Have you guys heard of podcasting 2.0? It encompasses a new standard for podcasting that allows you have a more rich experience. One piece is the ability to send in small amounts of bitcoin with a message attached, called a boost. Would love to boost into DL and engage with you guys directly. Jupiter Broadcasting does it and it has become one of my favorite ways to interact with the hosts.
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I’m not familiar with the term, do you have an example link? Search isn’t being forthcoming.
Of course! This article really explains it well:
Please forgive the link to a Apple news site, it just covers the concept well.
This episode of the show Office Hours also covers it from a more Linux focused angle:
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Yep, Heard of it. They first one to use this platform and to introduce the concept, afaik, was the podfather himself. (Adam curry, on the NoAgenda show).
It makes podcasts and their hosts, independent from shareholders etc, thus enabling free speech.
Respectfully, as RSS is an open standard, I’m not sure how much more enabled free speech can get.
True. Afaik, it becomes more enabled in the way of topics that can be discussed.
Again, the noagenda show is a good example. The only income there is, comes from donations. Value for value.
That way they can talk about anything. That’s something a lot of people on other podcasts can’t.
This is true but it should be noted that the No Agenda donation setup per their donations website are traditional PayPal links and PayPal subscriptions and the “Value for Value” is referring to their production model and not referring to the Value4Value crypto. Also No Agenda is findable on the Apple podcast index as well.
As No Agenda has existed since 2007, I’m still left wondering what free speech hasn’t already been enabled by simply using a “RSS feed with an enclosure, which is typically an audio or video file.”
Edits to illustrate the difference between Value For Value and Value4Value.
For me, I understand the draw of the blockchain and have to admit… I am not sold on it for content creation.
Why?
Because sending Satoshis is also someone being unwilling to send actual $. I understand that sending 10,000 Sats seems cool and trendy, but it is still disheartening when in reality it is one or two dollars. Yes, Sats can increase in the future much like it already has, but why not simply donate $5 up front. Or, allow audience members to send cash to a PO Box.
For me, the issue is a lack of actual value towards content creators. And, those content creators still rely on traditional advertising sources and $ donations to function in life.
My thought is that the cryptocurrency angle is geared towards the consumer as opposed to the content distributer, because decentralized tech is only good once there is a financial angle which still keeps donations low. Perhaps this is pessimistic, but so many years have already passed where someone needs to add cryptocurrency to a system that has already worked fine… rss feeds served to your device using open source tools, plus the option to donate back. Of course, many of us use Spotify and such, but not all of us.
What I mean is, all of these tools already exist without cryptocurrency, so is it necessary to add? And, if so, why are we not donating to projects we support with regular currency.
I totally hear where you are coming from. For me, I think of the crypto angle as a way to engage a core audience and augment an existing monetization model. Also, the crypto funding pieces of the new spec are only a small number of the features, there are many more parts of the spec that have nothing to do with monetization and everything to do with providing a rich experience.
Yes, heard of it. AntennaPod supports most features AFAIK. Jupiter Broadcasting has talked about it and accept boosts on their shows. I thought there were a lot of other neat features besides the crypto/blockchain element so I could take or leave that feature.
The free speech angle comes from Podcast Index LLC, a free and open index of podcasts that are not curated by Apple or Google or subject to speech or thought policing by those companies. I like the idea of de-googling my podcast index as much as my phone and PC so that’s neat.
Other features include extensions to RSS specifically for podcasts that would add labels to the xml for various podcast related information, like chapter data, instead of embedding chapters into the mp3 metadata.
Podping. A blockchain based “podcast announcement” that would notify podcast apps about new episodes instead of waiting for the app to scrape a ton of RSS feeds that may or may not have any new data, reducing bandwidth.
What are these other parts that enrich the experience?
Genuinely curious. The only part of this I am seeing is the lightning network.
Nice!
Makes me wonder if most projects haven’t been taking greater advantage of the Podcast Index besides Antennapod.
k, unclear why a blockchain would matter for this since you will be scraping either way.
Thanks for the info!
from https://podping.org
Podping is an alternative to WebSub for the open, RSS based podcasting ecosystem that allows for rapid, global notification of podcast feed updates. Using the Hive blockchain, Podping allows a wide variety of Podcast Hosting platforms to send out instant notification that a Podcast feed has changed. Podcast subscribing indexes and apps can then re-poll only the RSS feeds which have changed, eliminating periodic polling.
The intent is to use less bandwidth.
Right but wouldn’t the podcast app still have to scrape the new value anyways? How else would it know it’s been pinged?
I’m no blockchain expert but I presume that it only monitors the blockchain. When a new block is added, signalling new episodes, it determines which shows are new and if you’re subscribed to them. Then it just updates your subscriptions if any have changed and only the ones that did change.
Right now, on my devices, AntennaPod scrapes around 20 RSS feeds a few times a day but in reality only 2 of those shows might actually have new content on any given day.
I guess monitoring the blockchain constantly is less bandwidth intensive than scraping every RSS feed multiple times a day. I don’t really know, I think this would go completely unnoticed by most people.
I still do not understand the benefit. Call me dumb. Updating RSS is so simple and totally automatic, so I do not get the benefit that is added between releasing a new podcast → me, learning about the rss update, and accessing the content.
Thanks for giving more info. Podcasting over RSS is my favorite way to receive content. I guess I still do not understand how adding a public ledger will help any value in terms of the user experience… I guess the point is I can easily send cryptocurrency to podcasters with this.
I don’t know. My data plan is the lowest possible and I have never encountered any sort of data issue with RSS management over cellular, even with thousands of subscriptions. Getting updates for me is all text and limited pictures… I still have to access those links to have any real data usage. Thanks to cron and filtering I’ve never see an overwhelming amount of rss content and podcasts are retrieved once an hour. The only thing that really digs into data on my plan is Youtube.
My hope is that more people embrace RSS. If sending lighting sats makes people think they should use RSS, then please please do.
The crypto currency (Boosts) are sent with a different blockchain network. I think it won’t affect user experience at all but blockchains are decentralized and the idea is to less bound to centralized sources like Google and Apple so it fits the theme.
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