingfish 9y ago
    I did Stitcher for a bit. It was kind of ok. But the walled garden felt wrong and at some point I couldn't find a podcast on stitcher I wanted. So I found Downcast (iOS app). While it's not perfect, it does let me access my spaghetti-and-duct-tape BBC radio downloader easily.
yxhuvud 9y ago
It is the same in the media industry, RSS is everywhere. It is just that the end users seldom see it..
- gglitch 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on this, please?
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    Firefox used to display and RSS icon in the url bar if the site had a feed, allowing you to subscribe you to "live bookmarks" - feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html This is completely hidden from the UI by now.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Alt->Bookmarks->Subscribe to this page It could be more prominent.
    - avhon1 9y ago
      In Firefox, if you click the hamburger menu and select "Customize...", one of the things you can drag into either the menu or the button bar is an RSS feed indicator/subscribe button.
      - pmlnr 9y ago
        You wouldn't believe how much it matters what the default is; people don't customize any more.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - yxhuvud 9y ago
    What I mean is that it is often used as a transport format for when some component or app will need dynamic and styled text content that update over time. Often in web applications, but not always.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
True. But it certainly fell from grace. Prior to social media it was (paraphrasing) "Follow me via RSS" than morphed into "Follow me on social." Even site where RSS is baked in (i.e., WordPress) stopped mentioning it. It never went away, but it certainly (sadly) got a serious demotion.
username223 9y ago
> andy & helen zaltzman The Bugle and the Allusionist are tiny rays of light in these dark times. Podcasting is a simple and honest business: I download an MP3 and maybe listen, they get paid to read some ad copy.
fuchur 9y ago
Can we stop calling it podcasting? Nothing about the iPod or iTunes was special enough to warrant coining that term.
boyce 9y ago
I love how the term podcasting outlived dedicated personal music devices. For me it's testament to how solid the idea was. Guess "box sets" is also doing that now everyone streams TV series.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS." Can you elaborate on this? How are they related?
- pbourke 9y ago
  Podcasts are audio files syndicated over RSS
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    I see, I did not know this, I guess I never bothered to look. Thanks.
- freehunter 9y ago
  iTunes doesn't host any podcast files. You (as a podcast host) provide them an RSS link and when an end-user subscribes to your podcast, iTunes merely grabs your RSS feed and has the end-user's phone download the latest episode from your servers. The episodes are stores and distributed from the podcast host's own server. The podcast app is just an RSS feed reader.
- redwall_hp 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_enclosure Podcasts are just RSS feeds with a tag that points to an audio file. RSS and Podcasting have a lot of common lineage with the guys who invented blogging. As that Wikipedia page states, the enclosure tag was added by Dave Winer, of Scripting News, which is the oldest continuously operated blog...arguably dating back to 1994.

Zhyl 9y ago

Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.

thinkloop 9y ago
Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email, being federated as well, is easy for anyone to grok.
- afterburner 9y ago
  Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.
  - CAT0 9y ago
    They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/ https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/
    - _asummers 9y ago
      There's a native OSX app, too, which has been mostly ok for me, so far. A few bugs occasionally, but it's better than running in browser in my experience.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- princekolt 9y ago
  The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.
  - jon_richards 9y ago
    An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: <the original subject>" and my followups no longer thread. I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread. This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading). And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.
    - iforgotpassword 9y ago
      Just don't use the web front end, access them using your favorite mail client using IMAP. Oh wait, google fucked that up too. Luckily most clients worked around the google bullshit over the years.
    - thinkloop 9y ago
      Good points - so federated email works so well because most of us decided to federate to a single server. Something sad about that.
- nicky0 9y ago
  Open solutions are always more confusing than centralised ones. End user podcast apps try to hide all the details an make it look like "here's an app with podcasts in it". But behind the scenes it is wonderfully messy. Same with email. Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.
macspoofing 9y ago
Yep. It's perplexing that a YouTube for podcasts (with centralized ad serving and similar profit sharing) hasn't emerged. The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?
- ghaff 9y ago
  Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native advertising. > The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant? That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of (except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation by itself) really captures it.
  - jhauris 9y ago
    I think it's decentralized partly because itunes doesn't integrate with any other services. So to serve android and IOS many podcasters NEED a single RSS feed that they point iTunes and other services to. Many relatively small services exist to help with hosting, and usually provide a hosted RSS link independent of itunes/whatever. I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull content from other places. I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially compared to getting an app on the App Store.
orbitur 9y ago
Some "players" like Stitcher are trying their best to get away from that, though. And they're seeing moderate success, too. I feel like podcasts have simply been overlooked by big media types, and the day is coming where enough power will concentrate and advertisers will only want to give money to networks instead of individual podcasts. Enjoy the freedom while it lasts. I think 5 years from now, no individuals will be able to make money from it without joining a "network."
- singingfish 9y ago
  I did Stitcher for a bit. It was kind of ok. But the walled garden felt wrong and at some point I couldn't find a podcast on stitcher I wanted. So I found Downcast (iOS app). While it's not perfect, it does let me access my spaghetti-and-duct-tape BBC radio downloader easily.

yxhuvud 9y ago

It is the same in the media industry, RSS is everywhere. It is just that the end users seldom see it..

gglitch 9y ago
Could you elaborate on this, please?
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Firefox used to display and RSS icon in the url bar if the site had a feed, allowing you to subscribe you to "live bookmarks" - feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html This is completely hidden from the UI by now.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    Alt->Bookmarks->Subscribe to this page It could be more prominent.
  - avhon1 9y ago
    In Firefox, if you click the hamburger menu and select "Customize...", one of the things you can drag into either the menu or the button bar is an RSS feed indicator/subscribe button.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      You wouldn't believe how much it matters what the default is; people don't customize any more.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- yxhuvud 9y ago
  What I mean is that it is often used as a transport format for when some component or app will need dynamic and styled text content that update over time. Often in web applications, but not always.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

True. But it certainly fell from grace. Prior to social media it was (paraphrasing) "Follow me via RSS" than morphed into "Follow me on social." Even site where RSS is baked in (i.e., WordPress) stopped mentioning it. It never went away, but it certainly (sadly) got a serious demotion.

username223 9y ago

> andy & helen zaltzman The Bugle and the Allusionist are tiny rays of light in these dark times. Podcasting is a simple and honest business: I download an MP3 and maybe listen, they get paid to read some ad copy.

fuchur 9y ago

Can we stop calling it podcasting? Nothing about the iPod or iTunes was special enough to warrant coining that term.

boyce 9y ago

I love how the term podcasting outlived dedicated personal music devices. For me it's testament to how solid the idea was. Guess "box sets" is also doing that now everyone streams TV series.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS." Can you elaborate on this? How are they related?

pbourke 9y ago
Podcasts are audio files syndicated over RSS
- bogomipz 9y ago
  I see, I did not know this, I guess I never bothered to look. Thanks.
freehunter 9y ago
iTunes doesn't host any podcast files. You (as a podcast host) provide them an RSS link and when an end-user subscribes to your podcast, iTunes merely grabs your RSS feed and has the end-user's phone download the latest episode from your servers. The episodes are stores and distributed from the podcast host's own server. The podcast app is just an RSS feed reader.
redwall_hp 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_enclosure Podcasts are just RSS feeds with a tag that points to an audio file. RSS and Podcasting have a lot of common lineage with the guys who invented blogging. As that Wikipedia page states, the enclosure tag was added by Dave Winer, of Scripting News, which is the oldest continuously operated blog...arguably dating back to 1994.