Podcasts about really simple syndication

In the latest Develpreneur Podcast episode, hosts Rob and Michael explore data integration methods. Focus on scraping versus using APIs. They have experience in both realms. Dissect the challenges and advantages of each approach. Offer valuable insights for developers and data enthusiasts. Using Scraping for Data Integration What is scrapping? Scraping involves programmatically extracting data from web pages, mimicking human interaction with the user interface. Today, web scraping involves navigating HTML structures, identifying elements by their IDs, and extracting relevant information. Inconsistent IDs and Embedded Content Scraping challenges arise when pages lack consistent IDs or contain embedded content like iframes. On the other hand, APIs provide a structured means of accessing data, offering clear endpoints and formatted responses, typically in JSON or XML. Streamlining Scraping with Selenium IDE Rob underscores the importance of developers incorporating IDs into web page elements for easier scraping. He recommends using Scrapy and Selenium IDE. These are useful tools for scrapping interactions, which provide valuable insights into a page's scrapeability. Using APIs for Data Integration What are Apis? An API is a set of rules for software communication. It defines methods and data formats for requesting and exchanging information. APIs enable seamless integration between systems. They provide structured data access, clear endpoints, and formatted responses. Unlike scraping, APIs follow contractual agreements. This simplifies data retrieval and ensures consistency. Controlled Access and Security Michael highlights the advantages of APIs, emphasizing their controlled access and security features. Unlike scraping, which can be hindered by page changes and inconsistencies, APIs offer a reliable and secure way to access data, with built-in authentication and authorization mechanisms. Simplifying Data Retrieval API contracts define the expected behavior and data format for interacting with an API, making it easier for developers to integrate and consume data. By adhering to these contracts, developers can streamline the data retrieval process and avoid potential errors. Understanding Endpoints and Parameters Rob and Michael stress the importance of thoroughly understanding API documentation, which outlines endpoints, request parameters, authentication methods, and response formats. Clear documentation enables developers to effectively use APIs and integrate data into their applications. Exploring Alternative Data Source The Significance of RSS Feeds An RSS feed publishes frequently updated content. It uses the Really Simple Syndication format. Blog posts, news, and podcasts get published via RSS. Users subscribe to the website's RSS feed. New entries get aggregated into a single feed. Feed readers, browsers access the RSS feed. RSS Feeds contain a lot of relevant information RSS feeds offer easily parsed XML documents, simplifying data extraction compared to scraping or API integration. These feeds include metadata, content summaries, and links, enabling users to stay updated on preferred websites effortlessly. In conclusion, Rob and Michael recommend exploring scraping, API methods, and RSS feeds. Consider using tools like Scrapy and Selenium for scraping. Also, familiarize yourself with various APIs for data retrieval. These tips will provide you with a solid knowledge of scraping, APIs, and RSS feeds so developers can navigate data integration confidently and efficiently. Feedback and questions are welcome at info@develpreneur.com, and listeners are invited to connect with Develpreneur on YouTube for more insights and discussions. By focusing on mastering data integration, developers can unlock new possibilities and streamline their workflows. Additional Resources Restful API Testing With RestAssured Restful API Testing Using RestAssured RSS Reader And Promoter – A Product Walk Through Scrapy Selenium Behind the Scenes Podcast Video

Pablos: People are pissed off about social media all the time. They think that Facebook is making people vote for the wrong person. It's still very difficult to find somebody who thinks they voted for the wrong person because of Facebook, but they think everyone else did. Never mind that, there's this kind of, uh, very popular sensibility, which is to blame Facebook for all the problems in the world. They're doing fake news, they're doing, disinformation they're doing , every possible thing that could be wrong. Everybody wants to blame Facebook for getting wrong or Twitter or, any of the other social platforms. So if you think about it, in one sense, , yeah, Facebook got everybody together. I'm just going to use them as the example, we can extrapolate. They got everybody together. They, ended up getting too much content. you and your friends are posting too much shit. Nobody has time to see all of it. So you need the magical algorithm, which you should do like triple air quotes every time I say algorithm. They're like, the algorithm is supposed to figure out, okay, of all the shit that's supposed to be showing up on your feed, what's the coolest, or what's the stuff that you're gonna like the most? That's the job of the algorithm. And of course, we all believe the algorithm is tainted. And so, it's not really trying to find the things I care about the most or like the most. It's just gonna find the things that piss me off the most so that I get my, outrage, dopamine hit and keep coming back. So, which may all be true. We don't know. But, the point is, there's a fundamental problem, which is you cannot see everything that gets posted from all the people you follow. So, there does have to be some ranking. And then the second, thing is that you want that ranking to be tuned for you. And I think the thing that people, are missing about this is that you've got to have, a situation where it is very personalized because, not everybody's the same. Even if you and I followed the same thousand people, it doesn't mean we have identical interests. There are other factors that need to play into determining like what I want to see and what you want to see. And then I think that there's a whole bunch of things that, are classified as societal evils, that Facebook has to decide are not okay for anybody to follow. So if you have posts about Hitler, nobody should get to see those. Even if you're a World War II historian, nope, you don't get to see it. So there's a kind of, problem here, which is that all of this flies in the face of actual diversity, actual multiculturalism, we have 190 countries in the world. We have a lot of different peoples, different cultures, you and I just had a huge conversation about, different cultures and how they drive, we don't agree about these things. We have different ideas in different places in the world, even whole societies have different ideas about what's okay, and what's not okay, and that is the definition of Culture that is the definition of multiculturalism is valuing that that exists and letting everybody have their own ideas And and make let these different people operate in the way that suits them And when you travel, you get beaten over the head with that because, I can appreciate that people drive like this in Bangkok. That's not how I want to do it , that's kind of the fundamental point here. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at is you cannot create one set of rules for the entire world. That is not okay. Ash: 100% Pablos: And so what Facebook has chosen to do is try to create one set of rules for the entire world, at least the two billion people that are on Facebook. Ash: But then you become the government of Facebook. Pablos: You become the government of Facebook. And it's and we're all pissed off because they keep choosing rules that some people don't like or whatever. And so I think this is untenable and I don't think there's a solution there. I think it is a fool's errand and what I believe is, has gone wrong is that Facebook made the wrong choice long ago and they chose to control the knobs and dials and now they're living with the flack that comes with, every choice they make about where to set those knobs and dials. And what they should have done is given the user the knobs and dials. They should let me have buried six pages deep in the settings, have control over. What do you want more of? What do you want less of? Ash: More or less rant. Pablos: Yeah, They try to placate you with the like button and unfollow and all that, but it's not really control. So, contrast that with, the other fork in history that we didn't take, go back to like 2006, in the years before Facebook, We had this beautiful moment on the internet, with RSS. So RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, that hardly matters, RSS was an open standard that allowed any website to publish the content in the form of posts in a kind of machine readable way. And then you could have an RSS reader that could subscribe to any website. So we didn't have the walled garden of Facebook, but, you remember all this, of course, but I'm just trying to break it down here. What we had was, this kind of open standard. , anybody in the world could publish on RSS using their website, all the blog software did this out of the box. WordPress does it out of the box. In fact, most websites, would support RSS. And then you had a reader app, that could be any reader app. This is again, open standards so get any reader you want. And if you just subscribe to any website in the world, you are following them directly. When they publish a post, it show up in your feed. And when you followed too many people, you could start making filters. So I've been making filters. I still do RSS. So by the way, all this machinery still works 15 years later. The machinery still works almost any website if you just put /RSS or / feed on the domain name you'll see an RSS feed and you can subscribe to that so it goes into my reader app And then I've been building filters over the years. So I have filters like -Trump because I got sick and tired of all this bullshit about Trump regardless what you think about Trump I just wanted to think about other things and it was painful to have a feed filled with Trump during the election So I have also -Biden, I have -Kanye, I have -Disney, I have minus all kinds of shit that I don't want to see, I still follow the publishers, but it's weeding out articles that are about those things. And so I get this feed that's pretty curated for me and my interests, and I get more of the stuff I like and less of the stuff I don't like, but I'm responsible for the knobs and dials, I'm controlling the settings, and I get to have my own autonomy about what I think is cool and not cool. And if I don't want Hitler, I can easily just -Hitler. And what we did instead is we kind of signed up for this sort of, babysitter culture of having Facebook make those choices for us. And people not, taking responsibility for their own choices has put us in this situation where we just have an internet full of people want to blame somebody else for everything that they think is going wrong. What we need to do is, figure out a way to, shift the world back to RSS. And out of the walled garden. So that's my, that's where I'm at, and I have ideas about that. Ash: And it's interesting, go back to Delphi, So Delphi internet... Pablos: One of the first, before, before internet, this was like an ISP, like a, like AOL. Centralized ISP. Ash: Right. So, so Delphi was sold to Murdoch, to News Corp and, and then the founder, Dan Burns brought that back. He purchased it, he re acquired the company and then invited a couple of ragtag individuals, myself and, and Palle again, and Rusty Williams. Chip Matthes, and we had like, you know, a room with a VAX in the back. I was doing a lot of the stuff, but we were running forums. Dan had this crazy idea. It was like, Hey, what if you could just make your own forum? And this would be like way pre Facebook, it's like 97, 98. And 98, we started supplying that ability to websites. And the first one we did was a guy named Gil . And like we said to him, it's like, Hey Gil, like you guys really should have some forums, like, yeah, we totally should be. Wait, so how do we do that? And we wrote like a little contract, right? like the first, I think, business development contract that you could probably make. He was head of, , business development, eBay. Right. So he did that. I mean, he's very well known sort of angel kind of lead syndicate guy. Now I like an angel is for like for, for ages. Pablos: Oh, Penchina. I know who you're talking about. Yeah. Ash: We still have like the first document, you will do this. I will do this. I will give you a forum. You will use it for people to talk about, I don't know, the, the, their beanie baby or whatever they were selling back then. And the, the reality was that that took off and then we started supplying this technology, which we then enabled, we RSS enabled it, by the way, of course, at some point, right. When it was, when the, when the XML feeds were like ready to go, we upgraded from XML And then we, we, we took that and we said, all right, let's go, let's go for it. And at some point we're doing 30 million a month, 30 million people a month. Unique. We're like on this thing and we never governed. You could, you could go hidden, right? Kind of like your locked Instagram page versus not, but we didn't govern anything. Forums had moderators, they were self appointed moderators of that domain of, of madness. So if you didn't like that person's moderation, You know, like, all right, screw this guy. You know, like, I don't, I don't want to listen to you. You're crazy. And what we found, and this was the piece of data that I think that was the wildest. Servers are expensive back then. You actually have to have servers. Or in our case we were beating everyone else. Cause we had a VAX that was locked in a, Halon secure room. No, because it came when we repurchased it for a dollar. Like the VAX was still there and Lachlan Murdoch's, office became our like conference room. No, I'm not kidding. It was, it was really crazy. There was a, it was just a VAX sitting there and, Hey, look, you could run UNIX on it. We were good. We didn't care. It loved threads and it was good. And it could do many, many, many, many threads. So we were running this, this thing highly efficiently. There's six people in a company doing that much. That was the company, literally six. I look today and how many people we hire and I'm like, there were six of us. It was wild, the iceberg effect took place. So what ended up happening is the percent, and this is where I think Facebook can't do or doesn't want to do, is how do you advertise below the waterline? And when we were sitting there with the traffic, we're like, dude, why is there so much traffic, but we can't see it, right? It looked like we only had 20, 000 forums or something, and there was like all this mad traffic going on. And. It was something like the 80, 20 rule the other way. It was like 20 percent was indexable that you could see that you could join a forum. And it was 80 percent were, were insane things like Misty's fun house. That by the way, is a legitimate. Forum at one point, right? It was Misty's fun house. So I'm just saying, cause we're trying to figure out what was going on. Where were the people chatting and talking? And that's what we did. We let them bury themselves deeper and deeper and deeper. Usenet did that. If you just go back in time, what do you think BBSs were? It's the same. Pablos: Exactly. Ash: We always love talking. Pablos: Yeah. People love talking. Ash: You just figure out which one you want to dial into. Pablos: Nobody's pissed off about who they're talking to really. Usually they're pissed off about who other people are talking. They're pissed off about some conversation they're not really a part of. Or a conversation they can be a spectator on, but doesn't match their culture. That's one of the big problems with Twitter it's like BBSs, and it's BBS culture. Elon was the winner of the Twitter game long before he bought Twitter, because, that's just BBS culture that he had in his mind, IRC or whatever. All kinds of people who are not part of that culture, are observing it and think that it's a horrible state, of society that people could be trolling each other and shit. And that's just part of the fun. You have this problem when you try to cram too many cultures into one place, it takes a lot of struggle to work that out if you're in, Jamaica, Queens, then you're gonna, you're gonna work it out over time, with a lot of struggle, you're going to work it out and the cultures are going to learn to get along. But in, but on Twitter, there's no incentive. Ash: That's why we still have states. The EU still has, like, how many languages? That's why we have Jersey for New Yorkers. Pablos: The EU in their way has figured out how these cultures can get along. I think there's a real simple fix to this. The big death blow to RSS in some sense was that the winning reader app was Google Reader. And so the vast majority, of the world that was using RSS was using Google Reader. And then I don't totally have insight on how this happened, but, Google chose to shut down Google Reader. And I don't know if they were trying to steer people into their, Facebook knockoff products or whatever at the time. in a lot of ways I think what it did is it just handed the internet over to Facebook. Because anybody who was being satisfied by that, and just ended up getting, into their Facebook news feed instead. So it just kind of ran into a walled garden. I don't really blame Facebook for this, the way a lot of people want to. I blame the users. You've got to take some responsibility, make your own choice, choose something that's good for you, and most people are not willing to do that. But, I think to make it easier for them, and there is a case to be made that , people got better things to do than architect their own rSS reader process, but we could kind of do it for them. And so I think there's one, one big kingpin missing, which is you could make a reader app that would be like an iPhone app now. And you could think of it as like open source Instagram. It's just an Instagram knockoff, but instead of following, other people on a centralized platform by Instagram, it just follows RSS. And then it only picks up RSS posts that have at least one picture, right? So any RSS post that has one picture and then the first time you post it automatically makes a WordPress blog for you, that's free. And then, posts your shit as RSS compliant blog posts, but the reader experience is still just very Instagramesque. So now it's completely decentralized in the sense that like you own your blog, yeah, WordPress is hosting it, but that's all open source. You could download it, move it to Guam if you want, whatever you want to do. So now all publishers have their own direct feeds. All users are publishers, which is kind of the main thing that Facebook solved. Ash: Content is no longer handed over to someone, right? That's the other big thing. Pablos: Exactly. The content is yours and then your followers are yours, right? When they follow you, they follow you at your URL. And so you can take them with you wherever you go. And then to make this thing more compelling, you just add a few tabs. You add the Twitteresque tab. You add the TikTokesque tab for videos. And, add, the podcast tab. So now, posts are just automatically sorted into the tab for the format that matches them. Because people have different modalities for, for consuming this shit. So, depending on what you're in the mood for, you might want to just look at pictures because you're on a conference call. Fine. Instagram. Or, you know, you might want to watch videos because you're on a flight. Who knows? So, the point being, all of this is easy to do. You and I could build that in a weekend. And then the reason that this works, the reason this will win is because you can win over the creators, right? Because the sales pitch to a creator, and those are the people who drive the following anyway, you see TikTok and everybody else kissing the ass of creators because that's who attracts the following. The creators win because they're not giving anything up to the platform. Because they make money off advertising. So fine. We make an advertising business and we still, take some cut of what the creators push out. But if they don't like us, there's a market for that, right? The market is I'm just pushing ads out along with my content to my followers. Some of them watch the ads. Some of them don't. I have this much of an impact. And so now you get the platforms out of the way. Ash: If you do it right, Google has ad networks that they drop everywhere. Pablos: Everybody has ad networks already for websites. You could just use that. Amazon has one. So you can sign up for that if you want. Or the thing that creators want to do, which is go do collabs, go do direct deals with brands. Now you're getting 100 percent of that income. You pump it out to your fans. And there's no ad network in the middle. Nobody's taking a cut. Alright, if you could cut your own deals, then great, but you're in control and you can't be shadow banned, you can't be deprioritized in the feed, because that's the game that's happening. These platforms, they figure out you're selling something, you immediately get deprioritized. And so the creators are all pissed off anyway. So I think we can win them over easily enough. And then the last piece of it is, there's one thing that doesn't exist, which is you still need to prioritize your feed. You still need an advanced algorithm to do it. You don't want to be twiddling knobs and dials all day. You might put in -Hitler if you want. But what should happen is you should also be able to subscribe to feed ranking services. So that could be, the ACLU, or the EFF, or the KKK, whoever you think should be ranking your feed. Ash: Well, I was actually thinking you could subscribe to a persona. So people could create their own recipes. So this is the world according to Ash, right? Here you go. Like, I've got my own thing. I've done my dials, my tuning, my tweaks, my stuff. And you want to see how I see the world. Here we go. The class I teach, that's the first day I tell people, take Google news and sit down and start tuning it. And everyone's like, well, let me just start to just add, put ups and downs, ups and downs, add Al Jazeera, do whatever you want. Just do everything that you want, just make them fight and put all of that in and then go down the rabbit hole. But there's no way to export that. When we start class, I always talk about viewpoints And how all content needs a filter because we are filter. But if I want to watch the world as Pablos, I can't, there's no, you can't give me your lens. So if we look at the lens concept, today you can tune Google News, there is a little subscribe capability, but you could tune it and poke it a little bit, and it will start giving you info. It's not the same, quite the same as RSS, but it's giving you all the news feeds from different places, right? Could get Breitbart, you could get, Al Jazeera, you could get all the stuff that you want. And if you go back in time to, to when I was working with the government, that was actually my sort of superpower, writing these little filters and getting, Afghani conversations in real time translated. And then find the same village, in the same way. So then I would have two viewpoints at the same time. The good thing was that when you did that what I haven't seen, and I would love, love this take place, is for someone to build a, Pablos filter,? And I could be like, "all right, let me, let me go see the world the way he sees it." his -Hitler, his minus, minus, -election, - Trump, -Biden, that's fine. And then, and now I have a little Pablos recipe. I can like click my glasses, and then, then suddenly I see the world, meaning I filter the world through Pablos's. Pablos: Yeah, I think that, I think we're saying a similar thing because then what you could do is you could, subscribe to that. You could subscribe to the Pablos filter. You could subscribe to the... Ash: exactly, I'm taking your ACLU thing one step further. I think ACLU is like narrow, but you could go into like personality. Pablos: You could even just reverse engineer the filter by watching what I read. My reader could figure out my filter by seeing the choices that I make. Ash: Yeah, if it's stored it right, if we had another format, but let's just say that we had an RSS feed filter format. 'cause it's there. It's really the parameters of your RSS anyway. But if you could somehow save that, config file, go back thousand years, right? If you could save the config.ini, that's what you want? And I could be like, Hey, Pablo, so I can hand that over. Let's share that with me. And now what's interesting is works really well. And it also helps because each person owning their own content, the, the beauty of that becomes, you never, you never filtered, you never blocked you, you, you're self filtering. Pablos: That's right. Ash: We're self subscribing to each other's filters. Pablos: Publishers become the masters of their domain. If you've got a problem with a publisher, you've got to go talk to them, not some intermediary. The problem is on a large scale, control is being exercised by these intermediaries. And they have their own ideas and agendas and things. The job here is to disintermediate - which was the whole point of the internet in the first place - communication between people. Ash: Then the metadata of that becomes pretty cool, by the way. If I figured out that, okay, now it looks like 85 percent of the population has, has gone -Biden, -Trump. Let's think about that. Suddenly you've got other info, right? Suddenly you're like, Oh, wait a minute. and if you're an advertiser or you're a product creator, or you're a, like just sitting there trying to figure out how can I get into the world, that becomes really valuable, right? Because you could. Go in and say, people just don't give a shit about this stuff, guys. I don't know what you're talking about. Whereas when you have one algorithmic machine somewhere in Meta/Facebook, whatever we want to call it, pushing things up, it could be pushing sand uphill, right? It could be like stimulating things that you don't necessarily know you want. The structure that you just described flips that on its head because it says, Hey, I just don't want to listen to this shit, guys. Like, I just could not give a crap about what you're saying. Pablos: Right. Ash: And if enough people happen to do that, then the content creators also have some, some idea of what's going on. We try to decode lenses all day long,? We spend our life, like you said, in meetings or in collaborations or business development. What do you think we do? We sit there, we're trying to figure out the other person's view. We're trying to understand if you're a salesperson, "Hey, can I walk a mile in that guy's shoes" or speak like that person, I've never heard of anyone sort of selling me, lending me, letting me borrow their RSS, like, their filter. That would be phenomenal, that'd be great. And I bet you, if you did it right, you might even solve a lot of problems in the world because then you could see what they see, you know, I don't want to touch the topics that we know are just absolute powder kegs, but every time we get to these topics, I always tell the person, can you show me what you, what are you reading? Pablos: Yeah. Ash: Like, where did you get? Pablos: Yeah. Ash: You ever, you ever asked someone like, "where did you get that?" and then they show you, they show you kind of their, feed. And you're just like, what is going on? Like, if you, if you go to someone, whether they're pro or anti vax, it doesn't matter where it is. And just look at their feed, look at what they're listening to, because it's not the same thing I'm listening to, because the mothership has, has decreed which, which one we each get. But you look at it and then you're like, okay, maybe the facts that they were presented with were either incomplete and maybe not maliciously? I get it in the beginning of this, you started like, okay, is it malicious and didn't do it would get changed. But if you just cut out, I don't know, let's just say there's like 10 pieces of news, but I only give you five and I give the other person the other five. And they're not synchronous, you're going to start a fight. There's no question. What we don't have is the ability to say, Hey, like, let me, let me be Pablos for a second before I start screaming, let me see what he sees. that will probably change that could change a lot. Pablos: Think it could. That and certainly there's a cognitive bias that feels comfortable in an echo chamber. This is one of the issues that we're really experiencing is that, the process of civilization, literally means "to become civil" to do that. It's sort of the long history of humans figuring out how to control obsolete biological instincts. We've been evolved to want to steal each other's food and girlfriends. That's not specifically valuable or relevant at this point. We've had to learn how to get along with more people, we've had to learn to become less violent, we've had to learn to, play the long game socially, those things. And, there's work to do on that as far as like how we consume all this, this information, all the media. You're using the wrong part of your brain to tune your feed right now. You're using the lazy Netflix part of your brain to tune your news, and that's not really , how are you going to get good results. There's work to do to evolve the tools and work to do to evolve the sensibilities around these things. And so, you know, what I'm suggesting is like, we're not going to get there by handing it over to the big wall garden. You got to get there through this, again, sort of. Darwinian process of trying a lot of things and so you've described some really cool things that we'd want to be able to try that are impractical to try because things are architected wrong and using Facebook is the central switchboard of these conversations or Twitter or whatever and so you know what we need is a more open platform where like you know we can all take a stab at figuring out how to design cool filters that express our point of view and share them. And that's not possible in the current architecture. I think the last thing is, there are certainly other frustrations and attempts to go solve some class of these, some subset of these problems. You've got Mastodon, of course, and the Fediverse, and you've got Blue Sky trying in their way to make a sort of open Twitter thing. And then you've got, these other attempts, but a lot of them are pretty heavy handed architecturally. As far as I can tell, most of them end up just being some suburb of people who are pissed off about one thing or another that they get its adoption, right? So, Mastodon is basically a place for people who are, backlashing against Twitter. As far as I can tell. Ash: Yeah, and we even worked on one, right? Called Ourglass. Pablos: I don't know that one. Ash: It was coming out and we actually did an entire session on it. I actually worked on some of the product thought design on, on how that works. , it was like, it's all on chain. Part of the, the thing that, we did was very similar to what you're talking about. You wanted the knobs and the controls, and you wanted people to rant in their space. I know it gets pretty dark when you say, okay, but what are they allowed to talk about in in the dark depths of that sort of internet and and I say, "well, they already talk about it, guys" Whether they get into a smoky back room or, there's somewhere else that if they don't say it, I feel we get more frustrated. Pablos: The fundamental difference here is between centralized services. That's certainly Facebook and Twitter, but it's also Delphi and AOL, versus open, decentralized protocols and the protocols in time win over the services like TCP/IP won over AOL, AOL was centralized service, TCP/IP, decentralized protocol. At the beginning it was a worse user experience, harder to use, but It's egalitarian and it won and I think that that's kind of the moment we're in right now with with the social media. We're still on centralized service mode and it needs to be architected as decentralized protocol and we had a chance to do that before Facebook and we lost and so now there's just like the next battle is like how do we get back on the track of decentralized protocol, and I think if we just define them... That's why I think RSS won because it's called Really Simple Syndication for a reason. Because it's really simple. It was easy for any developer to integrate. Everybody could do it. And so it just became ubiquitous almost overnight. You could design something cooler with the blockchain and whatnot. But it's probably over engineered for the job. And the job right now is just like, get adoption. Ash: We started going down that path. So Delphi's sort of twin. Was, called Prospero. So Prospero was, little Tempest reference, was designed. As a way that you could just adopt it. That was that, that first eBay deal. And then we did about.com and most of the stuff. And right now you see Discuss. It's at the bottom of, of some comments. It's a supported service where, you had one party taking care of all of the threads and handles and display methods and posts and logins. And, you were seamlessly logged into the other sites. MD5 sort of hash and we did the first single sign on type nonsense, and we used to build gateways between the two, you're going to go from one to another, but the whole idea was that you provide, the communication tool, As a, as an open or available service. And you could charge for for storing it. And then what happens is you don't do the moderation as a tool. That's your problem. You strip it back to "look, I'm going to provide you the car and I don't care how you drive it." Go back to our story, whether you're in Vietnam or Riyadh or whatever you're doing, we're going to, we're not there to tell you which lane to go into, but that's, that's your problem. I think that one of the challenges with like RSS, cause we were RSS compliant, by the way. I'm pretty sure Prospero and I'm sure it's still around because it went XML to RSS. And I remember the fact that you could subscribe to any forum that was Prospero powered. You could subscribe to it a lot, like directly through your RSS reader. And I remember what was great about it is that people were like, "we don't want, your viewer." Just like we didn't want your AOL view of like, "you've got mail." I want my own POP server and then IMAP or whatever it is. I think there does need to be, like you said, someone putting together a little toolkit that's super easy. They don't need to know it's got RSS. They don't need to know anything. But it's like, "own your post." it can be like an Own Your Post service. And then the Own Your Post service happens to publish RSS and everything else, and it's compliant. Pablos: I think you just make an iPhone app and when you set up the app it just automatically makes you a WordPress blog and if you want you can go move it later. Ash: You got it. All that other stuff is just automated. Pablos: You don't even have to know it's WordPress. It's behind the scenes. Ash: If you were going to do this, what you would do is you'd launch and I would launch it like three different companies. Like three different tools. I've got a, "keep your content" tool and the keep your content guys are something compliant, RSS. You keep bringing it back. It's published, it's out there and then some new company, Meta Two, Son of Meta, creates a reader. Anyone that's got a RSS tag on it, we're a reader for it. So anyone using Keep Your Content or, whatever. the idea being that now you're showing that there's some adoption. You almost don't have to rig it. There is a way to do this because no one wants to download a reader if there aren't sources. Pablos: The thing can bootstrap off of existing sources because there's so much RSS compliant content. You could imagine like day one. If you downloaded this reader today. You could follow Wall Street Journal and just everything online. And some of it you have to charge for it. Like Substack has RSS. I follow Substacks. You could just follow those things in the app Substack has a reader, but it only does Substacks, and probably Medium has one that only does Medium. But we have one that does both, plus New York Times and everything else. So now, like any other thing, you just follow a bunch of stuff. And then, there's a button that's like post. Sure, post. Boom. Now that fires up your own WordPress blog. Now you're posting. All your content's being saved. You control it. You got some followers or if you have this many followers, here's how much you can make in ad revenue. Boom, sign up for ad network. Now you're pushing ads out. All This could be done with existing stuff, just glued together, I think, and with the possible exception of the filter thing, which, needs to be more advanced probably worth revisiting. Ash: I think what You could do is maybe the very first thing you do, create the filter company, like your RSS glasses. So instead of having to do that heavy lift, curate Pablos's, I would love to get your RSS feed list. How do you give it to me? How could you give me your RSS configured viewer? Pablos: A lot of RSS readers make it really easy to like republish your own feed. So like all the things I subscribe to, then go into feed... Ash: But then, that's blended, right? Pablos: Oh, it's blended. Yeah, for sure. Ash: Is blended, right? So now it becomes your feed. I'm saying, can I get your configuration? Pablos: I don't know if there's a standard for that. Ash: I'm saying that's maybe the thing you create a meta, Meta. Pablos: Honestly, I think these days what you would do is just have a process that looks at everything I read, feeds it into an LLM, and tries to figure out like how do you define what Pablos is interested in that way. You probably would get a lot more nuance. Ash: That's to find out what you're interested in. Pablos: It's almost like you want your feed filtered through my lens. Ash: That's exactly what I want. I want to read the same newspaper you're reading, so to speak. So if you assume that that feed that you get is a collection of stories. That's your newspaper, the Pablos newspaper, right? That's what it is, Times of Pablos and you have a collection of stories that land on your page, right? It's been edited. Like you're the editor, you're the editor in chief of your little newspaper. If you think of all your RSS feeds ripped down your, your own newspaper, I'd like to read that newspaper. How do I do that? That doesn't exist. I don't think that's easy to do. And if I can do that, that'd be great. Pablos: If you're looking on Twitter and people are reposting, if I go look at your Twitter feed and all you do is repost stuff and then occasionally make a snarky comment, that's kind of what I'm getting. I'm getting the all the stuff you thought was interesting enough to repost and I think that's a big part of like why reposting merits having a button in Twitter because that's the signal you're getting out of it. I don't love it because it's part of what I don't like about Twitter is I'm not seeing a lot of unique thought from the people I follow. I'm just seeing shit they repost. And so my Twitter feed is kind of this amalgamation of all the things that were reposted by all the people I follow and and to me, that's what I don't want. I would rather just see the original post by those people. Twitter doesn't let me do that, so I'm scrolling a lot just to get to the, first person content. I think it is a way of substantiating what you're saying, though, which is "There's a value in being able to see the world through someone else's eyes." Repost might just be kind of a budget version of that. Ash: The reason I say that it's valuable, it's like the old days you'd sit on train and maybe even today and you had a physical copy of the New York Times, and everyone, and you could see who reads the New York Times and who reads the Journal. Right. And who reads The Post and The Daily News, that's what you can tell. And those people had their lenses, you go to the UK and everyone, this is the guardian, the independent, whatever. And you were like, Oh, that's a time, Times reader. That's a Guardian reader or someone looking at page three of the sun. I have no idea what they're doing, but, you knew immediately where they were. Pablos: It's the editorial layer. Ash: You got it. Pablos: it's what's missing in today's context. What's missing now is you got publishers, and you got the readers. but the editor is gone. Ash: Well, it's not gone, that's the problem, right? So what we did is , in the, in the world of press, there was a printing press and an editorial group took stories and they shoved them through the printing press. And then, the next minute, another editorial group came in and ran it through the printing press. so if you went out , and you were making your sort of manifestos, the printing press probably didn't care, right? The guy at like quickie print or whatever it was didn't care. Today, Facebook claims it's the place to publish, but it's not. Because it's editorial and publish so that so what they're doing is they're taking your IP They're taking a content and then there's putting their editorial layer on it. Even if it's a light touch or heavy touch, whatever it is. But it's sort of like if the guy that was the printing press like "I don't really like your font." " Dude, that's how I designed it." I want the font. Like I like Minion, Minion Pro is my thing, right? That's what I'm going to do. But, but if they just decided to change it, you'd be really pissed off. Now, Facebook claims to be an agnostic platform, but they're not an ISP. They're not a, an open architecture. like we would have had in the past where like you host what you wanted to host. There, you host what you want to host, but they're going to down promote you. They're going to boost you. They're going to unboost you. So wait a minute, hold on a second. You're, you're not really an open platform. And I think that's what you're getting at, which is, either you're a tool to publish or you're the editorial, the minute you're both. You're an editorial. You're actually no longer a tool. Pablos: That's exactly right. I think, that's the key thing, we've got to separate those things. Ash: That's the element. And I think that that tells you a lot about why we get frustrated. If Twitter was just a fast way to shove 140 characters across multiple SMS, which we didn't have, because we're in the U.S. We were silly and we didn't have GSM. That's what Twitter was, right? Twitter was kind of like the first version of like a unified messaging platform. Cause it was like, you could broadcast 140 characters and it would work on the lowest common denominator, which was your StarTAC flip phone. So the point was that Twitter was a not unmoderated open tool. Then it got editorial. And now it's then it's no longer. And I think that's the problem, right? It used to be, you had a wall on Facebook and you did whatever the hell you wanted to. And then Facebook said I need to make money and it became the publisher, became the editorial board. Pablos: Okay, so we have a lightweight plan to save the internet. Let's see if we can find somebody to go build this stuff. Ash: If you could build that last thing, I think it's not a, it's not a complicated one, but they, I think they just need to sit down and, grab your feed. Or someone can come up with a collection of, Mixtapes, let's call it. Pablos: Yeah, cool. Mixtapes, I like that. Ash: Internet Mixtapes. There you go.

People will remember the “browser wars” of the 1990s, but they may not remember the “webtop wars” — that is, the battle for who will control the Push Technology which transforms your OS desktop into a tuner for live web channels. Learn about this fascinating blip in early internet history which eventually gave rise to a much simpler technology still in use today…one might even call it Really Simple (Syndication).

Once upon a time, the RSS icon was a common sight on web pages. But these days, it's rare to see the friendly widget on the web. So what happened? Why has RSS faded away across much of the web landscape? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Epost: Laernorsknaa@gmail.com Episoden på nettstedet: https://laernorsknaa.com/103-podkast-og-dets-historie/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/laernorsknaa Donasjon (Paypal): https://www.paypal.com/donate?token=-yR0zEJ65wE-69zvoB17FdXGd7Gh1fXTKI5CsvjA2jbcQcV9KgR35SBYpH6JD5ofFImlLCuCuNuinHyh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/norwegiannowwithmarius/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MariusStangela1 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxdRJ5lW2QlUNRfff-ZoE-A/videos Podkaster har virkelig endret hvordan vi hører på lydinnhold fra radioen. Det er en unik måte å fortelle en historie, til underholdning og til å lære. For eksempel har podkaster vært veldig nyttige for språklæring ettersom det er mye mer materiale tilgjengelig for nybegynnere og viderekommende helt gratis, som for eksempel denne podkasten her. Podkast er et veldig nytt medium, kanskje det nyeste vi har. Det begynte tidlig på 2000-tallet da distribusjon av lydinnhold på internett var mulig. Altså, å produsere podkaster var avhengig av utviklingen av internett ettersom det er slik podkaster blir lasta ned og spres. Podkaster begynte med at journalisten Christopher Lydon og programutvikleren Dave Winer spilte inn og publiserte lydintervjuer på nettet i 2000. Dette formatet førte etter hvert til opprettelsen av det som nå er kjent som den første podkasten, "Radio Open Source". Dave Winer utvikla RSS eller «Really Simple Syndication», en teknologi som blir brukt til å publisere podkastepisoder. Men uttrykket "podkast" oppsto først i 2004 da journalisten Ben Hammersley kombinerte ordene "iPod" fra Apple og "broadcast" (sending). Navnet ble populært og blei brukt av flere og flere. Navnet podkast gjorde også at vi begynte å tenke på podkast og bærbare enheter sammen. Dette skulle bli viktig da de første smarttelefonene ble tilgjengelige. Da var det mulig å ta med seg podkastene sine overalt man gikk.

Blubrry is dedicated to implementing Podcasting 2.0 features; today we'll be exploring what some of these features are and how they work within the Blubrry Podcasting platform. We hope you enjoy today's episode of Podcast Insider; we've worked hard to ensure that you're getting the best podcast knowledge. We'll still be periodically having guests, so if you're interested in being featured reach out to the team. Today's Hosts: Todd Cochrane and Mike Dell What is RSS and why is it important to podcasting? Really Simple Syndication  RSS is an OPEN web standard (not owned or controlled by anyone)  It's the primary way that podcasts are distributed It is what keeps podcasting an open medium that is not cancelable  What is the Podcasting 2.0 project?  It's an open project to add features to RSS It's an open directory of podcasts (podcastindex.org) It's a way to monetize podcasts via Value4Value rather than advertising What new features are available through the Podcasting 2.0 project? Live Item - Allows you to announce via your RSS feed that you are going live. Adds the ability to listen/watch live without leaving your podcast app. V4V - Allows satellite streaming and boosts donations and comments via lighting (bitcoin) Transcripts / Closed captioning - Your transcript link in the feed can be viewed on apps that allow it. It also can be viewed on closed caption-capable players/apps.  Credits - Who are your hosts, guests, producer and so on? Like movie credits right in your RSS feed  TXT - An open tag for codes and other things to prove ownership once the email address is removed from the feed. Location - Allows you to set the location of your show or an episode.  Cross-app comments - This allows people to comment on your episode no matter which app they are using, without leaving the app.  GUID - A behind-the-scenes tag that identifies your podcast no matter where you host or move to. Kind of an ID number for your show. Funding - A place to put your donate link, such as Patreon, PayPal, Buymeacoffee or donate page right in the feed for apps to show. And more! Why is Podcasting 2.0 important? It allows for innovation in the podcast industry It helps keep podcasting a free and open standard for the open web It offers alternative funding for shows thorough V4V Read more here Got a subject you would like us to cover on the show, Drop an email to mike@blubrry.com (audio, text, video), and we may use it. You can also post a question on the Blubrry Podcasting Facebook group. The best place for support with any Blubrry product or service is our ticket system (https://blubrry.com/support/). Tickets give the whole team access rather than direct emails or calls. Fill out our listener survey at surveys.blubrry.com/podcastinsider Schedule a one-on-one with Todd (hosting customers only). Email todd@blubrry.com Schedule a tech checkup with Mike (hosting customers only). Email mike@blubrry.com Send us your podcast sticker and a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) and we will send you a Blubrry care package. Our mailing address: Blubrry – MacKenzie 150 E. Campus View Blvd. #180 Columbus, Ohio 43235

We walk you through the ins and outs of starting a podcast in this short series. REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION! A few hosting sites you can use: Buzzsprout Captivate Transistor Castos RSS.com PodBean Resonate Sounder.fm (+ many more to chose from!)Check out our YouTube channel for the full video!

We walk you through the ins and outs of starting a podcast in this short series. REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION! A few hosting sites you can use: Buzzsprout Captivate Transistor Castos RSS.com PodBean Resonate Sounder.fm (+ many more to chose from!) Check out our YouTube channel for the full video!

Believe it or not, RSS feeds are still a thing. In fact, it's the primary way that news aggregators like Google News and others are notified about new content on your website. But if you don't manage them well, you can hurt your publication.RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or RTF Site Summary if you're really geeky). It's a way for your website to tell other services about new content on your site as you publish it, and to give them access to that content.Unfortunately, most publishers haven't looked at the RSS feed on their website. And many publishers push the entire content of their articles out through their RSS feed leaving it unprotected and open for use by anyone.This session shows you how to find the RSS feed on your website, how to see if you're pushing out your entire content via the feed, what the dangers are, and how to fix it.Links mentioned in this session:FeedlyLearn more at https://nearviewmedia.com/

If you're new to podcasting, then you may be wondering what RSS is and why it's important. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a way for podcasters to share their content with listeners. By subscribing to an RSS feed, listeners can have new episodes of their favourite podcasts automatically delivered to them. This makes it easy for listeners to stay up-to-date on all the latest episodes without having to visit different websites or search for new content. Podcasters benefit from RSS because it helps them reach a larger audience and build a more loyal following. If you're interested in learning more about how to set one up in your hosting platform and the information you need to include before it goes live be sure to listen to this one! Read the show notes for this episode here >> www.toobusytopodcast.co.uk/ep09  Connect with Rosemarie on Instagram: @toobusytopodcast   Connect with Rosemarie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemarie-callender/

Dave Winer is considered to be the father of blogging and the RSS feed AKA Really Simple Syndication. He's been connecting the dots and closing parentheses in Silicon Valley since the beginning of the tech industry. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School and NYU, entrepreneur, started two Silicon Valley tech companies. Winer has been given "credit for the invention of the podcasting model." Many of the things we do on the internet have Dave's fingerprints on it. Great conversation between David Winer and Guy Kawasaki on this week's Remarkable People Podcast!

Brian talks about the impact Fred Seibert had on him, in-terms of content marketing, when Fred was running Frederator Studios back in 2007. Podcast interview with Fred - https://podcast.venturevoice.com/episodes/vv-show-43-fred-seibert-of-frederator-studios-and-next-new-networks-CLYs4bV1 Checkout Fred's new venture FredFilms - https://www.fredfilms.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubo3_xRhSTw Transcription Ubiquitous content strategy. Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. We're gonna be talking about content marketing, and how to have a strategy that's ubiquitous, nice big word there. It means everywhere, right? It's about being everywhere. And just so much everywhere that no one even questions that that's kind of why I like the term ubiquitous because it's kind of like, it's just, you don't question it, it's everywhere, right? I have to apologize for my voice. I don't know, I've got something I probably have COVID or something. I don't mean to make light of it. But it's just funny how all this, you know, all these diseases that we get every year now has this, this shadow of COVID over it. So I don't think it's COVID. It's just a sore throat, but it all comes with the territory. I guess we won't get too far into that. Let's talk about content strategy and how to be ubiquitous. And I want to talk about this guy, or this logo, shall I say, that was all about Fredrater. This goes back. 14 years ago, I think it was 14 years ago, I'm going by what I just saw on an old podcast episode that I found because it was a podcast episode that had a unique way of completely changing my view of content marketing forever. And started at a time when I would never have known the term content marketing. In fact, I hardly knew the term search engine optimization at that point. But a piece of this interview is later on in the interview, I haven't gone back and re-listen to it because I recognized it. So immediately after starting to listen to it, I said, this is it. This is the interview that I remember changing my life. It was with this podcast Venture Voice, I've got a link in the description. So you can go check that out. If you're at a place where you can't see the link, go to BrianJPombo.com, and check out this episode. You'll be able to find the link to this specific podcast that's still out there, at least here in 2021, and it's worth listening to. Not that every prediction that happened in it came true, really the piece that he brings up about how he was able to well let me give you some background, Fred Seibert is who this interview was with if you're not familiar with Fred Seibert, he is a cable TV icon. Yeah, he started doing a lot of animation and bumpers for Nickelodeon, and MTV, some of the most famous bumpers that they had kind of advertising their networks, in the early days of the late 80s, 90s. He been responsible for many classic animation shows on television. And a lot of them started out on this podcast love, the more recent ones in the last 20 years or so started out on this podcast, which is called Frederator. If you're familiar with Frederator, Frederator was a podcast that was showing up and coming animators, and they're short clips of their animation. And then the ones that caught on ended up becoming something or took the animators to another level which he's been a huge promoter of that industry for quite a while. What he was able to do very early on in podcasting land. And this was 2007 is when I heard it, this is when this podcast originally came out. He's discussing how they were able to use the blogging function of podcasts because every podcast starts in a blog in a sense. Because they're all based on being on the background of having RSS, which is called Really Simple Syndication, and then that goes out to all the podcast aggregators. At that time, the main one was iTunes, but now you've got a million of them.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is basically an ugly text file called an XML file. This is what your computer's RSS reader looks for to find real-time updates. That might sound confusing, but it's simple and really helpful. Rather than scratching around for the latest content, RSS feeds it directly to you, which saves you time and sieves out the content you're not looking for.Key Points From This Episode:RSS stands for: Really Simple Syndication.Your computer uses RSS readers to check XML files.RSS feed helps you find the latest release of podcast shows so you don't have to.Links Mentioned:NetscapeDave WinerThanks for listening! Check us out on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok @weeditpodcasts, or visit our blog at WeEditPodcasts.com/blog for everything podcast-related.

Welcome to episode #749 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #749 - Host: Mitch Joel. In the early days of blogging and podcasting (2004/2005), I spent a lot of time teaching business professionals about digital marketing and media. One of the more confounding technologies to explain was RSS - the way in which someone would subscribe to a blog/podcast, and how they would be notified when something new was published. RSS stood for Really Simple Syndication, but it was really hard to explain. I came across a video on YouTube that was called, RSS In Plain English, by a company called, Common Craft. They used a whiteboard and paper cutouts to explain RSS, and followed it up with countless other videos. These videos became so popular that their format was then copied by many until it became a genre unto itself. Lee LeFever was the founder (and maker) of those videos. Known as the "explainer video genre," Lee (along with his wife, Sachi) have continued on growing this business. In 2012, he published his first book, The Art of Explanation, and more recently his sophomore effort, Big Enough - Building a Business that Scales with Your Lifestyle. Big Enough will help you chart a different kind of career path. If you're interested in entrepreneurship, business strategy, and e-commerce, this show is perfect for you. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:00:07. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Lee LeFever. Big Enough - Building a Business that Scales with Your Lifestyle. The Art of Explanation. Common Craft. RSS In Plain English. Follow Lee on Instagram. Follow Lee on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

My guest today is Caroline Crampton. Caroline is a freelance writer and podcaster. Among other things, she edits The Listener, a daily newsletter that curates the best podcasts. In this conversation, we focus on Caroline's curation workflow. Listen to the full conversation Download episode 48   Show notes Caroline Crampton The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary by Caroline Crampton Shedunnit (Caroline's podcast) Hot Pod newsletter Serial podcast The Listener newsletter The Browser Lindelani Mbatha Listen Notes RSS NewsBlur Apple Podcasts Pocket Casts Overcast Radio Atlas Google Keep Google Pixel Google Recorder Google Drive The Joe Rogan Experience Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Caroline, welcome to the show. Caroline: Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. Jorge: Well, it's great to have you. For folks who don't know you, can you please tell us about yourself? About Caroline Caroline: So, I'm a writer and a podcaster based in the UK. I started out my career in print journalism, but obviously things have changed a lot in that industry, and my career has changed a lot with it. So, I now work completely for myself and I'd say I don't have so much a beat as such I have a lot of curiosity. So, I've written a book that's about the Thames estuary that is kind of a nature book. I make a podcast that's about detective fiction from the 1920s. I've done reporting work about all manner of politics and social affairs. And increasingly in the last few years, my work has been in newsletters and recommending and reporting on very niche aspects of the podcast industry. Jorge: That's super intriguing. As someone who hosts a podcast and the newsletter myself, I'm very keen to unpack what that means for you. Newsletters and podcasts Caroline: Yeah, so there are two main email newsletters that I contribute to. The first one is called Hot Pod and it's…. well, we call it “the trade publication for the podcast industry.” That's what it's grown into. It was founded by my colleague Nick Quah, back in 2014, the summer of the Serial podcast, which I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with. And he was writing it himself for several years. And then sort of towards the end of 2018, he brought me on as the second writer. And obviously I'm contributing from the UK; he's based in the US. That's enabled us to broaden our coverage and bring more people in and generally expand things really. So yeah, we act like a trade publication would in any other industry, I suppose, but because podcasting is so new and so distributed, there are people doing it all around the world and people doing it for all different reasons as well. You know, people coming from professional backgrounds in radio, people coming from no experience in media whatsoever and just jumping in as a hobby and everything in between. And all the different subjects and topics as well that, it can be quite… it's both a great challenge to cover something like that, but also a source of endless excitement, because you never know who you might get to speak to you next week. Jorge: You mentioned two publications. So Hot Pod is one, right? Caroline: Hot Pod is one, and The Listener is the second, which is a daily podcast recommendation newsletter. I both source the episodes to recommend and write the whole email and everything that we feature in it. And that grew out of a company called The Browser, which has been going for a long time now and its main email newsletter is written by a guy called Robert Cotrell, who just has the most incredible background in journalism and media and everything that's interesting on the internet basically. The Browser has existed for I think over 10 years at this point, recommending articles; five articles a day that you won't find anywhere else and that you won't be able to stop reading once you've clicked on them. A couple of years ago now, I started working with them on adding audio picks for that community. Out of that work has grown an entirely separate newsletter called The Listener, in which we recommend podcast episodes in the same way that The Browser recommends articles. Jorge: So, that makes me think that you must listen to a lot of podcasts. Caroline: Yeah, I really do. I don't tend to keep an active tracker or anything like that, but I definitely less than for a couple of hours a day, I'd say. Jorge: I'd love to find out more about that. But before we started recording, you also told me that you host a podcast yourself. Caroline: I do. Yeah, it's called Shedunnit, and it's about the very niche topic of 1920s and 30s British detective fiction. So, we're talking Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Poirot, all that kind of stuff. Jorge: So, given your experience sorting through all of these podcasts, I'm wondering if you developed criteria that you can share with us as to what constitutes a good podcast. Caroline: I think the biggest thing is, I like to be surprised. And I can be surprised in any way. It doesn't necessarily mean information that's new to me. It can be surprising in the style that something's told or surprised in the tone of something. An example, just recently I recommended a podcast that was aimed at people who play amateur chess tournaments. Not something that I do. Not something I'm involved in. Not a world that I know very much about, but I found the enthusiasm and the specificity of the two people on the podcast in the way they were reviewing different pieces of software that you can use to help you organize your tournament, especially online. I just found that so surprising and charming, that I wanted to recommend it. So it doesn't necessarily mean a big budget or a huge revelations or anything like that. But just something that for me is out of the ordinary. Caroline's curation process Jorge: I'm super curious to jump into the newsletters — the curation process that goes into that — because it sounds to me like your work entails listening to a lot of stuff and then somehow finding the gems that you want to share with your readers/listeners. And I have just a lot of questions about that as someone who can barely keep up with media myself. How do you do it? Caroline: Well, you're right. That is exactly what it's about is filtering out the gems, and particularly, part of the mission of The Listener is to recommend things that people wouldn't be able to find otherwise… that wouldn't stray across their path naturally either in their sort of recommendations or on the front page of the podcast listening app that they use. Things that take them outside of their media diet, essentially. So, I'm constantly myself battling against that, because the way that the internet works these days is you consume one of something and it says, “Hey, would you like three more of that?” I'm constantly trying to think beyond that and find ways around it myself. So, the process starts actually not in my headphones, as it were. It starts on my screen where I just try and capture as many different feeds as I possibly can. And at this point I'm just looking for, anything and everything. And I have an RSS reader where I organize everything and I put things in folders by topic and category and so on, so that I can find things again, basically. And then before I start actually listening, I'm filtering by how many episodes does the show have? Does it have a particular series that I'm interested in? Is this something where the audio quality is just so poor that I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending it? So, I'm doing a sort of initial filter at that stage. And then, I move on to adding episodes that I want to consider for recommendation into a giant never-ending listening queue. And then that's what I'm listening to whenever I have time. And it's from that, that I'm drawing the episodes of the eventually make it into the newsletter. Jorge: So, the way that I'm hearing this is you find out about the shows through an RSS reader and/or your web browser. And are you collating those in any way? Do you have a queue of shows that you want to listen to? How does that part of it work? Caroline: Yes. So I have a lot of different sources that I'm drawing on to add things into that RSS reader, other email newsletters, the things that the makers of apps are putting on their front pages, stuff that people are recommending to me word of mouth, things that my friends and family like and enjoy, things that I see people talking about on Twitter, things that are getting written up in publications. Also, I have a very long running and overflowing Google form where… it just says, “Do you want to recommend a podcast to me? Put it in here?” I quite often sift through that because there's lots of things that end up in there that I would never have found otherwise. I also have a colleague helping me, Lindelani Mbatha is our international editor and he also is just feeding me anything good that he finds from where he's consuming media in South Africa. So that gives me a completely different perspective from another place. He's seeing the world differently to me and all of that then ends up in my RSS reader. Then I use a website called Listen Notes. I absolutely love this site — I think it's brilliant — which is a podcast catalog, I suppose, in its simplest form. But crucially for me, it has the ability to create custom RSS feeds. It calls them your “Listen Later” feed by default. So, I have “Caroline Crampton's Listen Later,” and to that, I can add any episode of any podcast and it generates for me an RSS feed for that queue, which I can then add to my app. So anytime I add a new episode to that Listen Notes feed, it pops straight into my app without the need for me to go and search for a show and subscribe or anything. I've just got one organized linear feed, essentially, of everything I want to try out for the newsletter. RSS Jorge: That sounds fantastic. I wasn't aware of Listen Notes. It might be worth recapping for folks what RSS feeds are, because so far, you've mentioned both the newsreader and podcast itself, right? Can you give us a brief overview of that? Caroline: Yeah. So, RSS is actually very old internet technology. It's sort of one of the building blocks of the internet. And RSS just stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” And it's a very straightforward collection of code that creates an instance that updates every time you add a new article or MP3 file. You can add basically anything to an RSS feed. And people have over the years built different apps to capture the product of that syndication. So, what I use in my web browser, I use an RSS reader called NewsBlur, but there are lots of different ones, just essentially an interface that organizes all of those updates that are being sent by all those different feeds. A podcatcher of any kind, whether it's Apple podcasts or Pocket Casts or Overcast or whatever is essentially the same thing. It's an interface through which you've told it that you want to run all of these RSS feeds and it's alerting you every time an update arrives. Jorge: And in the case of this very podcast, The Informed Life, if you go to the website, we provide a link to the podcast's RSS feed, which you should be able to plug into any of those apps to actually listen to the shows. One aspect of RSS as a technology for getting information to people, is that — as you hinted at in your description — it prioritizes chronology over other organization means. For example, if you're subscribed in a podcatcher, you will care about the latest episode, right? And you will be notified when there's a new episode of the show. In my experience, the interfaces of these tools don't tend to be as useful for looking for older content. And I'm wondering in your curation process, how do you balance the discovery of new shows… You were talking earlier about things that might be surprising; I don't know if to call it serendipitous. But if you're using RSS, I would expect that that would increase the likelihood that you would be listening to shows from the same… two episodes from the same shows? I'm describing what happens to me, when I subscribe to RSS feeds, it's like I ended up reading the things that person X is writing in their blog, or I end up listening to episodes of the same podcast, even while some might be more interesting to me than others. It's always favoring the recency. I'm wondering in the act of curation, are there ways to overcome that or is that an issue for you at all? Caroline: Its definitely something that I'm aware of. And it's one of the reasons why I use a web-based RSS reader to store all of the podcast feeds that I'm currently filtering and considering rather than just subscribing to them in a podcast app, for instance, because podcast apps are built exactly as you say: to show you the latest releases because that's the behavior that they expect from their users. Whereas I want to be able to easily scroll down everything or flip it the other way up and look at it as something from the beginning or one reason why I like NewsBlur as my RSS reader over some others that I've tried is it has quite a good advanced search and filtering system, so I can say, “I only want to see posts or episodes from 2017 or from after 2018.” It allows me to put in search queries that help combat that issue of everything being in chronological order. I also organize feeds into folders. So, like I have a folder that's just for podcasts that are about food. So, when I'm looking at the upcoming recommendations for the newsletter, I like to try and keep it as varied as possible on a few different factors, chronology being one of them, or age of publication, but also, where in the world was the podcast made? What style? Is it a conversational show or a narrative documentary type or something in between? Who's making it? How long is it? All these different things and I'm trying to make sure that there's a mixture at all times. So, you'll never get a newsletter that just has three, hour-long conversational podcasts featuring only Americans, you know? It will always be varied and different. So, I might think, “Oh, well, you know, for next week, I really want a food podcast that's maybe from South America. That would be here a really great addition to what we've already got.” I'll go and look in my food folder and scan back through what's there. I might do some searching for some key words of country names or cuisines or something, and that will help me focus in on some episodes that I then want to listen to in order to make the final selection. Jorge: When you said podcast from South America, I'm assuming that all the podcasts are in English. Is that a fair assumption? Caroline: Almost always, yeah. Just because that's the language that I speak best. I have recommended a few podcasts that exist for language learning. So, they're in other languages, but they are people speaking slowly or explaining or that kind of thing. And I've also recommended a great podcast called Radio Atlas, which is a project that subtitles podcasts in other languages. It's a video podcast but it doesn't have any visuals if you know what I mean, it just has the subtitles. So, it means that, someone like me for whom English is my main and only language, it means I can listen to any podcasts that they've recommended with the subtitles. Frequency and volume Jorge: Well, that's fascinating. I'm going to have to check that out. What's the frequency with which The Listener comes out? Caroline: There's an addition every weekday. Jorge: That makes me think that you have to sort through a lot of different podcasts. And when you were describing the process, I got the sense that there's a part of the process where you're looking at, like you said, stuff on a screen, right? So, I would imagine like the description, the length of episodes… you talked about how many episodes the show had released. I would expect that those are all things that you can see on the screen without having to listen to the shows. But there are other aspects that you were talking about that made me think that when the shows have made it past an initial set of filters, you have to actually listen to the shows. I'm wondering how much time do you spend listening to podcasts and how do you make the time, basically, to be able to keep up that volume? Caroline: Well, this was one of the things I was apprehensive about when first discussing whether we wanted to launch this newsletter, because I was concerned that in order to do it well, yes, I would need to listen to so many podcasts and would there physically even be time in the day, let alone with life and work and everything else. So, we did a couple of trial weeks where I tried it not for publication, just sending to one of my colleagues every day, just to see if it was possible. I was actually really surprised at how much time in the day could have podcasts in it that didn't currently. I don't set aside two hours a day where I just sit there with headphones. I don't have that luxury, but I listen while I'm walking my dog. I listen while I'm cooking. I listen while I'm exercising. Pretty much any time that anyone might be listening to podcasts, I'm always listening to podcasts. And yeah, there is enough time, I was happy to discover. But it does mean I need to be very systematic and very organized to make sure that I'm getting through enough and that I'm listening to a wide enough variety. Also, I keep notes as I go. I write notes in my phone. So, when I finished an episode, either straight away, or as soon after as I can, I will just make some notes about it. Because otherwise, if I know I want to recommend it, I might not have time to actually write it up for the newsletter for a few days or a few weeks. And I don't want to forget those initial impressions I had upon listening to it. Making notes Jorge: You've just touched on a subject that I wanted to ask you about, which was exactly that this: how do you keep track… especially, the image of walking the dog is one that I can relate to. I do that as well. And I actually love walking and listening to either podcasts or audio books. And one of the challenges that I always run into is that I will listen to something that I want to keep track of because it either sparked an idea or it's something that I want to blog about later. And I find that I have to take the phone out of my pocket, open up the note taking app or the “to do” app, you know, write a note to self and in the process of doing that, I've lost track of what I'm listening to. So, what I've resorted to doing is speaking into the air, like a mad person, because the smart assistant in my phone will interpret the trigger phrase, which I will not mention here, and I will say, “take a note” or “remind me to,” or what have you. But it's a very imperfect system for me. And it seems that that is central to your work. I'm wondering how you do it and if there are recommendations for how to do that better? Caroline: I'm in the same situation as you. I have to say it has got easier now that my dog is older. When I first got him and he was just pulling me all over the place, there was just no opportunity to pause and take my phone out and make a note or set anything going or anything like that, because I was just being yanked about all over the place. He's now three years old and is calmed down enough that he's quite happy to have a sit down on a street corner while I make a note or whatever. So, that's easier. I do a combination of: I use Google Keep to write little notes to myself if there are any particular moments that I want to revisit. When I write up the eventual recommendation, I'll try and just notice where the play head is in the app and go, “at 25 minutes in that podcast, this person said that,” that sort of thing, so that if I want to jump back to it, to remind myself, I can, without having to listen to the whole thing again. I have a Google Pixel phone and I really like the — it's quite recent edition actually, it came with an OS update, I think — I like the voice recorder app, because it now has inbuilt transcription and uploading to Google Drive. So, if I'm in a situation where for whatever reason, I don't want to type into my phone or I'm not able to, I do the same, I just start talking to it. And I can, just in the same app, I can scroll through what I've said as text or upload it to Google Drive so I can access it on another device. And that can be really helpful to talk through some thoughts or talk to myself about it, but then be able to locate what I was saying and paste it straight into a newsletter, if I think it's good enough. The influence of curation on creation Jorge: One of the advantages that I see in curated collections of items — like the ones that you are creating — is something that you touched on earlier, which is that you are getting recommendations from a person, as opposed to some kind of algorithm. You talked about, like the stuff that is surfaced in the stores, right? Which I think at this point, we all realize that those are driven by algorithms, and usually they will try to create some kind of profile of you and your tastes and will try to serve you up similar things. And the advantages that I see in what you're doing is that rather than depend on these algorithms that are tailored to serve you more of the same, in the curation process, what you're doing is you're reflecting a particular taste or worldview. I'm wondering, as someone who is not just a curator of podcasts, but a podcaster yourself, if and how the curation process has influenced your own approach to podcasting and how you select the subjects that you will podcast about, or that you will write about, if that is a thing? Caroline: Yeah, I think it is a thing. It's mostly influenced me in a practical sense in that now being somebody who does curate podcasts for a living and listen to them, I have come to an appreciation of quite how many press releases and alerts and so on people who do this do so, you know, someone who reviews podcasts for a publication or something. I get dozens a week, messages and emails from people saying, “Hey, check out my podcast!” I've really come to appreciate the value of a very pithy and well-written approach. I in no way begrudge people sending me those emails, because often I find interesting things to listen to. We all just want to share our contact with more people. That's perfectly fine! But the emails I get that are very easy to read and to the point and have a very clear… “and if you're interested in checking it out, here's where you can do that…” element to them, I'm just so much more likely to click on those links or remember those shows. At the beginning, it was astonishing to me what a small proportion those well-written and short emails are. I get so many where it's actually quite hard to dig out what the name of the podcast is; it comes in like the fifth or sixth paragraph or something and I just don't have time for that. So, I've given talks at conferences before about ideas for growing your podcast and that kind of thing. And one of the things I always like to include in the deck is, a friend of mine who actually became my friend because he initially sent me a really good email about his podcast before we even knew each other, and that's how we first got in contact. With his permission, I share that email and just say, “You know, this email was so good. Not only did I listen to his podcast, but now I'm friends with this person. Send emails like this! Don't send confusing or rude ones. Or long ones.” Jorge: Oh, that's great. And you've posted that? Is it public? Caroline: I think it's on my website. Yes, I can make sure it's visible. Curating your listening Jorge: I've noticed, as a result of the — I'm attributing this as a result of the pandemic — that my listening habits have changed. When I was working in offices and I had a commute to offices, I would devote a lot of my commute time to listening to podcasts. As commutes have gone away, my podcast listening has diminished significantly and I'm starting to feel guilty at how many un-listened episodes there are in my podcatcher. I'm wondering if you have any tips for folks, other than subscribing to The Listener for how they might find podcasts that they might find interesting, or that might add value to their lives. Caroline: I think that is something that a lot of people are facing. You're definitely not alone in that. The data over the last six months has shown that people were listening less initially. And then once listening did start to creep back up again, it had a different profile. People were no longer listening in the mornings and evenings for their commutes, but far more people were listening at lunchtime, for instance. Lunchtime has become actually a really big time for podcasts to drop, rather than very early in the morning, so you catch people on their way to work. I find that quite delightful in a way. I like to think of people all over the world, sitting down to their sandwiches with a podcast. But I do think that it's okay for your tastes to change. I very much recognize that guilt, that the episodes are piling up, you haven't listened to them and you feel bad. So, first thing I tend to encourage people to do is just be really honest and unsubscribe to the ones that don't work for you anymore. And that doesn't mean that you are saying that they're bad, or that they're not as good as they used to be, just that they're not for you right now. Maybe you'll come back to them another time. There's a very famous and popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, which I do not understand how people keep up with that podcast. He puts out a two-hour episode every other day! Even I, with my very high podcast listening, if I was trying to keep up with that one, I would not be able to do my job. So, I do think that you might decide that it's not all for you. And then the other thing I recommend doing, is thinking about the kinds of topics that you want to engage with. Start from the other end. I think often we start from like, “What is a good podcast?” And then you try it out to see if you like, which is just totally fair. But you might also like to think, “Well, I'm trying to feel a bit more escapist right now. Like I'm not so interested in focusing on the news. What audio drama is there that I could try or I'm into spooky stories right now, what is that I could try?” So be very focused in your searching and look in particular genres because they can get a bit overwhelming to just scroll and scroll and go, “Well, there are all these podcasts, how do I know if any of them are any good or that I will like them?” So I like to sort of narrow things a bit like that, if that makes sense? Jorge: Yes, it does. That's a really valuable advice. And I think after our call, I'm going to delete a bunch of podcasts from my podcatcher or unsubscribe from them. Caroline: I definitely have experienced that guilt feeling. But I had a very fortuitous thing happen — I didn't feel like it was fortuitous at the time — where I used to use a different podcast app, and I don't know why maybe there was a bug? Maybe there's something wrong with my phone? But just one day I opened it and it had wiped everything! All of the shows I'd subscribed to and my whole listening history, everything was just gone. And I was a bit taken aback and upset about that. But in the process of rebuilding my subscriptions list, it meant that I shed a lot of shows that I wasn't really that interested in anymore more. And it meant, I felt therefore, like there was space to add some new things that I did want to try. And I'm not saying you should delete everything, but I do think that people get into a rut or a habit with their apps and their podcasts and so on. And sometimes it can be quite good to just force yourself to reevaluate it. Closing Jorge: Well, that sounds like an invitation for folks to curate their own feeds and the information that they let in. And I think that that is a very good place for us to wrap up the conversation. So where can folks follow up with you? Caroline: I have a website, which is carolinecrampton.com, where there are links out to the various different things that I do. And you can find my social media and so on, if that's interesting to you. Also The Listener has a landing page, thelistener.co and you can see some sample additions, you can see some testimonials from people, you can try it for free and you can subscribe if it seems like the kind of thing you'd be into. Jorge: Fantastic! I'm going to include links in the show notes to all of those. Thank you so much for being with us and for sharing your knowledge and insights. Caroline: Thank you very much for having me. It's been great.

Jean MacDonald, podcaster and Community Manager at Micro.blog, joins us to discuss her experience in curating posts and connecting people on the site, as well as the upcoming global photography challenge. We also uncover the oldest things that we can find at home and consider which of our myriad media services we will keep. A Special Guest 00:00:00 Jean McDonald (https://micro.blog/macgenie) Micro.blog Community Manager (https://help.micro.blog/2017/community-guidelines/) Manton Reece (https://micro.blog/manton) Micro.blog Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manton/indie-microblogging-owning-your-short-form-writing) Macworld 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macworld/iWorld#2004) Smile Software (https://smilesoftware.com) Rogue Amoeba (https://rogueamoeba.com) Blogworld (https://www.blogworld.com) New Media Expo (https://nmxlive.com) An Event Apart (https://aneventapart.com) What does 'Tweetup' mean? (https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29045/tweetup) Micro.blog 00:10:00 What is a 'blog'? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog) Micro.blog Pricing (https://micro.blog/pricing) RSS? (Really Simple Syndication) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS) Micro.blog 2.0 Press Release (https://news.micro.blog/2020/09/29/press-release-microblog.html) John Hayes (https://jonhays.me) Sunlit App (https://sunlit.io) February 2020 Micro.blog Photo Challenge (https://micro.welltempered.net/2020/01/31/february-photoblogging-challenge.html) August 2020 Micro.blog Photo Challenge (https://micro.welltempered.net/2020/07/23/august-photoblogging-challenge.html) Upcoming Micro.blog Photo Project - October 13-14, 2020 A Day In The Life of Our Online Community (https://micro.welltempered.net/2020/09/24/a-day-in.html) Inktober (https://inktober.com) How Rick Smolan Launched His A Day in the Life Photo Books (https://www.inc.com/daniel-wolfman-and-chris-beier/rick-smolan-photography-books-a-day-in-the-life.html) A Day In The Life Of Australia (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1080374.A_Day_In_The_Life_Of_Australia) A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/171150.A_Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Soviet_Union) Coober Pedy - South Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy) 1km = 0.62 miles #Hashtag The Oldest Thing In Our House 00:28:00 Jason

How to sell even if you are in quarantine , on vacation or asleep If people are put into a situation where the economy shrinks or anything similar it is the people who have prepared that will win in the future. You will have to outwork the competition and there is some silver linings in the storm in the future. Downturns in the economy chase weak players out but what you are left with is the best people to compete against. You have to tilt the odds to your favor and find a better way to compete. Changes in society and or changes with jobs will come and go. You get to keep the skills you develop forever or even for your next job.   Start with your social media profile Fill out your profile so that it doesn’t look like you are in high school. Add the jobs you have had and other notable items. Clean up your profile and remove undesirable information. You will want to sanitize your profile because people will look you up for what it coming next.   You will start to build a Dream 100 list. This strategy was taught by Chet Holmes. You literally list out the top 100 people you want to work with or do business with. When you acquire a new client you add someone else to the list. You are going to leverage your social media account to find clients that are in your top 100 list. This is one of the reasons you want to clean up your social media account. Find the people you want to connect with and start a conversation and make it meaningful. The goal is to get enough traction that you can start a business conversation. You don’t lead of with the business conversation though.   How to leverage online content You have to get past what others think of you and what you are doing. You must get over your voice and your look on film. Your first one is your worst one is what you are taught. It does take time energy and effort to get used to creating content online.   Create the content on your own time so you know who owns the final content. There may be challenges if you create content in the die of a company. How to think about content in terms of money   When building online content think in terms of barter or trade.  What could you do if you had zero dollars and had to advertise? Would you be able to make a deal happen? What would you be willing to trade in order to make something happen? Make a list of what skills you have that you could trade or barter for to get what you need.  You may have to do a 3 way deal in order to close some deals to get what you need in order to sell. Content is really barter for services its your commercial for people to find you. This content is meant to supplement an online sales funnel and marketing measures.   You can break some of it up and work with people on a team. You can trade for work and or services to build out content you don’t know how to use. You can get caught up with making something perfect and this will give you and excuse to not get anything done. For what you need to work on right now done is better than perfect.   Changes in the environment can lead to loss of sales If you are in quarantine or society close down for a while people will still need to but things. They don’t want to leave the house or they don’t want to be near someone who could be sick.   People are always looking for knowledge. Buyers don’t want to make a bad decision so they want to be certain about what they do.    One of the greatest things is you get to keep your content when you build it on your own time and dime.   Having content makes you an expert and the more you have the better you look. You will want to build up your content arsenal over time. You don’t have to do all of this work in a day. If you search for excuses you will find them   There are multiple people who add content and explainer videos about any topic. If you don’t know how to do something google it there are 10,000 articles or videos on everything. If you want to see how to do something look up the content on YouTube.   Learn how to search on search engines. Go and look up “sites like __________ or  “free __________” or “cheap _________”. When you use the search engine the right way anything you need can be found.   You have to find the time to put content together. If you are at home you have time work during the evenings.  You can do quite a bit over a few weekends.   Recycle your content Keep all your content in one place and then you can recycle it. Here is the path flow you take video and turn it into audio. Once you have the audio you can turn it into text. You are going to have to put in some work, you will need to outwork your competition.   The path for content creation The content you are going to build starts with easy downloads. You will start here because you now have outlines for everything else you want to create.   10 FAQs 10 SAQs 10 Myths 10 Books 10 things you wish you would have known when you got started Create a buyers guide – this is a mix of FAQs & SAQs Create videos that is 2 -5 minutes, these are explainer videos Podcasts and audio content Videos – These can be hosted on YouTube and other places   Create video for content Most of the content you will create will revolve around similar topics. The best place to start is to leverage Facebook live video. You can download the video and then edit it. Once you have the edit done you can upload to YouTube.   You only have so long to hold attention of anyone. Get to the point intro in the first few seconds. My name is ________ and what we will talk about is _________ Sound matters more than you would know. People will put up with bad lighting to an extent but they will not put up with poor sound. You can shoot explainer videos. You shoot what your idea is so that it can be used on tablets or websites. You can shoot B roll or extra footage.   Be aware of private property rules and ask for permission to film on private property.   For good light use a cowboy studio. 3 point lighting will make you look like a pro. Use a good looking linen or desk as a backdrop Be quick and easy about building your content. You need get momentum. If you get stuck on perfection nothing will get done. Look at the camera when you talk and use bullet points to talk off of.   Keep your bloopers for a reel that can be used later on down the road. You will want to back up all of your content.   Create a podcast about your topic Say what you need to but watch your language for distribution. You don’t want to create a bad first impression.   Your podcast is not a Pitch fest, you can mention services at the end of the episode.    Common questions and commonly searched terms are a good way to build content.   The sounds in your podcast Sound quality really matters more than you know for an episode of a podcast. Enunciate your words and make sure to use vocal inflection. Write a good description  for your website. Use the content from your FAQs, SAQs and buyers guide. You can rip the audio from the video you have crated and piece together a good podcast if you have done things right. Your RSS feed An RSS feed is the Really Simple Syndication feed or address for your podcast.  Put your RSS feed everywhere that will allow you to. There are multiple directories out there.   Create a YouTube channel Once you have video you can create a YouTube Channel. This will take some work on your part. You will want to research your key words for the distribution of the content.   Go to google look up your industry and see what key words pop up for you. Make a list of things you can create and repurpose content from.   Create 10 videos and when you upload them use the 3T method – Title – Tags – Thumbnail.  Name the videos based upon similar key words. You will need to do the research.   You can turn your podcasts into MP4s and put them up on YouTube. Make sure to check the terms and conditions of what YouTube allows since this changes over time.    Content online There are multiple places for you to add your content online for people to find. This is not the only list but a place for you to get started. There is paid of software that will release all of your content into most of the platforms. How you move forward with your syndication of your materials is up to you. Facebook page Instagram page Twitter Snapchat Your hosted website or created website.   The best tools for content creators There are places for content creators to get their processes made for free or low cost. Here are just some of the places you could look to build content pieces. If you don’t like the platform or the resources you can go to a search engine and type in “site like _________” and see what 10,000 different places come up for you. Some of these links will take you to apps and some will take you to software.  Grammarly   How to create a .pdf   How to create a buyers guide   How to create a youtube channel   Link shortner   Podcast hosting – free Podbean Anchor Buzzsprout   Places to put your RSS feed   Snappa (Thumbnails)   Free audio editing program audacity   Voice recording – transcription otter.ai rev.com   Create an image video    Pexels (stock photo)   Create infographics software   Pixlr (image edit)   Powtoon (video maker)   Tinytake.com (Free screen recording)   Loom – (video creation)   Prezi (build presentations)   Free stock music   Free stock video   How to set up 3 point lighting   Book Creation and self printing  Take the content you have built and turn it into a book – Look for Julie Broad to help with this.    Tools needed – these are paid Logitech camera ($25)   Audio Technicha ATR 21002 ($99)   Focusrite – Solo ($100)   Cell phone mount – square jellyfish ($16)   Mini tripod reti cam ($35)   Cowboy studio ($80)  

This is the part where things get technical but like Marie Forleo said Everything Is figureoutable.   You’ll have to think about media hosting some of the popular ones are Soundcloud, Anchor, Libsyn, WordPress, podomatic, speaker, etc Next is RSS Feed, RSS feed means Really Simple Syndication. First, you have to have a website where you will host your feed. I use WordPress then you set up an RSS feed, by using a built-in plugin like Blubrry. It is a protocol that automatically sends out your updates to Apple Podcast, Google podcast, Stitcher, and other apps anytime you add a new episode, so people who have subscribed can listen to it without having to look for it. Once you record episodes, then you go into WordPress and download and install the blubrry power press plugin for WordPress and fill in all the information. If you guys are interested in a more detailed explanation, let me know through email, and I will send you more information. Submit to iTunes you will need an Apple ID to submit your podcast to the directory in the iTunes app, once you go into podcasts scroll down the list of options and find Submit a podcast. It would give you information to fill in i.e., name of the podcast, your RSS feed, etc., once you submit everything, it will take a few days to a week to hear back through email if your submission was accepted. I hope you enjoyed this quick How to podcast series. I'm working on a new project that will inshaAllah be more help. I can't for you to join me on this new journey of the Naptime Is Sacred podcast. Thanks for listening, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.

This episode breaks down the process of how to move your show (podcast) from one podcast hosting company to another without losing any subscribers. Topics covered in this episode: What is a podcast host? What is a podcast directory? What is an RSS Feed? What is a 301 Redirect? How do you move your show without losing subscribers? What is a podcast host? When you start podcast, one of the major decisions you will make is where to host your show. There are many podcast hosts available but some of the more popular ones include: Simplecast. Where I work full-time on the product support and content team. Others hosting companies include: Libsyn Blubrry Podbean BuzzSprout Spreaker Soundcloud Anchor What do podcast hosting platforms do? Overview of Podcast Hosts: 1. Audio File Storage & Delivery 2. Generate your RSS Feed 3. Publishing & Syndication to directories. Audio File Storage & Delivery To store your audio files and serve them to listener devices when someone clicks play or download from a podcast app or an embed player or anywhere your podcast episodes can be accessed. Generate your RSS Feed which is the link between your show and subscribers and to all of the podcast apps and directories. Every podcast has one unique RSS Feed and that usually only changes when you change podcast hosts. Note: Your RSS Feed is not always generated at the location where you store your audio files. When moving a show, you will do so wherever your RSS Feed is located and not necessarily where your audio files are stored. My original set up was using the Powerpress plugin by Blubrry on my Wordpress website and I hosted my audio files for download only on the podcast host, Libsyn. If your RSS Feed was generated by Powerpress, then that is the location where you would redirect your feed. Ask if you are not certain. Publishing and Syndication To Directories. Podcast hosts make it possible for you to create and publish new episodes much like creating a blog post on a website. When you publish new episodes or make edits to already published episodes, your podcast hosting platform connects your RSS feed to the podcast directories such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora so your show will always be updated automatically. This process of publishing and then updating everywhere automagically is possible because of the RSS Feed and this process is called syndication. Additional roles of podcast hosts: Analytics, websites, sharing tools, embed players, and some even have world-class support! What is a Podcast Directory? A podcast directory is simply a library or catalog of podcasts where one can browse, listen, and subscribe to new shows. Major Podcast Directories: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Google Play Pandora iHeart Radio TuneIn Stitcher When you start a new show, you submit your RSS feed to as many of these directories as possible to get your show listed. You only have to submit your show one time and when you publish new episodes they all get updated as we learned earlier because of your RSS Feed and the power of syndication. Tip: Create an Apple Note or Text document and copy the URL for each directory listing for your own show. What is an RSS Feed?: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. (Wikipedia) When you set up a new podcast you will get a unique RSS Feeds for your show. This is usually done by the podcast host. If you set up your show on your Wordpress website and use the Powerpress plugin or maybe you are podcasting through a Squarespace website, your RSS Feed will be generated and managed at your website. Wherever you publish new episodes and manage the details about your show such as titles, descriptions, show art etc, is typically where your RSS feed is located. An RSS Feed looks like any other hyperlink or URL, but it is actually a text document filled with code. If you click on it, it will not take you to your podcast, but will only show you a bunch of code. The code is full of all the information about your podcast along with special metadata tags that can be read by podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts or Overcast. The RSS Feed is what you submit to the podcast directories, but it is not the link you share to post on websites or social media channels. Once you submit your show to the directories, it generally works behind the scenes. Podcast directories mirror everything that is in the RSS Feed. When you make a change at your podcast host or wherever your RSS Feed originated, your RSS Feed updates as soon as you press Save or publish. When your RSS Feed changes, the podcast directories will see the changes the next time they refresh and the changes get updated wherever your podcast has been submitted. Every podcast has one RSS Feed and it will not typically change unless you move your show to another hosting company. Tip: Copy your RSS Feed URL to an Apple Note or text document so you always have it handy if you discover a new directory to submit to or for reference when you are ready to move your show to a new hosting platform. What is a 301 Redirect? A redirect is a way to send both users and devices to a different URL from the one they originally requested. A 301 Redirect is one of the most common types of redirects and a 301 is permanent. When you create a 301 Redirect for your podcast RSS feed when a listener device or app looks for your old RSS Feed, they get forwarded or redirected to your new RSS Feed and because it is permanent, they will never look for the old RSS feed again (in theory). The 301 Redirect is how you can move your show without losing subscribers. The 301 Redirect should also update many of the apps and directories, but you should check each directory and manually update the directories if they are still referencing your old RSS Feed. Warning: The 301 Redirect is also how you will lose all of your hard-earned subscribers if you do not take your time and do it right. Ask if you need help or not sure how to do it. Creating a 301 Redirect is easy, but if you do not do it correctly, it is possible you could lose all of your subscribers and they would have no idea. How To Move Your Show (Step-by-Step) Tip: Always subscribe to your own show in Apple Podcasts and other mobile apps as you want to know exactly what your subscribers are experiencing and new episodes and changes to your show always happen much faster for subscribers, so it is the best way to monitor your show Tip: Export your analytics data and copy any information you want for your records from your old podcast host. You will not be able to import your old analytics data to your new hosting company. Every podcast host is a little different, but here is a typical scenario. I will use Simplecast as a guide since I know the process best for importing a new show: Import RSS Feed to Podcast Host: Setup a trial account on your new hosting platform. Paste your original RSS Feed to import your show. (This will only make a copy of your show and will not affect your podcast in the directories and it is not linked to your original host). Enter Billing Information (credit card) Select the subscription plan you want to be on at the end of the trial period. New RSS Feed. Once your show has been imported and billing setup, you will have access to a new RSS Feed. 301 Redirect. When you have tested your new podcast host and are ready to ‘officially migrate’ your show from your old host to your new host, it is time to set up the 301 Redirect. This is the final step as once you do the 301 Redirect, you will no longer be publishing on your old host and will start publishing new episodes on your new host. All clear? Where do you do the 301 Redirect? The 301 Redirect will always take place at the source of your original or old RSS Feed. You will paste in your new RSS Feed in the 301 Redirect field of your old host. The 301 Redirect will permanently forward your old RSS Feed to your new RSS Feed and this process takes effect immediately. Keep your old account open for up to 4 weeks just to be sure the Redirect has had enough time, but you will notice the redirect happening right away. Your old RSS Feed is no longer active once you create the 301 Redirect. How you know if the 301 Redirect is working? Open a web browser. Paste your old RSS Feed into the address bar. If the redirect is working properly, your new RSS Feed should open in the browser. 5.Update The Directories Apple Podcasts and the other major directories and apps should update automatically once they look for your old RSS Feed, but to expedite the process and to make sure all of the directories are looking at your new feed, it is a good idea to manually update as many directories as possible. Some directories may require you to fill out an RSS Update form, but many directories such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher have portals where you can update your RSS Feed manually. Apple Podcasts is your priority as so many little directories pull the RSS Feed from Apple Podcasts. One thing you can do if you are hesitant or not sure if you want to manually enter your new RSS Feed is to log into Apple Podcasts Connect and click ’Refresh Feed’ and it should change to your new feed in about 20–30 minutes. Log back in to Apple Podcasts Connect and make sure you see your new RSS Feed in the URL field. If you do not, paste in your new RSS Feed and save. 6 . Update Web Players (some cases) If you have a website with embed players from your old host, you will need to replace the embed codes with your new host embed player codes. 7 .Publish New Episodes! Once you set the 301 Redirect and have updated the directories, it’s time to start publishing new episodes on your new host. You have officially moved your show and did not lose any subscribers. For the first few episodes, just keep an eye on all of the directories and make sure new episodes are showing up. Tip: Always subscribe to your own show in your mobile podcast apps. Directories can take a few hours to update when you publish new episodes or make changes, but subscribers will often get the updates in near real-time. Force quit your Apple Podcasts app and re-open if you are not seeing updates after some time and starting to get impatient.

The lowly RSS feed has been around a long time. More than 20 years to be exact. Originally dubbed RDF Site Summary—the RDF stood for Resource Description Framework, it was introduced in March 1999. It evolved into RSS, which now stands for either Rich Site Summary or my preference, Really Simple Syndication. It’s essentially a geeky way for websites to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, or episodes of audio and video series like this very podcast you’re listening to. When publishers of content use RSS feeds, they allow anyone with an RSS reader to subscribe to their feed, so whenever they publish someone new it will automatically show up. Forget the techno-speak and just think of it as the ability to create your own virtual newspaper or magazine. You can literally subscribe to as many of these feeds as you want to, depending on your appetite for content. I blame Google for a big decline in the popularity of RSS, when they killed off their free Google Reader software in 2013. I guess they thought RSS wasn’t going to be around much longer, and wasn’t worth supporting. Personally, I adopted another product called Feedly and I’ve been happy with it ever since. I use their paid version which is $5 a month which I find well worth it. There are a bunch of other alternatives, such as one that I also use sometimes called Panda at usepanda.com. I subscribe to many business publications and blogs. I benefit from keeping up with relevant news and articles related to marketing, as well as topics specific to some of the industries my marketing clients serve. Feedly makes it easy to quickly scan through dozens of feeds. I do this regularly to bookmark useful headlines to read later or share on social media. I think most people in business can benefit from curating information pertinent to their role. RSS feeds are still a very effective way to do this, even if the technology seems a little dated.

Do you know something that is really simple? Really Simple Syndication (aka, RSS). Did you know that RSS is the backbone of podcast delivery? Well, aren't you clever! What's NOT really simple is effectively measuring podcasts when a key underlying component is a glorified text file that tells an app how to download an audio file. Advertisers, publishers, and content producers the world over have been stuck with "downloads" as their key -- and pretty much only -- metric for years. That's like just counting "hits" on a website! But, NPR is leading an initiative to change all that through Remote Audio Data, or RAD. Stacey Goers, product manager for podcasts at National Public Radio, joins the gang on this episode to discuss that effort: how it works, how it's rolling out, and the myriad parallels podcast analytics has to website and mobile analytics! “For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Spreaker Live Show #164 for Sept 12th, 2018Show Duration: 68 minutes-Host: Rob Greenlee, VP of Podcaster Relations, Voxnest and Spreaker @robgreenlee - rob(at)voxnest(dotcom)-Co-Host: Alex Exum, Host of "Live Talk" and “The Exum Experience Podcast” on Spreaker-We stream LIVE every Weds at 3 Pacific /6pm EST from SpreakerLiveShow.com-You can now get the show on Google Podcasts App on Android-You can hear this show on Amazon Echo Smart Speakers now via the New Spreaker SkillShow Today:- Skype is able to Record NOW - Pros and Cons: Live Show vs Pre-recorded Show - Your RSS Feed: What it is, Why You Need It and How to Use it - Apple Podcasts Top 200 Ranking Manipulation Issue- Dragon Con Podcast Track & TechCrunch Disrupt Events DownloadOn the show today:-Pros and Cons: Live Show vs Pre-recorded Show? Interactivity - connection with audiences at a deeper level with LIVEMore flexibility in production time for pre-recording segments and piece together -Your RSS Feed: What it is, Why You Need It and How to Use itRSS Feed: What is it?Before explaining the ins and outs of exactly what an RSS Feed is, let’s look at what the acronym actually stands for. RSS literally means ‘Rich Site Summary’ but it is also commonly known as ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Why? An RSS Feed is mandatory for distributing or syndicating your podcast as it is literally the URL for your show!What does a podcast feed mean? Once you set up your Feed your content will be ready to be submitted to podcast applications or news readers to subscribe to your content. So great places to add your podcast feed to are Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Create podcast only rss feed is required.RSS feed: Why is it so Important?Simply put: It contains all of your podcast’s information: title, image, description, mp3 file URL, and category. All the information necessary for your podcast to be distributed outside of your hosting platform. RSS allows you to syndicate content to different platforms so that you can reach diverse audiences without the need for them need to visit your website directly.Podcast Hosting: What are the benefits?For listeners: it means they don’t need to sign up for emails or push notifications for shows which interest them, they can stay up-to-date and find all their favorite podcasts in one podcasting app. Upload your content to one place and it get distributed everywhereRSS feed: Where Should You Host Your Podcast? In answer to this question there’s no hard and fast rule – it completely depends on the sort of podcaster you are! The first thing you need to ask yourself though is whether you want to self-host or use a hosting platform and there are advantages and disadvantages to both.Self-hosting – by hosting everything yourself it means that you have complete control over your Feed, you own it and your workflow is simple – in turn, this means if anything happens to your website, your podcast goes down too. Furthermore, shared hosting means lots of people using the same resources which can lead to technical problems. Bear in mind that you will need to have some technical skills in order to know how to code and build the RSS Feed and to always know what’s happening in the industry which might require an update to your Feed!podcast rss feed exampleHost – host platforms are designed to handle the specifications and needs of a podcaster, this means the technology behind the sites are able to scale with your show as it grows! As they are developed for end-users they also have excellent support teams who are on hand to offer technical support when needed!your feed is the skeleton of your showWhen weighing up the positives and negatives of where to host your RSS Feed, consider this: your feed is the skeleton of your show and when deciding your host location you absolutely need to make sure your hosting service allows redirection. The most popular hosting services generally allow this and Spreaker includes this option in the RSS Customization option.google play email tag - recommend not to worry about submitting to Google PlayWith Spreaker you can also apply very specific changes according to the devices in which your listeners are listening to your show, like iOS11 and the Season and Episodes tags. You can also apply changes from Spreaker CMS that will come through as tags in your RSS feed’s metadata, such as: your seasons, episode order and episode labels. To read more about this, check out our previous blog post on adding tags to your podcast.iOS11 seasons and episodes tagsRSS feed: How Do I Stay in Control?Nowadays, podcasters or whoever is using an RSS Feed have a high level of control over it, users can manage, move and customize their feed to exactly how they want it. Most podcast hosts allow podcasters to customize different fields of their RSS Feed with categories, author’s name or e-mail. For example Libsyn and Blubrry’s Powerpress both offer extensive RSS Feed customization.The option to have full control of the RSS feed also offers the chance to redirect the RSS Feed and to add a prefix to the RSS Feed. Redirecting a feed means fully owning it and it’s worth noting that in the future you might want to host your podcast somewhere else and if you forward the old one to your new host it will mean that you don’t lose listeners who are subscribed to the old feed.how to get a podcast feed addressRound UpWhichever route you choose to go with your RSS Feed, self-hosting or using a provider, always make sure that you stay in control as it’s the key to utilising it to its maximum! We hope that by using our guide you now feel confident in answering some of the key questions on the subject, such as: what does podcast feed mean? or where to submit podcast your feed. Good luck in making the most of your podcast RSS Feed!-Apple Podcasts Top 200 Ranking Manipulation IssueIn an astonishing video, Twitter user Lime Link posts a video that shows the extent of Apple Podcasts Chart manipulation: it shows a clever way of how to spot the podcasts gaming the system, and how to do it yourself (don't).Podnews.net reported this in May, they showed five podcasts in the top ten suspected of manipulating the charts, and people advertising for manipulators. We've also seen evidence of people threatening podcasters who don't use their service with "one star ratings and bad comments". And where's Apple?Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wimv1aJ4ra8My speculation: Only answer to this is that it might be misleading comparing subscription data on castbox to apply it to apple subscription activity, plus the only other explanation could have some element of editorial just like New and Noteworthy is all editorial (selected for feature by Apple staff, .Buying placement by creating activity by using large banks of iPhones to subscribe and unsubscribe activity in a short period of time. Just DON’T DO It as it could get you banned from Apple Podcasts/iTunes.-Dragon Con Podcast Track & TechCrunch Disrupt Events DownloadListener Comments & Questions:HohOYes, you 2 have a great dynamic. A contradiction of personalitiesLinda IrwinJoe Rogan actually cancels his show if someone cannot make it.Spreaker/Voxnest Links:https://Voxnest.comhttp://blog.spreaker.comhttp://SpreakerLiveShow.comhttps://Spreaker.comEmail: rob at voxnest.comSend Questions and Comments to:Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker using #SpreakerLiveTwitter: http://twitter.com/VoxNestTwitter: http://twitter.com/robgreenleeTwitter: http://twitter.com/alexeum Tech Support: support at spreaker.com

Spreaker Live Show #164 for Sept 12th, 2018Show Duration: 68 minutes-Host: Rob Greenlee, VP of Podcaster Relations, Voxnest and Spreaker @robgreenlee - rob(at)voxnest(dotcom)-Co-Host: Alex Exum, Host of "Live Talk" and “The Exum Experience Podcast” on Spreaker-We stream LIVE every Weds at 3 Pacific /6pm EST from SpreakerLiveShow.com-You can now get the show on Google Podcasts App on Android-You can hear this show on Amazon Echo Smart Speakers now via the New Spreaker SkillShow Today:- Skype is able to Record NOW - Pros and Cons: Live Show vs Pre-recorded Show - Your RSS Feed: What it is, Why You Need It and How to Use it - Apple Podcasts Top 200 Ranking Manipulation Issue- Dragon Con Podcast Track & TechCrunch Disrupt Events DownloadOn the show today:-Pros and Cons: Live Show vs Pre-recorded Show? Interactivity - connection with audiences at a deeper level with LIVEMore flexibility in production time for pre-recording segments and piece together -Your RSS Feed: What it is, Why You Need It and How to Use itRSS Feed: What is it?Before explaining the ins and outs of exactly what an RSS Feed is, let’s look at what the acronym actually stands for. RSS literally means ‘Rich Site Summary’ but it is also commonly known as ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Why? An RSS Feed is mandatory for distributing or syndicating your podcast as it is literally the URL for your show!What does a podcast feed mean? Once you set up your Feed your content will be ready to be submitted to podcast applications or news readers to subscribe to your content. So great places to add your podcast feed to are Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Create podcast only rss feed is required.RSS feed: Why is it so Important?Simply put: It contains all of your podcast’s information: title, image, description, mp3 file URL, and category. All the information necessary for your podcast to be distributed outside of your hosting platform. RSS allows you to syndicate content to different platforms so that you can reach diverse audiences without the need for them need to visit your website directly.Podcast Hosting: What are the benefits?For listeners: it means they don’t need to sign up for emails or push notifications for shows which interest them, they can stay up-to-date and find all their favorite podcasts in one podcasting app. Upload your content to one place and it get distributed everywhereRSS feed: Where Should You Host Your Podcast? In answer to this question there’s no hard and fast rule – it completely depends on the sort of podcaster you are! The first thing you need to ask yourself though is whether you want to self-host or use a hosting platform and there are advantages and disadvantages to both.Self-hosting – by hosting everything yourself it means that you have complete control over your Feed, you own it and your workflow is simple – in turn, this means if anything happens to your website, your podcast goes down too. Furthermore, shared hosting means lots of people using the same resources which can lead to technical problems. Bear in mind that you will need to have some technical skills in order to know how to code and build the RSS Feed and to always know what’s happening in the industry which might require an update to your Feed!podcast rss feed exampleHost – host platforms are designed to handle the specifications and needs of a podcaster, this means the technology behind the sites are able to scale with your show as it grows! As they are developed for end-users they also have excellent support teams who are on hand to offer technical support when needed!your feed is the skeleton of your showWhen weighing up the positives and negatives of where to host your RSS Feed, consider this: your feed is the skeleton of your show and when deciding your host location you absolutely need to make sure your hosting service allows redirection. The most popular hosting services generally allow this and Spreaker includes this option in the RSS Customization option.google play email tag - recommend not to worry about submitting to Google PlayWith Spreaker you can also apply very specific changes according to the devices in which your listeners are listening to your show, like iOS11 and the Season and Episodes tags. You can also apply changes from Spreaker CMS that will come through as tags in your RSS feed’s metadata, such as: your seasons, episode order and episode labels. To read more about this, check out our previous blog post on adding tags to your podcast.iOS11 seasons and episodes tagsRSS feed: How Do I Stay in Control?Nowadays, podcasters or whoever is using an RSS Feed have a high level of control over it, users can manage, move and customize their feed to exactly how they want it. Most podcast hosts allow podcasters to customize different fields of their RSS Feed with categories, author’s name or e-mail. For example Libsyn and Blubrry’s Powerpress both offer extensive RSS Feed customization.The option to have full control of the RSS feed also offers the chance to redirect the RSS Feed and to add a prefix to the RSS Feed. Redirecting a feed means fully owning it and it’s worth noting that in the future you might want to host your podcast somewhere else and if you forward the old one to your new host it will mean that you don’t lose listeners who are subscribed to the old feed.how to get a podcast feed addressRound UpWhichever route you choose to go with your RSS Feed, self-hosting or using a provider, always make sure that you stay in control as it’s the key to utilising it to its maximum! We hope that by using our guide you now feel confident in answering some of the key questions on the subject, such as: what does podcast feed mean? or where to submit podcast your feed. Good luck in making the most of your podcast RSS Feed!-Apple Podcasts Top 200 Ranking Manipulation IssueIn an astonishing video, Twitter user Lime Link posts a video that shows the extent of Apple Podcasts Chart manipulation: it shows a clever way of how to spot the podcasts gaming the system, and how to do it yourself (don't).Podnews.net reported this in May, they showed five podcasts in the top ten suspected of manipulating the charts, and people advertising for manipulators. We've also seen evidence of people threatening podcasters who don't use their service with "one star ratings and bad comments". And where's Apple?Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wimv1aJ4ra8My speculation: Only answer to this is that it might be misleading comparing subscription data on castbox to apply it to apple subscription activity, plus the only other explanation could have some element of editorial just like New and Noteworthy is all editorial (selected for feature by Apple staff, .Buying placement by creating activity by using large banks of iPhones to subscribe and unsubscribe activity in a short period of time. Just DON’T DO It as it could get you banned from Apple Podcasts/iTunes.-Dragon Con Podcast Track & TechCrunch Disrupt Events DownloadListener Comments & Questions:HohOYes, you 2 have a great dynamic. A contradiction of personalitiesLinda IrwinJoe Rogan actually cancels his show if someone cannot make it.Spreaker/Voxnest Links:https://Voxnest.comhttp://blog.spreaker.comhttp://SpreakerLiveShow.comhttps://Spreaker.comEmail: rob at voxnest.comSend Questions and Comments to:Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker using #SpreakerLiveTwitter: http://twitter.com/VoxNestTwitter: http://twitter.com/robgreenleeTwitter: http://twitter.com/alexeum Tech Support: support at spreaker.com

Really Simple Syndication is a great way to feed your content onto third party platforms to drive traffic to your website, but it can also be used by others to steal your content and rob you of precious traffic.

Spreaker Live Show #63 for June 29th, 2016Our Topics This Week: How-To and Where To Submit your Podcast RSS Feed and Tip of the Week “Spreaker is Live Streaming From Podcast Movement, Next Week” with co-host Alex Exum @AlexExum and he is based in LA and hosts "The Exum Experience" and the "Spreaker Studio Review" show. Show Duration: 35 minutesHost: Rob Greenlee, Head of Content, Spreaker @robgreenlee - rob(at)spreaker(dotcom)Co-Host: Alex Exum, Spreaker Host of "The Exum Experience" and the "Spreaker Studio Review" shows at @AlexExumSpreaker Blog Posts at http://Blog.Spreaker.com:- 3 Easy Steps for Submitting Your RSS Feed to iTunes - The topic of this show today- How to Start Coding on Android If You’re an iGuy (iOS Guy or Gal)Detailed Show Notes:Tip of the Week “Spreaker is Live Streaming From http://PodcastMovement.com, Next Week”: PM16 Spreaker Live Show "Live" Schedule------------Weds, July 6th - 11am - 1pm CST11amGuest: Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl Podcast 11:30amGuest: Danny Pena - GamerTag Radio 12 noonGuest: Debra Grobman - ConfirmedCompany: Flatlands Avenue Productions, LLC, a digital audio production studio, social media and public relations firm. We are a team of broadcasters, audio engineers, writers, editors and public relations professionals. We provide media training, voice coaching, audio production, distribution and support services. 12:30pmGuest:Rob McCracken, EW Scripps/MidRoll -------------Thurs, July 7th - 11am - 1pm CST11amGuest: Rachel Ghiazza, Spotify 11:30amGuest: Marty Michael, HeadGum co-founder 12 noonGuest: Rob Cesternino - Rob has a Podcast 12:30pmGuest: Robin Marshall Bio: Introducing Robin Marshall, host of Sugar Mom Podcast. Robin is an Author, Voice Over Artist, Audio Producer and now a podcaster as well. Robin is working in collaboration with Flatlands Avenue Productions for the purpose of marketing, and promoting this female and most times millennial-focused content on her exclusive Sugar Mom Podcast podcast. www.SugarMom.net--------------Fri, July 8th - 1pm -2pm CST1pmGuest: Harry Duran, PodcastJunkies.com 1:30pmGuest: Bryan Moffett, General Manager of National Public Media (NPR) Detailed Show Notes: “How-To and Where To Submit your Podcast RSS Feed”How-To Submit a Podcast Feed, What is a Podcast Feed?, What is RSS?, What does it do?- Text file linked to via web URL, that is dynamically created by servers to add media file links, text metadata- These feeds are called RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication), contain URL links to your show audio files How-To Submit your Show to the number #1 distribution platform iTunes/iOS Podcast App:- Sign in to iTunes Podcast Connect via an Apple account - https://itunesconnect.apple.com- Click the at the top left of the iTunes Connect dashboard- Enter your RSS feed into the provided text box and then click the “Validate” button- A Feed Preview will load if you do not have any validation errorsHow-To Submit your Show to Stitcher, Google Play Music, TuneIn - Before you submit your podcast to Stitcher make sure you meet the following minimum requirements: - Your artwork is a square JPG or PNG formatted image at least 1400 x 1400 (1400 x 1400 JPG image recommended). - A unique podcast program title. - Stitcher does not accept video (mp4 or m4v) or digital document (pdf or epub) podcasts. - You may also provide Facebook and Twitter URLs during the submission process. If you have completed the above steps, you are now ready to submit your podcast to Stitcher.- http://www.stitcher.com/content-providers.phpSubmit to Google Play Music- Before you submit your podcast to Google Play Music Podcast Portal make sure you meet the following minimum requirements: - Your artwork is a square jpg or png formatted image at least 1200 x 1200 and at most 7000 x 7000 in size in RGB color space (1400 x 1400 jpg image recommended). - At least one Google Play Music Podcast category selected - Valid email address in the iTunes or Google Play email field (notifications from Google will be sent to this address)Google Play Music Podcast Portal does not accept video (mp4 or m4v) or digital document (pdf or epub) podcasts. - If you have completed the above steps, you are now ready to submit your podcast to Google Play Music Podcast Portal - https://play.google.com/music/podcasts/publishAfter you submit your podcast to Google Play Music- All podcasts submitted to Google Play Music Podcast Portal are moderated. The process can take between 1-10 days, though most submissions are approved within 3 days.- Google will email the address you entered as your Google Play email in PowerPress settings When your podcast is approvedSubmit to TuneIn- Before you submit your podcast to TuneIn make sure you meet the following minimum requirements: - Your artwork is a square JPG or PNG formatted image at least 1400 x 1400 (1400 x 1400 JPG image recommended). You can also optionally submit a unique logo and banner image. - TuneIn does not accept video (mp4 or m4v) or digital document (pdf or epub) podcasts.If you have completed the above steps, you are now ready to submit your podcast to TuneIn.- http://help.tunein.com/customer/portal/emails/new?ticket[labels_new]=podcast&t=641867After you submit your podcast to TuneIn- All podcasts submitted to TuneIn are moderated - The process can take between one to 10 days- TuneIn will email the address you provide when your show is approved or deniedSubmitting to iHeartRadio.com via Spreaker only- Create a Spreaker user account (primary or secondary distribution)- Create a new “Show” or “Podcast” on the Spreaker platform for “Primary” distribution- Add your existing show RSS feed via feed importer (Paste in your current podcast feed URL)- Build your show page in Spreaker, will get you into Spreaker listening apps- Then visit your show page and click “Edit” then click “Distribution”, then click the Red button- http://Spreaker.comThe Review Process during which they'll be considering various factors including content quality, thoroughness of description (show and episode descriptions, cover images,...), use of copyrighted material, and overall presentation.The Review Process is carried out by the iHeartRadio staff. In case you have inquiries on the outcome of a review, please contact them directly at help@iheartradio.com.Spreaker Links:http://Adore.fmhttp://blog.spreaker.comhttp://SpreakerLiveShow.comhttps://Spreaker.comSend Questions and Comments to:Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker using #SpreakerLiveTwitter: http://twitter.com/robgreenleeTwitter: http://twitter.com/alexeum Tech Support: support at spreaker.com

Spreaker Live Show #63 for June 29th, 2016Our Topics This Week: How-To and Where To Submit your Podcast RSS Feed and Tip of the Week “Spreaker is Live Streaming From Podcast Movement, Next Week” with co-host Alex Exum @AlexExum and he is based in LA and hosts "The Exum Experience" and the "Spreaker Studio Review" show. Show Duration: 35 minutesHost: Rob Greenlee, Head of Content, Spreaker @robgreenlee - rob(at)spreaker(dotcom)Co-Host: Alex Exum, Spreaker Host of "The Exum Experience" and the "Spreaker Studio Review" shows at @AlexExumSpreaker Blog Posts at http://Blog.Spreaker.com:- 3 Easy Steps for Submitting Your RSS Feed to iTunes - The topic of this show today- How to Start Coding on Android If You’re an iGuy (iOS Guy or Gal)Detailed Show Notes:Tip of the Week “Spreaker is Live Streaming From http://PodcastMovement.com, Next Week”: PM16 Spreaker Live Show "Live" Schedule------------Weds, July 6th - 11am - 1pm CST11amGuest: Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl Podcast 11:30amGuest: Danny Pena - GamerTag Radio 12 noonGuest: Debra Grobman - ConfirmedCompany: Flatlands Avenue Productions, LLC, a digital audio production studio, social media and public relations firm. We are a team of broadcasters, audio engineers, writers, editors and public relations professionals. We provide media training, voice coaching, audio production, distribution and support services. 12:30pmGuest:Rob McCracken, EW Scripps/MidRoll -------------Thurs, July 7th - 11am - 1pm CST11amGuest: Rachel Ghiazza, Spotify 11:30amGuest: Marty Michael, HeadGum co-founder 12 noonGuest: Rob Cesternino - Rob has a Podcast 12:30pmGuest: Robin Marshall Bio: Introducing Robin Marshall, host of Sugar Mom Podcast. Robin is an Author, Voice Over Artist, Audio Producer and now a podcaster as well. Robin is working in collaboration with Flatlands Avenue Productions for the purpose of marketing, and promoting this female and most times millennial-focused content on her exclusive Sugar Mom Podcast podcast. www.SugarMom.net--------------Fri, July 8th - 1pm -2pm CST1pmGuest: Harry Duran, PodcastJunkies.com 1:30pmGuest: Bryan Moffett, General Manager of National Public Media (NPR) Detailed Show Notes: “How-To and Where To Submit your Podcast RSS Feed”How-To Submit a Podcast Feed, What is a Podcast Feed?, What is RSS?, What does it do?- Text file linked to via web URL, that is dynamically created by servers to add media file links, text metadata- These feeds are called RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication), contain URL links to your show audio files How-To Submit your Show to the number #1 distribution platform iTunes/iOS Podcast App:- Sign in to iTunes Podcast Connect via an Apple account - https://itunesconnect.apple.com- Click the at the top left of the iTunes Connect dashboard- Enter your RSS feed into the provided text box and then click the “Validate” button- A Feed Preview will load if you do not have any validation errorsHow-To Submit your Show to Stitcher, Google Play Music, TuneIn - Before you submit your podcast to Stitcher make sure you meet the following minimum requirements: - Your artwork is a square JPG or PNG formatted image at least 1400 x 1400 (1400 x 1400 JPG image recommended). - A unique podcast program title. - Stitcher does not accept video (mp4 or m4v) or digital document (pdf or epub) podcasts. - You may also provide Facebook and Twitter URLs during the submission process. If you have completed the above steps, you are now ready to submit your podcast to Stitcher.- http://www.stitcher.com/content-providers.phpSubmit to Google Play Music- Before you submit your podcast to Google Play Music Podcast Portal make sure you meet the following minimum requirements: - Your artwork is a square jpg or png formatted image at least 1200 x 1200 and at most 7000 x 7000 in size in RGB color space (1400 x 1400 jpg image recommended). - At least one Google Play Music Podcast category selected - Valid email address in the iTunes or Google Play email field (notifications from Google will be sent to this address)Google Play Music Podcast Portal does not accept video (mp4 or m4v) or digital document (pdf or epub) podcasts. - If you have completed the above steps, you are now ready to submit your podcast to Google Play Music Podcast Portal - https://play.google.com/music/podcasts/publishAfter you submit your podcast to Google Play Music- All podcasts submitted to Google Play Music Podcast Portal are moderated. The process can take between 1-10 days, though most submissions are approved within 3 days.- Google will email the address you entered as your Google Play email in PowerPress settings When your podcast is approvedSubmit to TuneIn- Before you submit your podcast to TuneIn make sure you meet the following minimum requirements: - Your artwork is a square JPG or PNG formatted image at least 1400 x 1400 (1400 x 1400 JPG image recommended). You can also optionally submit a unique logo and banner image. - TuneIn does not accept video (mp4 or m4v) or digital document (pdf or epub) podcasts.If you have completed the above steps, you are now ready to submit your podcast to TuneIn.- http://help.tunein.com/customer/portal/emails/new?ticket[labels_new]=podcast&t=641867After you submit your podcast to TuneIn- All podcasts submitted to TuneIn are moderated - The process can take between one to 10 days- TuneIn will email the address you provide when your show is approved or deniedSubmitting to iHeartRadio.com via Spreaker only- Create a Spreaker user account (primary or secondary distribution)- Create a new “Show” or “Podcast” on the Spreaker platform for “Primary” distribution- Add your existing show RSS feed via feed importer (Paste in your current podcast feed URL)- Build your show page in Spreaker, will get you into Spreaker listening apps- Then visit your show page and click “Edit” then click “Distribution”, then click the Red button- http://Spreaker.comThe Review Process during which they'll be considering various factors including content quality, thoroughness of description (show and episode descriptions, cover images,...), use of copyrighted material, and overall presentation.The Review Process is carried out by the iHeartRadio staff. In case you have inquiries on the outcome of a review, please contact them directly at help@iheartradio.com.Spreaker Links:http://Adore.fmhttp://blog.spreaker.comhttp://SpreakerLiveShow.comhttps://Spreaker.comSend Questions and Comments to:Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker using #SpreakerLiveTwitter: http://twitter.com/robgreenleeTwitter: http://twitter.com/alexeum Tech Support: support at spreaker.com

If you enjoyed this podcast please provide an iTunes review using this link: http://apple.co/1dgFZzEHere is a link to the post: http://iteachblogging.com/summarize-rss-feed-summarize/There is a great debate in the blogging world and that is “Should I summarize my blog rss feed or should I share the entire post?”First let’s discuss what an rss feed is how it works:RSS; originally RDF Site Summary; often dubbed Really Simple Syndication, uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video. …http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_feedSo now that we have the official wiki definition let’s try a bit more simple of an explanation of why you care. If someone subscribes to your blog they are saying that they want to know when you release another blog post. If they fill out the subscribe information and “opt in” they will receive an email of your latest blog post.At this point it is up to you as to what they receive. They can receive a summary of up to however many characters that you choose or you can allow for them to see the entire blog post in their email.https://www.amazon.com/shop/iteachblogging

If you enjoyed this podcast please provide an iTunes review using this link: http://apple.co/1dgFZzEHere is a link to the post: http://iteachblogging.com/summarize-rss-feed-summarize/There is a great debate in the blogging world and that is “Should I summarize my blog rss feed or should I share the entire post?”First let’s discuss what an rss feed is how it works:RSS; originally RDF Site Summary; often dubbed Really Simple Syndication, uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video. …http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_feedSo now that we have the official wiki definition let’s try a bit more simple of an explanation of why you care. If someone subscribes to your blog they are saying that they want to know when you release another blog post. If they fill out the subscribe information and “opt in” they will receive an email of your latest blog post.At this point it is up to you as to what they receive. They can receive a summary of up to however many characters that you choose or you can allow for them to see the entire blog post in their email.https://www.amazon.com/shop/iteachblogging

This week I had a lot of questions from new and prospective podcasters that show that, even though podcasting has been around a while (10 years), people seem to have trouble with how it works. So I am going to explain it in very basic terms. This would be a good episode to pass on to people you know who ask you about how podcasting works, what it is, and how it DOESN'T work. Ok, The first thing about podcasting you should understand is, that it is driven by the RSS feed. What is an RSS feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What that means is that it's a file on the web (either static or dynamically generated) in XML format. It contains “posts” or “items” in reverse order newest first and oldest last. RSS is a standard where the content is not formatted in a particular way as how it's displayed. It's just the raw content (mostly text) and the receiving program (RSS Readers) format it for display on a screen. The raw RSS was never meant for humans to see. It's meant for machines to see, interpret and display as they see fit. For podcasting, Dave Winer (who invented RSS) added some magic to RSS to allow “enclosures” which can be any sort of file that once delivered to an RSS reader would download to the local users device (at that time computers only). This is what allows us to enclose our mp3 files in the RSS feed for delivery to our listeners. (works the same for video files) So basicly how this works for Real people is like a Radio. Your RSS feed is the transmitter and the listener's Podcatching software is the receiver. They “Tune” (subscribe) to your RSS feed just like you might tune your radio to 98.1 to listen to the Bob and Tom show on your local radio station. The difference is you can “Tune” your podcatcher to more than one station at a time and it “records” (downloads) the show for playback later kind of like a DVR would for a tv show, that can be played back at a later time. The podcatching software all works a bit differently from one another, but uses the same basic method to get your podcast files to the listener. Some now allow streaming of your files so instead of downloading the whole file before you play it, it plays it on demand. Apps like Stitcher, Tunein and even Apple's “Podcasting” IOS app can do this. (I prefer to download the files so I don't' have to use up my data plan when I'm away from wifi on my phone) The import part is to have your RSS feed formated correctly so that all these podcatching software apps can read it correctly. In 2005, Apple added podcast support to iTunes and we have never been the same since! The only issue at that time was they added some iTunes specific tags that needed to be there for the podcast to look right in iTunes. If you use a plugin like Powerpress, and fill out all the settings, all those tags will be there in the correct place and your show will look right on those apps. While we're on the subject of iTunes, I want to re-iterate that you do not UPLOAD to iTunes. You do not have an iTunes feed. Just because the iTunes store doesn't LIST your episode, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. People get so worried about what iTunes shows in their listings they don't realize that the listing isn't the important part. It's the RSS feed. People who subscribe to your show in iTunes are subscribed DIRECTLY to your rss feed. The iTunes store (where your listing lives) doesn't update in real-time. If I put out a podcast at 3pm on Friday afternoon, at 301pm it will be available to be downloaded via someone subscribed in iTunes. The listing might not update for 2 hours or 2 days. Media Hosting / Web hosting Your web page (if you are doing it the way I suggest) is where your RSS feed lives. The place where your media files (mp3's) live can be anywhere that is accessible on the web. To be included on iTunes, there are some other requirements for the server, but if you use a good media host (such as blubrry.com) that is all taken care of. In fact,

Voce del Glossario a cura di Gianluca Tramontana RSS L’RSS, acronimo Really Simple Syndication, è un popolare formato per la distribuzione di contenuti Web. Gli RSS permettono all’utente in modo rapido, semplice ma potente la raccolta di contenuti da diverse fonti sul web. Essi facilitano l’accesso agli ultimi aggiornamenti dei propri siti preferiti senza doverli visitare ogni volta singolarmente con un evidente risparmio di tempo. Il termine Syndication non ha un equivalente italiano, esso indica la cessione di contenuti di un sito web affinché possano essere pubblicati da agenzie di stampa. La raccolta di contenuti viene canalizzata in un’unica destinazione, utilizzando un programma chiamato feed reader o, per l’appunto, aggregatore. Il vantaggio sta nel fatto che non c’è più bisogno di visitare 20 siti diversi per controllare gli aggiornamenti: è il feed reader che si occupa di notificare l’arrivo di nuovi contenuti, alla stregua di un client di posta elettronica. Spesso, per descrivere gli RSS, si utilizza la metafora del canale televisivo: il flusso informativo veicolato dai feed RSS assomiglia molto ad una sequenza di trasmissioni televisive o radiofoniche che si succedono. Il concetto è anche molto simile all’abbonamento a una rivista: è sempre un atto volontario e consapevole con il quale un utente vuole essere aggiornato costantemente sulle novità prodotte dai siti di proprio interesse. Non a caso un altro termine molto in uso nel mondo degli RSS è proprio subscription cioè abbonamento. Si tratta quindi di una tecnologia di tipo pull: all’utente finale non sarà automaticamente inviato nulla, a meno che non abbia inserito l’indirizzo del feed RSS nel suo feed reader. L’opzione di sottoscrizione ai feed RSS si trova su quasi tutti i blog, e sempre più spesso anche in altri siti web di varia natura: news, meteo, podcast e tutti quei portali che offrono contenuti con frequenti aggiornamenti. Nell’ambito delle piattaforme e-learning, ad esempio, gli RSS possono essere utili per tenersi aggiornati sulle news o sui nuovi messaggi inseriti in un forum. RSS è una tecnologia con enormi potenzialità per la didattica: la sua semplicità e flessibilità la rendono adatta ai più svariati utilizzi, dall’aggiornamento continuo che caratterizza molti settori disciplinari, come ad esempio la medicina, alla possibilità di “connessione” dei blog e dei podcasting in canali tematici.

This blog is all about providing tips and ideas on how to best use Facebook Pages.One of the things I will be doing is reviewing each of the various tabs that are standard and the tabs that you can add with various applications.The first one I want to review is the Notes tab.One way to think of the Notes tab is to view it like a blog. This is a place for you to post your articles and ideas in a forum for everyone to read and comment on them. If you are looking to build a good following on a Facebook Page using the notes for blogging is a great idea.You can also add an RSS feed to your notes. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It basically makes it easy for people to subscribe to your content. Any blog platform out there already has RSS built into it. So you could take the RSS from your current blog if you have one and then have it automatically feed into your Notes tab.However there are some issues that I have found with this. Not all RSS feeds seem to feed in at all or can mess up the way the information looks. I would actually caution against doing this with the Notes tab. The results are unpredictable and in my experience it is not easy to change once you set it up.I recommend you copy and paste your posts into your Notes tab.I also recommend that you make sure that your title and content are things that are hot topics and things that would interest people. This will help you in getting your content noticed and commented on.Always ask for comments! This also helps your post to be fed out to more users. Think of it as votes. The more votes you have the more popular your content is and the more Facebook will share it out.Hope you have found this helpful.Please ask your questions and comment below!!Peter BrissetteCustom Facebook Page TemplateWant to listen instead?Click here for Audio of Custom Facebook Page Template - The Notes Tab

Simply put, RSS Stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication and is a format of Xml code used to publish frequesntly updated works in a standardized format. This benefits readers who can subscribe to timely updates from their favorite websites or to aggregate conent from many sites into a single RSS Reading program. To understand RSS, we first need to go over a brief overview of XML. XML is probably the most flexible way to store data in a file. It is widely used on the Internet, and in all kinds of other applications. Entire books have been written on the subject and language. XML is a markup language very similar to HTML. It defines how to use tags to describe information in a file. What is RSS Video Tutorial

Josh and Kim Can DuetFrom "I Remember You" to "Hold on to Me, Babe," RFE plays a set of intimate numbers during this podcast. The show also includes performances of "Lilac Wine," "Sand and Foam," "I Heard the Bluebird Sing," "The Irish Rover," "A Heart Needs a Home," and "Stone Cold Dead in the Market."A few word about listening and subscribing:-You can always simply come here to listen using the player above.-You can download an mp3 of the podcast by clicking the title bar of this post, saving the file to your disc, and then playing it using any player you choose.-If you want to subscribe using iTunes (or another Podcatcher or another RSS reader) you can copy this link without the quotes "http://feeds.feedburner.com/RFEPodcast" into the "Advanced" pulldown menu in the "Subscribe to" window. It should be similar in other podcatchers and readers.-You can also click this symbol to subscribe any number of ways.For those of you new to the world of RSS (and we're pretty new, too) the term means Really Simple Syndication, and it's a way that your computer, or more specifically some software on your computer, will automatically find when a new article is posted on a blog, podcast or web site. If you want to automatically get updates of our podcast and you don't know how, there are plenty of resources on line to learn how to subscribe to RSS feeds.

I was recently told by an acquaintance that RSS feeds have been explained to him a number of times, but despite that he still doesn’t understand the technology. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a great tool for small business owners to get the word out about […] The post Startup BizCast #8 – Small Businesses and RSS Feeds (Steve Mullen) first appeared on EndGame Public Relations.

I was recently told by an acquaintance that RSS feeds have been explained to him a number of times, but despite that he still doesn’t understand the technology. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a great tool for small business owners to get the word out about […]

Flat Word Strategies: New Technologies Create Interactive Learning   Introduction In "The World is Flat," Thomas Friedman makes the case that a number of forces have converged to flatten and restructure the global competitive landscape, and that this process is continuing and accelerating.  This flattening has empowered individuals to compete and collaborate on a global scale like never before.  As educators, we must understand the implications for us, our students and our institutions and more globally on education and learning.  Key flatteners that are already impacting education include the Internet, open source software, search, wireless/mobility, VoIP, digitalization, personalization and virtualization. One of the key observations of this less predictable, less hierarchical flattened world is that knowledge is widely distributed and rapidly changing leaving traditional course-based learning increasingly unable to meet the needs of students.  Bridging this divide requires new paradigms in education that incorporate "flat' world strategies such as informal learner-driven knowledge transfer and new technologies and forms of learning. Question from Mike: Gordon, can you give us a little background on some of the new tools being used? In the 1990's many of us first started to use the Internet to deliver and supplement content for our courses. We developed relatively static web pages that included text and pictures in similar format to traditional textbooks. Today with the combination of high bandwidth access and new development tools, fresh web content looks and feels much different. With "Web 2.0" tools and delivery methods, instructors are discovering new ways to develop and deliver content to and engage their students. Among the new tools finding their way into business and into the hands of our students are: Search,Instant Messaging, Blogging/Podcasting,Wikis,RSS/Subscription, andWireless/Mobility. While many faculty are well-versed at using websites, email, and course management systems to interact and engage with their students, most have been slow to adopt some of these "new" technologies into and outside of their classroom. These new tools are part of the dynamic, interactive new Internet many are calling Web 2.0. According to techtarget.com, the term Web 2.0 was first used by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International in 2004 during a next generation web conference. Web 2.0 based technological advances have continued over the last two years and new applications are coming out daily that allow faculty and their students to experience new ways of interacting and learning. Much of this new technology is built around two fundamental technologies, AJAX and RSS. Question from Gordon: AJAX â�� thatâ��s soap, right Mike? Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path (www.adaptivepath.com) is responsible for coining the acronym AJAX in a February 2005 article. In the article, Garrett describes AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, as a new approach to web applications. In terms of user interaction, what makes AJAX stand out is that it allows developers to create web applications that start to approach the richness and responsiveness of desktop applications. AJAX is not a technology, nor is it code or an application that can be downloaded. Instead, it is a collection of technologies that have all matured and when combined together provide for a new paradigm for the architecture of web applications.  More precisely, AJAX includes XHTML and CSS; DOM or the Document Object Model; XML and XSLT; XMLHttpRequest; and JavaScript.   Technologies Role XHTML + CSS Standards-based presentation Document Object Model (DOM) Dynamic display and interaction XML + XSLT data exchange and manipulation XMLHttpRequest Asynchronous data retrieval JavaScript Binds everything together   To understand how AJAX works, we first have to understand the classic or traditional client-server web application model.  In this model, user actions (typically through a web browser interface) trigger an HTTP request back to the web server, which processes the request (retrieving data, performing calculations, etc) and responds to the client (user) with an HTML page.  While this model has been extremely successful at building out the Internet, it breaks down when developers try to replicate the user experience of desktop applications.  Thatâ��s where AJAX comes in.  AJAX represents a fundamental shift in what's possible on the Web.  To provide this functionality, we introduce an AJAX engine as an intermediary into the traditional client-server model. Simply put, instead of loading a web page at the start of the session, the browser loads the AJAX engine on the client side of the relationship.  This engine is JavaScript code that coexists with the browser, usually in a hidden frame, and is responsible for rendering the web interface and communicating with the web server on the user's behalf.  Practically speaking, what this does is ensures that the user is never looking at an empty browser window waiting for the server to respond and the page to refresh.  With first generation web technology, user actions would generate an HTTP request; with AJAX these requests are JavaScript calls to the AJAX engine.  Many user actions don't require communication with the server and can be handled by the engine.  If the server is needed, the engine makes the request asynchronously using XML, with no interruption of the user-application interaction. Question from Mike: Gordon could you tell us a little bit about RSS? RSS (RDF Site Summary and also referred to as Really Simple Syndication) is a technology used to push content out to subscribers using an aggregator application like My.Yahoo or Google Reader. In addition web browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer 7.0, along with Mac OS X and Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system, have built in aggregator functionality. These applications allow the user to subscribe to different feeds and have content pushed out to the aggregator. Here's an example of how you can use this technology â�� if you have a free Yahoo account, you can configure your account to aggregate, or collect, different types of content. Once setup, you can go to any computer with a browser and an Internet connection, go to My.Yahoo.com, log in with your username and password and have your custom page come up with all of your subscribed feeds listed. Your feeds are selected by you and you can add and remove as you see fit. Here are some the feeds we like and subscribe to: Gizmodo for breaking gadget news, Broadband Reports for news on delivery technology and Information Week for breaking IT news. Let's look at how it works â�� let's say Information Week publishes an article on a IT workforce needs â�� if you are logged in to your aggregator and subscribed to the Information Week feed, you see the title, a brief summary of the article and how long ago it was published (minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc) on your aggregator page. If the article looks interesting you can click the link and then read the entire article. This technology has allowed many to cut back considerably on hard copy technology journal reading and email subscriptions â�� most common journals and periodicals are now publishing content with RSS feeds, allowing readers to subscribe and rapidly scan and review content. RSS developers create an XML file that describes content as it is posted on websites. The blog at nctt.org/blog is a good example if you want to take a look at an XML file. The blog is written using a word processor and then the content is typically copied and pasted into a blog editor with the XML file automatically updated with the latest content. If you are a subscriber to nctt.org/blog your aggregator checks the NCTT blog site periodically for updates and, if it finds one, it lists the content on the aggregator screen. You can see a brief summary on the aggregator and, if you wish to read further, you can click the link and read the entire blog. Your current students are using this technology on, in some cases, a minute by minute basis. Let's take a look at how it can be used. Let's say you wake up one morning not feeling well and have to cancel your classes. When and how do your students find out you are out sick? Maybe you send out an email which requires students check their campus email account or (worst case) you call in and a note goes on the door or board. In both cases many, if not all, of your students will show up for class and be disappointed to find out you will not be there. Using a simple RSS feed, you could give your students the option of subscribing and actually push the message out to their cell phone or other connected device. Students get the message and do not end up showing up for a class that has been cancelled. Question from Gordon: Mike, What are some of the popular apps out there now that people are using? The â��killer appâ�� or application that demonstrated the potential and viability of AJAX is Googleâ��s gmail service. The use of AJAX has since exploded. Examples include the aggregators we mentioned earlier, which all leverage AJAX technology to provide for a more pleasing user experience, as well as a whole class of â��webwareâ�� â�� web-based applications that attempt to replicate desktop applications, including Writely, ZohoWriter, ZohoShow, Google Spreadsheets, and DabbleDB. With these applications, you and your students have access to a virtual office suite, allowing students to interact and collaborate online. This new class of tools and technologies provide faculty with an opportunity to engage their students inside and outside of the classroom. Question: Gordon: Where can people find the content of this article? You can find the content of this podcast in the Oct/Nov 2006 edition of Community College Journal, at nctt.org/blog and at nctt.org/podcast.  In addition you will find a maintained list of several interesting links that further demonstrate these technologies. You can reach the authors at gsnyder@stcc.edu and mqaissaunee@brookdale.edu and at their National Science Foundation center and project websites at www.nctt.org and www.maitt.org    

Online Tools for the 21st Century - RSS Feeds RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS feeds are to web browsing what ordering by catalogue is to window shopping. You can use them to make sites send you fresh info instead of you going in search of it. You can learn more about RSS at http://frl.bluehighways.com/frlarchives/000123.html  Check out Bloglines, an online RSS reader at: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs  Jennifer Moore visits with Patrick Elie. A prominent Haitian human rights activist prompts Homebrew to take a second look at the life and work of Jean Dominique. The complete conversation is available on radio4all.net.