Unlocking the Potential of Activity Pub in the Podcasting Landscape

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:

Activity pub in plain English.

Dave Jackson [00:00:18]:

Daniel, future of podcasting episode 42, activity pub. Can we say for dummies? I think that's trademarked. For me, how's about that? If I can understand it, anybody can understand.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:31]:

You could start a new series of books called Dave's Guide to, and that could be whatever.

Dave Jackson [00:00:35]:

That's it. We're talking earlier, and we said activity streams, and you said or activity pub. So that was the first thing. And and we do have an episode on this.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:44]:

Right.

Dave Jackson [00:00:44]:

Where you and Sam completely geeked out, and now we're circling back so normal humans can can understand this a bit. Do we need to even talk about streams at this point, streams versus pub?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:55]:

Yes. Because most people, when they're talking about activity pub, they are talking about both of these things together. Here's the way to look at it. ActivityStream is merely the specification of how the data is structured and it comes with certain ideas and concepts with it. Activitypub uses ActivityStream and ActivityPub is streaming activity to the ActivityStream. That's why they call it the activity stream. It's a stream of activity. And then think of it this way, activity pub is the way that that stream of activity gets published.

Dave Jackson [00:01:35]:

Okay. Can we use the analogy of a freeway where you have rules like you must drive on the left side of the road or the right side of the road at 55 miles an hour. That would be the stream, and then the pub would be the road. No. That that falls apart. Trying to mentally get a picture on this.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:01:55]:

I would say it's like this. What is podcasting? What is a podcast, Dave? Well, podcasting at its core is using RSS. RSS is also used for a lot of other things, for blogs, for newsletters, for other kinds of things. They're all using RSS. They're all using the same central standard of structured data and communicating that data. Podcasting is a particular flavor of that. And podcasting is one method of publishing something from an RSS feed. And there are multiple ways that you can publish from an RSS feed.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:02:31]:

Podcasting is one of them. That's what we talk about here. So activity pub is communicating with the activity stream. So in the back end, it's all activity stream when we're talking activity pub and all of that. It's activity stream on the back end. But that stream doesn't really do anything. It's just structured data. There's no way to really work with it.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:02:55]:

The real magic comes in with activity pub and that is the publishing method that then allows different streams to communicate with each other. And to like Sam Sethi and I talked about in our very technical discussion, it's kind of the idea of there's an inbox and an outbox. An activity pub is what gets the stream into someone else's inbox and also puts something in your outbox. It's all activity stream published through activity pub.

Dave Jackson [00:03:26]:

Got it. Alright. I think I got it now. Everybody seems to be talking about activity pub. I know some of this talks about cross app comments seems to be coming up a lot with this particular technology. Is that basically why it's becoming such a hot topic right now?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:03:42]:

That and also the realization of what all can be done with this. A couple of years ago, I proposed something and then also John Spurlock proposed something similar for Podcasting 2.0, the idea of some kind of listener event thing that can sit and monitor certain activities coming from a podcast app as well as from the podcast listener. I proposed a method I called webhooks. John Spurlock proposed a method he called events, but we're after the same basic thing and that is some place that can receive data and then do something with that. And I wanted to see cross app comments integrate with that kind of thing, But we really don't need to build a all new system because activity stream and activity pub can get us most of the way there. We just have to agree on certain things around how you use that technology. But that is the core technology that then has so much potential for it because while I think cross app comments are what we should focus on first as we're trying to build ActivityPub into podcasting because cross app comments are an audience focused feature. I think it's the kind of thing that people would be willing to switch podcast apps in order to get.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:05:05]:

News flash, not everyone wants to give you money. So to say

Dave Jackson [00:05:10]:

What?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:05:10]:

I know. To say you should switch podcast apps so you can give me money, that's not really a selling point for most audiences. But instead, if it's something like join the community or communicate with other fans, share your feedback with us, comment on this episode, respond to other people. If there's a community feel to it, that's a lot more of a selling point to the audience so that they might want to get involved too, and they would be willing to switch their apps in order to do that.

Dave Jackson [00:05:43]:

It's something that makes them feel like they're missing out. You know? Oh, if I could do that, I could do this, or all the cool kids are in there trading comments and such. They might be more willing to, to jump.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:05:54]:

Yeah. And you look at a system like YouTube. And while we do talk about how the comment section of YouTube is down there with Reddit as the cesspool of the Internet, Nonetheless, it is a great place for community, and people are commenting. They're sharing with each other. They're responding to each other. They have discussions going on sometimes in the comments. And that's because it is right there while they consume the content that you are publishing through at least on YouTube. So if we can bring that same kind of functionality into a podcast app, then people can comment on their favorite episodes as they're listening.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:06:31]:

They can do all kinds of things right there inside the podcast app. And that's why I think that the cross app comments feature, some people are saying maybe we should rename it. But that basic thing is what I think needs to be first because that is a much bigger selling point for the audience. But there's so much more that we could do with activity pub and activity stream as well. Because again, the easiest way to remember this is just reverse the names of those. Activity stream is a stream of activity. And activity pub is publishing that activity. So it works out nicely there.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:07:10]:

When we look at this is just a protocol for how things can communicate and be stored, Think of what other kind of activity could we track or offer in a podcast.

Dave Jackson [00:07:22]:

I like the one idea. I think it was Adam that had it that if you could somehow send information to an advertiser that their ad was heard, I was like, oh, that's kinda cool because in the same way that we want to attract people to swap apps, I don't wanna always be all value for value. It's the alternative to having ads on your show. It's like, well, if we can somehow use the tools in podcasting 2.0 to take advertising to the next level, that would be a win win for everyone. So I don't know. It's is that basically that same technology? It's it's a trigger is I JSON to the episode. If you do this, then do that, and off it goes to the stream. So interesting.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:08:04]:

It is very much an open canvas of technology that we could do so much with it, what you just described. Something else that we could do really cool with it is, well, a sort of comment would be ratings and reviews where you could have cross app ratings and reviews that instead of having to rely on some third party service, your own activity stream for your podcast has the ratings and reviews for your podcast that then these other apps can write to that. Because the only difference between a comment and a rating and review is just some metadata. Like the rating and review might be only on the top level, only on the overall show like the way that Apple Podcasts does it. Or you could have it on the individual episodes like Goodpods and also Podchaser allow ratings and reviews on the individual episodes. That could be up to the publishing system and the podcaster on how they do that. But the only thing that's really different is a rating and review has a rating to it, like a number of stars. And that might be it.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:09:09]:

Or maybe it's a thumbs up. But I think the star method is more universal and that's what we should push for. Another thing too is think about what other activity could be. I'm very cautious to use the word tracked because these days, that has really bad implications because people think, I don't want to be tracked or they hear about tracking and all of this. Another way to look at it is activity could be confirmed. Maybe that's a better way of saying it. So an app could potentially report to the activity stream that this much of an episode has been listened to. Not like second by second by second, but maybe it does it percentage wise, like at every 10%.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:09:53]:

Or maybe it does it where whenever the listener pauses the podcast or stops or deletes or something like that, that then it fires off a quick little message over to the activity stream to say this listener listened from this point to this point and stopped. And then maybe later on, they JSON an additional amount But that kind of activity could be confirmed through the apps if the apps wanted to report that. But the nice thing is that once you open the store of support for ActivityPub and what could be done with it, all of these things that we think could be done with activity streams and activity pub. The only difference for the podcast app developer is just how they structure the message and what triggers it. So once you open that door, you can start easily supporting a whole lot more features. And that's what gets really exciting about this. While cross app comments is great for the audience, some of this other stuff can be good for chapters, and some of it even good for advertisers.

Dave Jackson [00:10:57]:

Yeah. Because once you figure out how you're going to publish this and what wording and what coding or whatever, then everybody can do it universally. So we don't have this weird, like, well, that's going to a good pod. So you've gotta do this or that, and we'd all be kind of, JSON one hand, it'd be interesting because then almost everybody's app would be the same in a way, but you'd have user interface that would make the difference. And then not everybody's gonna use all of these features. So that would make things different. I guess my question is we have all this data flowing to and fro. Where does it live?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:11:30]:

I like that question. That that's a throwback to John Lee Dumas. He used to always say that. I love this question. And I do love this question because this one is really important to me. I think that the source of truth should be in the chapters control. So that means something that's on their quote server, unquote. That could be through their podcast hosting provider, a third party service that they pay for.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:11:54]:

Maybe I'm gonna offer something like this through Podgagment. But something that the podcaster has control over what is allowed to be displayed inside of the activity stream. Now, one of the things, the popular things that uses ActivityPub right now is Mastodon. That's another social network, a spin off from x Twitter. Or not really a spin off, but a lot of people spun themselves off into Mastodon. Yeah. And when the whole talk about activity pub and cross up comments and stuff with around activity pub had started, I kept thinking Mastodon, and that's where my holdup was. I thought, like, we're so limited on this because Mastodon is basically like Twitter but not as developed and very decentralized and it has performance issues and all of this stuff.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:12:42]:

So that's why until now, I've only said ActivityPub and ActivityStream. Mastodon is using ActivityPub, but Mastodon is not actually ActivityPub in itself. It's just built on top of it. So the way that Mastodon works can be similar to how podcast apps can work. Where with Mastodon, you might have podcast index dot social. That's the social area for us working on Podcasting 2.0. There is mastodon.social. There are other places.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:13:15]:

I believe threads and Truth Social are both going to, quote, federate, unquote, that's the term for this, when they connect to this bigger network of decentralized social networking. So all of these servers going back and forth, and this goes back to the inbox, outbox idea just like an email, you don't have to worry. Do you know who I use as my email server, Dave?

Dave Jackson [00:13:39]:

I have no idea.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:13:41]:

And I don't know who yours is either. I just know if I send you an email, it goes from my outbox into your inbox and you receive it. And then you can reply. That goes from your outbox into my inbox. The difference here in podcasting that I would love to see is that all that inbox, outbox stuff can happen and it can all be decentralized where maybe like Podverse has their own activity pub service and Cast O Matic has their own, Podcast Guru has their own, True Fans has their own. All of these places have their own activity pub, and they can connect with each other and respond to each other. But all the activity gets recorded at the central source which is the chapters control over that. And that is seen as the source of truth.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:14:32]:

So what that would then give 2 big things that would give, moderation and performance. Moderation is something that I frequently keep pushing for. Guys, we need to remember to let the podcasters moderate this because there are all kinds of reasons why you might want to remove someone's comment from your site. Maybe not block the person but maybe just remove their comment. Maybe their comment was incorrect. Maybe their comment was harsh. Maybe their comment contained profanity and you just don't want any kind of obscenities around your content invisible in these apps. For whatever reason it is, I believe podcasters should have the ability to moderate the content that is shown with their podcast in that sense.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:15:13]:

So if the podcaster controls the central activity stream, then they can choose what is allowed into it. And they could say, this particular comment, no, I don't want that one there. So that's the moderation benefit of centralizing the stream for the podcast. The performance benefit is that an app would only have to look at that one activity stream. And that's what they should do anyway because then they would see the moderated view of the content. The apps could have a caution, press this button to be triggered or any whatever they wanna do where they could then expand it to show everything that was not approved by the podcaster. But if they pull it from the podcaster's own activity stream, then they only have to pull it in once, not going out to 100 of places. Because you think about when a conversation has a dozen people responding back to each other, That's all kinds of threads going back and forth, back and forth, all of these inboxes and outboxes, and all of these different federated servers probably around this one conversation.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:16:21]:

And you'd end up with this tree that the app would have to follow all the branches of this tree in order to get and display all of the replies to one central comment which is a comment on the episode. That's why I really push for it to all be in one activity stream the podcaster can control. And then the apps load that one activity stream even though they're using ActivityPub in their own instance and others are using their own. So the engagement is decentralized. But the source is centralized, just like podcasting itself. The podcast RSS feed is centralized. The podcaster is generally in control of it. But the consumption is decentralized.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:17:07]:

There are hundreds of apps out there for podcasters to be able to have their episodes in and audiences to listen or watch from those different apps. The same thing can be in Activity Pub and Activity Stream where the podcaster has their own centralized activity stream And then all these modern podcast apps are activity pub clients that can read from that activity stream and also communicate with each other and send content back to that activity stream.

Dave Jackson [00:17:41]:

Is there a pod ping in there somewhere? Because it just sounds like there's a ton of these, like, if we just want media host. Right? So so Libsyn has a activity pub, Captivate Buzzsprout, rss.com, Pod Home. You know, they've all got their own little activity pubs, but yet we need to connect anything that happens over there to the podcasters because somebody left. I guess somebody wouldn't leave a comment at another media host. Maybe that's not a great example, but I I just picture all these. Like, here's the main one that the podcaster has, but if somebody's leaving comments in this app or that app or this app, how is that information getting back to now we're almost back to the early days of podcasting, pre Podping, where now everybody's box has to go check everybody else's box.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:18:26]:

I believe that is where that inbox and outbox metaphor comes into play. And part of what works with ActivityPub that I think Podping is not necessary because ActivityPub kind of already works in that way where it's more of a push method instead of a pull method. I believe that's the way. I could be wrong there, but I know that's being discussed what is the best way to do that. Because certainly that is a concern. If you have a 3 hour long episode and you're listening and you've pressed play and you look down and there are no comments, how will you know if anyone else comments during the 3 hours that you've been listening to that episode? Most likely someone else could be commenting And you wouldn't see it unless the app is pulling data or if somehow the server pushes data to the app. And that's where that's beyond my pay grade on this activity pub and activity stream conversation, but I believe that is part of the activity pub protocol. Okay.

Dave Jackson [00:19:29]:

Because, yeah, I I was thinking about that. I'm like, well, if we'll just say the app. If the app knows the address to the podcaster, then somebody hits play on that podcast, then they can just send it. They know where that the main box is for the podcaster. They're like, oh, this is for it's like almost like a a mail service. Oh, wait a minute. We've got a message here for Daniel. We don't have to send it everywhere.

Dave Jackson [00:19:51]:

We just need to send it to Daniel. So somehow maybe that trigger of a play goes directly to the podcasters. This is fun. I'm trying to talk like I understand this, but that would then send a message. Hey, so and so JSON to 10 minutes on that chapters activity pub. And how big? I guess we don't know because when I hear every every word like Oprah, you get an activity pub, you get, you know, everyone gets And I was like, okay. Well, who's hosting all that? And how big are they? I never think about it, but I I remember when, there was some discussion about this, and I think it was Kevin from Buzzsprout. JSON something like, well, every time we add one little field and you've got 80, 90,000 podcasts, and you've just added whatever, you know, x amount of even if it's a kilobyte of information because it's text, you multiply that by a 100,000, you're like, that can add up a little bit.

Dave Jackson [00:20:44]:

So that would be, again, just now grasping the concept. I was like, it sounds like almost another it could be another hosting account. I don't know. Is that something we're gonna need?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:20:55]:

Well, it's not too big of data. And the nice thing is just like transcripts in podcasting 2.0, support for transcripts is a tag. It's one tag. Well, you could maybe have multiples for different languages. But it's basically one tag per episode in your RSS feed. And then no matter how big the transcript is, the RSS feed doesn't get any bloated from the size of the transcript because the transcript lives somewhere else. So the same thing here is where there are two approaches to take to this and each have their positives and negatives. But the general idea is that for every episode you publish, it would include the actual tag is the social interact tag.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:21:39]:

And now I'm actually kind of liking that name because now it does mean so much more than only comments because there's so much more that we can do that is social interaction that can be confirmed through that single tag in this feature. But every episode would have its own social interact tag that then points to the post or the they call it the root. It would post to that. It would include that in the post. So saying that this is the root post. This is where all activity needs to be reported for this episode back to this root post. So that needs to exist on a server somewhere. And, yes, that's an extra service, but it's still just it's plain text, and plain text compresses really well.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:28]:

And especially when we're talking about just comments, usually, the length of comments are very short and thus could be transmitted very easily.

Dave Jackson [00:22:39]:

Yeah. It doesn't take much to store. This is the worst thing I've ever heard.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:44]:

So Right.

Dave Jackson [00:22:45]:

Who is this guy? Yeah. I could see that.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:49]:

So let me ask you. I'll put you on the spot with this. Okay. Is this making sense? And if not, we can try and clarify it because you're the voice

Dave Jackson [00:22:57]:

I'm the voice of aunt Cheryl. Yeah. I picture it, and I I think you said the thing with the stream. So I picture like a highway and all this information with all sorts of different types of stuff and activity. That's the stream. Activity pub is my on ramp to get things into that stream. Then in the stream, it's almost like I I picture people standing next to a river and somebody said, hey. Every time an orange fish comes by, take it out and put it in this bucket.

Dave Jackson [00:23:26]:

Or list your track how many orange fish go by. Like, not every app is gonna need every bit of information that you've now shoved into the stream. But if it's something that we want to confirm, then we can have somebody looking for that thing so they can say, oh, yeah. It just went by. Good. It's done. So it's it's just the stream of information that's got tons of, you know, just I don't know what's going on. It's just a sea of information going back and forth, and some apps are gonna use it.

Dave Jackson [00:23:55]:

I guess, in a certain extent, it's almost like having a ham radio and a regular radio. Two different frequencies that, know, this one can't pick up everything. Maybe I don't know if a ham radio can pick up AM FM probably, but I'm just picturing that an AM FM station can't pick up ham radio stuff or or even satellite. Let's go that route. You do have all this information, and some apps will pick up some of that information and other apps won't, but they'll use the other information. So it's just a this giant gob of, you know, a fiber optic line of of this information. Some apps will go, oh, yeah. We are watching for this type of information.

Dave Jackson [00:24:31]:

And so that's the you've shoved it out, and they're like, oh, come over here. We need that. And then that goes into that would be in the podcasters Activity Pub is going to have all that stuff. But the apps that go, oh, wait a minute, we're looking for this information. So then they go, oh, wait a minute. Somebody push play. They're sending information back into the stream where your activity pub is looking for. Did they get it or not? Your activity pub is publishing thing, but it's also looking for updates from the apps of, like, did this chapters? This, you know, etcetera, etcetera.

Dave Jackson [00:25:07]:

So am I am I close?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:25:08]:

Yeah. Pretty much. The well, think about the stream metaphor or the highway. The highway doesn't reach out and pull cars onto it. Cars are put on the highway. Stuff is put in the stream. And that's the way it works with activity stream too. So my podcast's activity stream doesn't have to go looking for anything and going to check, did someone press play? Did someone send a comment? Instead, it just receives all of this stuff.

Dave Jackson [00:25:37]:

Okay.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:25:38]:

And something I would encourage you in our audience to watch out for is to distinguish when you hear people talking about activity pub and activity stream, to distinguish when they're talking about audience ActivityPub and Activity Streams versus podcast Activity Streams. And this is something that often comes up. I know that Sam Sethi is a big proponent of activity streams and Activity Pub, and he's done a lot on Trufans. And think of Truefans and x Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and all of these places, pretend they're all ActivityStream and ActivityPub. You look at on Facebook. When someone likes something, sometimes you see that, that it says so and so liked this thing Or you look at an app like Goodpods. And when someone else who is your friend already listens to an episode or rates it, then you see that as, oh, they rated this. Same thing on true fans.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:26:38]:

If someone sends a boostagram to something that can be displayed, that is all the listener activity stream, but not the podcaster activity stream. So there is the listener activity stream is the social network aspect of this. And it doesn't mean that these apps are going to start reporting everything that you listen to or how much you listen to and sharing that out with the world. It doesn't mean that. That could be done if you wanted to, like some podcast apps focus around that kind of thing. Find out what your friends are listening to, and you can share what you listen to with your friends. That's all possible to do with ActivityStream and ActivityPub. But I think our first focus really needs to be on the podcast activity stream because that's where the home would be for stuff like comments, ratings, and reviews, and other things that could go into the podcast activity stream.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:27:34]:

None of this user or listener activity stream and sharing out those things or sharing those verbs as some people might say. But I think we should really focus on the podcast activity stream first.

Dave Jackson [00:27:47]:

Yeah. Because I don't wanna share that I've binged all the seasons of how to kill your wife. That would be bad. Right. It's like, no. Wait. Wait. Dave seems to be very interested in that.

Dave Jackson [00:27:57]:

How to rob a bank and not get caught? Yeah. Let's not share that, shall we?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:28:00]:

Yeah. And some people, you look at some of the controversial podcasts out there, which doesn't mean it's only one political side, both political sides. If they're touching something that people disagree with, that's therefore a controversy. You look at, you know, someone might not want other people to know they listen to and support, financially support a particular podcast. And so I think that any kind of activity from the audience should be assumed to be private unless it's otherwise clearly indicated that it would not be. Like, I suggest that things like emails to a podcaster should be under the assumption of privacy unless the podcaster is saying to send us a message to share with the podcast, send it to this address. So there, the assumption is this is going to be public unless you tell us otherwise. But then you could look at other stuff like what I JSON to.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:28:58]:

I believe that should be private. The assumption should be that it's private unless I choose otherwise.

Dave Jackson [00:29:07]:

Yeah. I like that idea. So now that I have a slight grasp on what's going on here so I get the technology now a little bit. We're I I got my head around it now. Where is this going? Is this something is there a lot of arguments over this? I mean, obviously, you get a bunch of developers in there. They're all gonna have different ideas of what they can and and should and maybe shouldn't use it for. Is this something that looks like and I'm I realize I'm asking you to kind of steer into a crystal ball, but we kinda do that here on the future of podcasting. But does this look like something that will be implemented going forward?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:29:40]:

I think so. Because some apps have already built in some support for Activity pub, but they've done it the Mastodon way, which I think is not the way to do it. But it could be pretty easy for them to flip things over in a slightly different way. And also, there's this book coming out later this year, 2024, about Activity Pub and a lot of people are talking about it and that will help developers better understand it. And I know Dave Jones in Podcasting 2.0 has said things like, it's actually not that complicated. And when people say that, I mean, I feel like either that's true and it truly isn't that complicated or it's just not that complicated to you because you have all of this understanding. The the curse of you. Dave Jones.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:30:29]:

Yeah. So we'll see. But the nice thing is, in my case, and I don't know how many other people struggled in the same way, my big hang up was I kept thinking activity pub is Mastodon and Mastodon is activity pub. And therefore, we can only do what Mastodon can do with maybe a little bit of extensibility. That's not the case. And now that out of the way like, that whole thing, we did an episode, about a year ago where I came on and I was talking about my new proposal for cross app comments and the way that it could be done. That whole thing that I described is basically ActivityStream but in a different format. That's the exciting thing is that it's a framework that can be fairly easy to support.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:31:16]:

And, with so many other apps building in support already for activity pub kind of stuff. Like, even WordPress is building support for activity pub stuff. The potential there is great because one of the things I have really wanted as we talk about cross app comments, I've longed to see the day where not only what you publish in 1 podcast app can also be commented, responded to and read in another podcast app, but it can all go to the podcaster's own website too. Because I love to have the comments there on the web page, but when people comment in these different places, it just can't be pulled in. Especially certain API limitations prevent some of that stuff being pulled in systematically. But if we do this cross app comments thing with activity pub activity stream, that could be pulled into the website because that kind of thing has already been built. See, there's so much interest around activity pub right now that I think it's kind of pushing everyone to look into support for this. Kind of like AI, where AI is the new thing.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:32:24]:

It's the new electrolytes. And I'm not saying that everything's now going to be it's got activity pub, but a lot of developers are starting to see the potential for it. And I think also starting to maybe be like me and understand what's actually happening and and detach Mastodon from activity pub. And then realize this is simply a protocol for how to structure data, how to stream that, how to track it, and how to communicate with other systems.

Dave Jackson [00:32:57]:

Alright. Well, let's put a a pin in the activity pub talk. Let's talk about the praise point. I have one. Do you have one? I do. Let's see if it's the same one. See if great minds think alike. And it is so cool when you see it.

Dave Jackson [00:33:12]:

Captivate has now updated their web player to use the chapters. And so what's cool is you can see the chapters. So where you normally have, like, a little timeline, now your timeline has these little dashes in it so you can see where the chapters start and stop. And I was like, oh, that's cool. Well, if you've added links and pictures, it updates on the player. So you're just sitting there. They have this really cool transition from one chapters the next. So all of a sudden, you'll see your your images swap on your website.

Dave Jackson [00:33:45]:

And then the the link is right there on the player. And I was like, I realize probably if you're lucky, 5% of your audience, I guess it depends on who your audience is too, will actually listen on the website. But I found myself, as I, was looking at it, sitting there longer because I wanted to see if it was something else's who is the is the image gonna change again? Which, in theory, if that works for everybody now that's me right now going, oh, look. It's oh, you know, that it might be like an audiogram where 6 months from now, I'll be like, yeah. Whatever. The image changes. But right now, it had me sitting on the website watching, which could then boost your SEO because your time on-site will go up. That was my positive praise.

Dave Jackson [00:34:29]:

What was yours?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:34:31]:

Yeah. I'm still in this mode of now I'm cycling through all of these different podcasting 2.0 apps, just catching them in a cycle to see what they come out with, what's new, trying each of them to discover new things. And I noticed something also along the lines of chapters that is a nice touch with some of these JSON. And that is so far that I've seen are these 3 apps Podverse, Podcast Guru and Trufans that do this where when you look at the list of chapters, you see the image for each chapter if it has a chapter image for it. And when you consider a podcast like No Agenda Show that has an image for every chapter and a whole lot of chapters, That's really neat to be able to see that in just a list view of those. So that's a cool thing. I hadn't noticed because some of the other apps don't do that. So I never really thought of it.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:35:23]:

But then when I saw it, I thought, oh, that's nice.

Dave Jackson [00:35:27]:

Another one that just came out today, Cast O Matic now. They had a pretty decent update. And one of the things I saw is they now, what's the wallet switching technology? But that is now supported. So if you're listening to boost a gram ball with Adam and he's playing a song, those satoshis will actually go to the musician, which is pretty cool. I saw that. And I also saw where Fountain I haven't fired it up yet, but Fountain apparently adjusted their user interface. And they kind of described it as it was a pretty major change, so I'll have to go and look. Because I know the cool thing about Fountain is it does a lot.

Dave Jackson [00:36:05]:

But anytime you have any app like that, the more you do, how do you do this without having this really cluttered interface? So I'll have to to go back and, check it out.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:36:15]:

Now this podcast praise corner thing was something I was thinking of recently, and that's why we're introducing it with this episode because I realized that sometimes we can be a bit hard on some of the others. I know, certainly, I come with certain criticisms of things. So I thought it would be nice to just end on a positive note and say, here's something nice being done and just to praise the people who are doing something cool, something neat that maybe we hadn't thought of or hadn't noticed, or they just do it in a nice way to end on a positive note.

Dave Jackson [00:36:47]:

Well, that'll do it. That'll put a a period in the positive praise.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:36:51]:

Precisely.

Dave Jackson [00:36:52]:

Thanks so much for listening to the future of podcasting. We'll be back again real soon with another episode.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:36:58]:

Keep boosting and keep podcasting.