I recently wrote about Podcasting 2.0 and thought I should add a further amendment regarding their goals. I previously wrote:

To solve the problems above there are a few key angles being tackled: Search, Discoverability and Monetisation.

I’d like to add a fourth key angle to that, which I didn’t think at the time should be listed as it’s own however having listened more to Episodes 16 and 17 and their intention to add XML tags for IRC/Chat Room integration I think I should add the fourth key angle: Interactivity.

Interactivity

The problem with broadcast historically is that audience participation is difficult given the tools and effort required. Pick up the phone, make a call, you need a big incentive (think cash prizes, competitions, discounts, something!) or audiences just don’t participate. It’s less personal and with less of a personal connection the desire for listeners to connect is much less.

In podcasting as an internet-first application and being far more personal, the bar is set differently and we can think of real-time feedback methods as verbal via a dial-in/patch-through to the live show or written via messaging, like a chat room. There are also non-real-time methods predominantly via webforms and EMail. With contact EMails already in the RSS XML specification, adding a webform submission entry might be of some use (perhaps < podcast:contactform > with a url=“https://contact.me/form"), but real-time is far more interesting.

Real Time Interactivity

In podcasting initially (like so many internet-first technology applications) geeks that understood how it works, led the way. That is to say with podcasts originally there was a way for a percentage of the listeners to use IRC as a Chat Room (Pragmatic did this for the better part of a year in 2014, as well as other far more popular shows like ATP, Back To Work etc.) to get real-time listener interaction during a podcast recording, albeit with a slight delay between audio out and listener response in the chat room.

YouTube introduced live streaming and live chat with playback that integrated the chat room with the video content to lower the barrier of entry for their platform. For equivalent podcast functionality to go beyond the geek-% of the podcast listeners, podcast clients will need to do the same. In order for podcast clients to be pressured to support it, standardisation of the XML tags and backend infrastructure is a must.

The problem with interactivity is that whilst it starts with the tag, it must end with the client applications otherwise only the geek-% of listeners will use it as they do now.

From my own experiences with live chat rooms during my own and other podcasts, people that are able to tune in to a live show and be present (lots of people just “sit” in a channel and aren’t actually present) is about 1-2% of your overall downloads and that’s for a technical podcast with a high geek-%. I’ve also found there are timezone-effects such that if you podcast live during different times of the day or night directly impacts those percentages even further (it’s 1am somewhere in the world right now, so if your listeners live in that timezone chances are they won’t be listening live).

The final concern is that chat rooms only work for a certain kind of podcast. For me, it could only potentially work with Pragmatic and in my experience I wanted Pragmatic to be focussed and chat rooms turned out to be a huge distraction. Over and again my listeners reiterated that one of the main attractions of podcasts was their ability to time-shift and listen to them when they wanted to listen to them. Being live to them was a minus not a plus.

For these reasons I don’t see that this kind of interactivity will uplift the podcasting ecosystem for the vast majority of podcasters, though it’s certainly nice to have and attempt to standardise.

Crowd-sourced Chapters

Previously I wrote:

The interesting opportunity that Adam puts forward with chapters is he wants the audience to be able to participate with crowd-sourced chapters as a new vector of audience participation and interaction with podcast creators.

Whilst I looked at this last time from a practical standpoint of “how would I as a podcaster use this?” concluding that I wouldn’t use it since I’m a self-confessed control-freak, but I didn’t fully appreciate the angle of audience interaction. I think for podcasts that have a truly significant audience with listeners that really want to help out (but can’t help financially) this feature provides a potential avenue to assist in a non-financial aspect, which is a great idea.

Crowd-source Everything?

(Except recording the show!)

From pre-production to post-production any task in the podcast creation chain could be outsourced to an extent. The pre-production dilemma could look like a feed level XML Tag < podcast:proposedtopics > to a planned topic list (popular podcasts currently use Twitter #Tags like #AskTheBobbyMcBobShow), to cut-out centralised platforms like Twitter from the creation chain in the long term. Again, only useful for certain kinds of shows, but could also include a URL Link to a shared document (probably a JSON file), an episode index reference (i.e. Currently released episode is 85, proposed topics for Episode 86, could also be an array for multiple episodes.)

The post-production dilemma generally consists of show notes, chapters (solution in progress) and audio editing. Perhaps a similar system to crowd-sourced chapters could be used for show notes that could include useful/relevant links for the current episode that aren’t/can’t be easily embedded as Chapter markers.

In either case there’s no reason why it couldn’t work the same way as crowd-sourced chapter markers. The podcaster could also have (with sufficient privileges) the administrative access to add/modify remove content from either of these, with guests also having read/write access. With an appropriate client tool this would then eliminate the plethora of different methods in use today: shared google documents being quite popular with many podcasters today, will not be around indefinitely.

All In One App?

Of course the more features we pile into the Podcasting client app, the more difficult it becomes to write and maintain. Previously an excellent programmer, come podcaster, come audiophile like Marco Arment, could create Overcast. With lightning network integration, plus crowd-sourced chapters, shared document support (notes etc) and a text chat client (IRC) the application is quickly becoming much heavier and complex, with fewer developers with the knowledge in each dimension to create an all-in-one app client.

The need for better frameworks to make feature integration easier for developers is obvious. There may well be the need to two classes of app or at least two views: the listener view and the podcaster view, or simply multiple apps for different purposes. Either way it’s interesting to see where the Tag + Use Case + Tool-chain can lead us.