338 - Inside Podnews and Podcasting 2.0 with James Cridland

0:04 Good morning Podcasting Morning Chat. Today is Tuesday, July 15th, 2025, and today Pod News founder James Cridlin stops by to share how Podcasting 2 Point O will transform the podcast industry. Plus, he'll share tips to simplify your podcasting process. So if you're listening live on Clubhouse, hit the share button, bottom left hand side of the screen and share it. However, Clubhouse lets you. And if you're listening via podcast, please share this episode with the fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds and we'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here.

1:20 Good morning again podcasting Morning Chat. Thank you for being here. I am your host Mark Ronick and on stage with me we have my Co hosts, producer Ashley Feller, Dr. Faye, Sid Meadows and Nick Nalback. And of course, if you listened to the intro, we also have James Cridlin here on stage with us. And we're going to be finding a lot more about finding out a lot more about James and pod news. And like I said, also podcasting 2 point O because it's kind of been a mystery to some of us, Admittedly, as long as I've been in this game, it's 1 area I haven't explored enough of and I think it's about time I do. And I figure I'll take you along on the journey with me. So actually what's funny is we wanted to get in touch with James to talk about his workflow, his processes, his tools.

2:14 We know that James likes to use a lot of his own home built tools as well. So we want to hear a little bit more. Get inside the head of James Cridlin. So with that, let me first say hello to you James. Good morning officially. I know you were in here chit chatting before we started. I was, yes, 'cause I followed the link and managed to open the room early, so that was fair rob me, wasn't it? Yes, good thing you know a little bit about Clubhouse. Yeah, scary. Well, let's just dive right in. I think that's the best place to start. And I'm going to remind everybody to please hit that share button and invite others into the room here live, If not, invite them to come listen to the podcast a couple hours later. So James, most people in the podcasting space know you as the editor, the creator of Pod News.

3:05 But I'm curious, what drove drove you to launch Pod News in the 1st place? And how is that vision changed or maybe grown over time because you started at what, five years ago? Yeah, I, I started it seven or eight years ago. Eight years, in fact. Yes, Gosh, I was actually, I was at a, so I've worked in radio for 35 years. So, you know, definitely working around the audio area. And actually I launched the first daily podcast from a radio station back in March of 2005. SA long, long, long time ago. I was at a radio conference actually in LA, and I was talking to a friend of mine at the bar and he was saying, where do you get your news about podcasting? I hear the podcasting is a big thing now. And, and I said, well, you know, I don't, I don't know whether there is anywhere is there?

3:53 And we couldn't really think of anywhere that was a daily update on what was going on in the podcast industry. And so I thought, yeah, maybe there's an opportunity there. So. So it took about a month or so, and then I sort of started it and I've written it every single weekday since, which is quite nice. And how have things changed since eight years ago now? How, Especially with pod news itself, What's maybe something that's been a big change for pod news? There's been plenty of change, of course, in the industry, but the real change from the POD news point of view is that for the first nine months or so, I was really always trying to find enough stories. I kind of needed four stories a day, and I was desperately trying to find enough stories to cover. All the way back then, there really wasn't an awful lot of news coming out of the industry.

4:48 And then all of a sudden, there was this sort of this just explosion of activity in the industry, which turned it from being a couple of stories a day into the type of thing that you get to see now. And quite a lot of that was around 2019 and of course, 2020, the pandemic. But yeah, you know, just an incredible change in comparison to what it was right back when I started. So, James, you're one of the few people who really have this global pulse on podcasting. And what is it about this space that grabbed your attention so strongly enough to to build your career around covering it? I've always been in the audio space. I used to be a radio presenter a long, long, long time ago, back when they let anybody on, seemingly. So I know the power of radio.

5:40 I know the intimacy of radio and of audio more generally, and from that point of view, really it was a natural change to move from live radio, which is still very popular, still lots of people listen to it, but realizing that really the future of radio and audio is more and more so on demand. I know that we're speaking on a live service now, but more and more people are consuming their content on demand, which is quite a thing. So, you know, so I saw that and I thought, well, actually that that is definitely, you know, it's where, it's where the future is going in terms of the audio space. So it's probably something that I should be having a look at. And I think particularly as you, as you can tell from my from my fancy British accent, I'm not from the US, although I've worked for companies in Canada and the US. I'm a Brit, but I live down here in Australia, so I've got a very, you know, global view of the industry and actually, you know, there are fascinating things happening in different parts of the world that I wanted to help share as well. That makes sense.

6:53 And yeah, I'm with you there as far as on demand. And you know, we were live for a few years before we, I recognized that we wanted to extend our reach live was great and we were still getting new listeners live here on Clubhouse. And we're we do it live on YouTube as well. So we, we people find us. But that on demand aspect is really important. We're finding that, you know, that we've we've built a whole new audience, a whole other community just from the on demand listening. So I get that completely. And now you've been, I know for a while actually, you've been closely tracking and covering what's called podcast podcasting 2 point O, which sounds exciting and admittedly a little mysterious for me. And I know some of our community as well. So for those of us who haven't caught up yet, can you give us a quick overview of what podcasting 2 Point O actually is and why you see it as such a positive step forward for podcasting?

7:56 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, taking a little step back and a look at the history of podcasting, you know, clearly we got to a position in 1993 with the birth of podcasting and podcasting getting its name from Danny J Gregoire, who ended up calling us podcasters and talking about podcasting and everything else, which was a fantastic thing. Then, of course, Apple jumped in with both feet in 2005. Really. Because they wanted more content on their iPods at the time, Adam Curry, the Co inventor of podcasting, helped Apple with a full list of all of the podcasts that you could get hold of at the time.

8:39 And so that was very exciting. Lots of change because Apple wanted images. There weren't images in podcasts before then, you know, your little thumbnail image. So an Apple wanted, you know, genres and things like that as well. So lots of change in 2005 and then nothing happened and, and here we are in 2020, which is when the idea of podcasting 2 point O and the podcast index started. In 2020, there were a band of people, including Adam, thinking there's really been no change in the fundamental features that podcasting apps offer.

9:23 There's been no change in what podcasting can technically do, but there's been tremendous change in terms of how media is consumed and, you know, and just life in general. But the, there was absolutely no change in terms of the standard RSS feed, the way the podcasting works, absolutely no additional features in there. Adam Curry and a developer that he works with called Dave Jones came up with the idea, rather cheekily called it Podcasting 2 Point O, but came up with a way of adding additional features into podcasting, which is what Podcasting 2 Point O is. So there's a bunch of new features, a bunch of new ideas in there.

10:09 Some of the work, some of them are you're probably using right now. Some of them are interesting ideas that will never go anywhere, but that's the wonder of trying new things. But Podcasting 2 Point O is essentially there to make podcasting better, and it makes podcasting better whether you're a listener to podcasts, whether you're a podcaster, or whether you're a developer. And that's what Podcasting 2 Point O is there for. Thank you. And how is podcasting 2 point O accessed? As podcasters, what How do we interact with it? How do we use it? So what podcasting 2 point O is, is it is it's essentially a bunch of new features. So you are probably using it right now. If you're using the Apple Podcasts app, as lots of people do, you will notice that there are transcripts in the Apple Podcast app.

10:58 And those transcripts can get in there two ways. Either you can leave it up to Apple, which is always a bad idea because who knows what Apple is transcribing, or you can do a transcript of your podcast yourself through your through your podcast hosting company. It might be buzz route, it might be rss.com. It might be about a whole bunch of these things and upload the transcripts along with your with your audio. And when you do that, what's actually going on behind the scenes is a little RSS, a little additional tag in the RSS feed contains a link to your transcripts.

11:41 Apple sees that at the other end and goes, oh, this person has done a transcript. We don't need to bother about doing our own. We'll just take his so. And that is the podcast transcripts tag, which is a new tag and you feature in podcasting 2 point O. So it's tools like that. Another one, for example, which podcasters should really like, and this is in 75,000 podcasts right now, is something called the funding tag. What the funding tag is again, it's a really simple additional piece of information in your RSS feed that you end up setting in, you know, Buzz Sprouts or blueberry or whoever you're using Captivate, whoever you're using as a as a podcast hosting company. But it links to maybe your Patreon page, maybe it links to buy me a coffee.

12:33 Maybe it links to your Stripe page. It links to a page where your listeners can fund your website, fund your podcast. It's called a podcast funding tag. So you can ask people for money as many podcasters do, but actually in the podcast app, if you're using something like Pocket Casts or Podcast Addict or many other podcast apps out there, there is a little button that looks a bit like a dollar coin and you click it and you're taken to that page. And that again might be your Patreon, it might be your, you'll buy me a coffee, it might be your, your, your PayPal. Really simple, straightforward way for a listener to turn into somebody that is funding your creativity. So those are two features that podcasting 2.0 enables and there are ton more of them, but you can see that they're additional, additional features that we never had a couple of years ago. But now we've got and are being used more and more and are being supported by podcast hosts, supported by podcast apps, and super useful.

13:42 Thank you. And is there anything like, is there anything else that we as the podcast hosts should be thinking about, should be doing as far as podcasting 2 point O? Or do we just kind of ride this wave with our podcasting host platform, You know, with Buzz Sprouts adding the correct features that are in line with podcasting 2 point O? Do we just sit back and like I said, ride that wave? Or are there some things we should be doing on our end to make it work more for us and our audience? Probably the first thing is to go to. There's a website which is all about podcasting 2 point O and it's at Podcasting 2 point org and that's where the website is, Podcasting 2 point org, Very clever.

14:28 And there you will find a list of all of the things that podcasting 2 point O does. There are some things that loads of people already support like the funding tag, like the transcript tag, and there are a few other, you know, really obvious ones. There are many ideas in there that not very many people are supporting. And so if you see one of those ideas guests, for example, being able to list guests properly so that you can see them in your podcast app, or maybe there's something else in there around the location tag, which I'm very excited about because it's basically my idea. But all of those ideas, if you see one that you really wish that your podcast host supported, then please ask your podcast host say that, you know, Oh, I've seen location tag. It seems like a really good idea. When are you guys going to to support it? That will be super useful.

15:23 And ask the same question again to your podcast app. It takes time to put some of these things in, but it's super worthwhile. Thank you, James. So, OK, now I think I've got a good sense of what it is and how to use it. Is there anything coming along the lines of more detailed, more improved analytics? Because we talk about that a lot here, that analytics kind of suck for podcasters unless you're on YouTube, which does give you a bigger variety. But as I know you are like me, we believe in audio first podcasting. Not to say that podcasting can't be video, but we're we're audio first. What's that?

16:07 Don't open that one. Yeah, exactly. That's a whole other conversation, but yeah. So is there anything that you know of that's in the works to improve our analytics? There actually is there. There's a number of different ideas going, going around, both in terms of podcasting 2.0, including in terms of in terms of ideas, but also other ideas that are kind of being done by the same people that podcasting 2 point O is by the same people in that group, but doesn't actually need any new features. But yeah, I mean, analytics is always going to be a really difficult thing because getting analytics while keeping them private is a massively important thing for all of us.

16:48 And you might remember that there was an idea from NPR about four or five years ago, and it was called RAD. And the idea was that your podcast app would tell your podcast host when somebody pressed the play button. So when somebody paused or skipped. So you can actually see whether or not the ad was listened to and all of that kind of thing. Anyway, it turned out that with that technology, you could also pretty well stalk somebody from, from when they left their house to we can, we can see that they're in a car now and all this kind of stuff. And and so that bit doesn't sound so good.

17:28 Having more, more granular information sounds fantastic, but that sort of thing doesn't sound so good. So it really comes down to what kind of stats we want. And there's a good, there's a good piece of work which a developer called John Spurlock has been working on, which I think he calls it the Open Podcast Consumption tool. But basically it's seeing whether or not you can get information, just the information that actually we would find really useful, which is how many people are listening to my podcast right now and also how many people have subscribed. Those are two numbers that actually we don't know. We've got podcast hosting companies who will tell you vague numbers, which are based on IP addresses and devices, which is not the same as people. And we also have some vague numbers around downloads, which of course you don't have to press the play button if you've downloaded a podcast.

18:26 So we don't actually know how many people are listening. So wouldn't it be great it just if we got a really good rock solid number for how many listeners we have? And that is possible, but it needs an awful lot of work on the podcast apps side. And why should a podcast app sit there and do all of this hard work when, well, they don't earn any money out of it? There's no benefit to them. So it's a bit of a sticky one. But I do hope that I do hope that it'll be fixed because better statistics is going to be really helpful, particularly in that conversation around YouTube and Spotify video, which does have very good stats in terms of how many people are using those particular apps.

19:10 It'd be great to see that big news on more shows as well. James, you kind of said the magic word money for my next question, podcasting 2 point O and monetization, what's happening in that area? Well, so there's two things. There's firstly the funding tag which I was talking about that that little button that looks like a a dollar sign on Pocket Casts, for example, if you were to click there on the pocket. Casts, I have seen that, yeah. Yeah. So if you click that on the the Pod News Daily Show, which is the show that I recorded about 20 minutes or so ago, then you will see that takes you just simply through to a Stripe form that you can pay me some money through.

19:56 That is one way of doing it. There is another way that podcasting 2 Point O has also been looking at monetization. It uses Bitcoin. But it actually works really rather well. So the idea is that as you listen, for every minute that you listen, you send a tiny amount of money to the podcast, to the podcaster that you're listening to. And it's cleverer than that in that if you have a show which maybe has two hosts and an engineer, you can actually split it so that the money goes maybe 60% of the money goes to the presenters and 40% goes to the engineer, for example. You can do some very, very clever things with that. The difficulty, of course, is as soon as you say Bitcoin, people go Bitcoin.

20:48 Terrifying, that's what I just. Did, yeah. And and and and. Oh my goodness, how complicated is that going to be? And blah, blah, blah. You can't do that sort of thing with a credit card because every time you use a credit card, the 1st $0.35 or something like that is basically paid as a charge. So you can imagine if you were, if you were sharing, I don't know if you're sharing a cent every minute, then of course you couldn't do that on a credit card. But you can do that in other payment tools. There are actually quite a lot of shows which are accepting streaming payments as they're called. The streaming payments does actually work really, really well.

21:29 But as I say it it, it sounds hugely complicated and hugely scary. A really good podcast app to play around with that if you want to, is a podcast app called Fountain, which will actually give you a little bit of a little bit of money to get going if you start using that. The beauty of that is that not only can you pay a podcaster as you're listening to their show, you can also press the boost button and send them a message. So you can press a boost button. I don't know, you might, you might want to share with them $0.50 or a dollar or the biggest boost that I've received is $125.00, which is not to be sniffed at alongside a message.

22:12 Of course, getting messages in, I mean, most people who produce a podcast are producing them alone and don't see that much feedback. Well, that's a wonderful feedback loop to automatically get money alongside messages. That's super good. But again, it comes down to Bitcoin and understanding what Bitcoin is and understanding all of that kind of stuff. So it's not for everybody, but certainly making it easier that way is if. It wants to take this seriously. They need to call their money something other than something that sounds like a snack food that you get out of the bag. Satoshi's. What is this, Satoshi? Yeah, that's right.

22:53 Sounds like a chip, you know. A satoshi is a tiny amount of Bitcoin, much like a cent is a tiny amount of a dollar. But yes, completely agree. If you were to use and there is a there's another podcast. It's a website at the moment. It'll be an app soon called true fans, which I think you find at true fans dot FM and again that again uses streaming, streaming payments. And what Sam has done, the owner of True Fans, is he's done a very good job of making it a little bit more simple to understand how the streaming payment works. And basically, for all intents and purposes, it'll look to you like it's a normal American U.S.

23:37 dollar. It just happens to use the Bitcoin under the under the hood. But but yeah, you know, so there's so there's a ton of this sort of stuff going and we all, we would all love there to be other monetization options other than just advertising, because advertising isn't for everybody. And clearly, you know, podcasting 2 point O can absolutely help with that, both with the funding tag and with and with this this streaming payments as well. Right. You touched a little bit on engagement when you said you can send a little message with it. But that's, that's a big thing for me. Engagement. I yeah, I don't know why hosts don't like just the distribution platforms don't have it set up to where anyone can can communicate with the podcaster. You know what I mean?

24:31 Everyone should be able to click on something in their podcast app that brings them to a place where they can can message the podcaster. So what's going on with that when it comes to podcasting 2 point O? That has been a long, longly a long debated thing in the podcasting 2 point O groups and things trying to get, we call them cross app comments because it's always better if you can actually see what other people are saying as well. So actually having comments just like you would on a YouTube video. Or maybe you you you've used the good pods app, which has comments in it or various other things. So great ways to get messages back to the podcast hosts, but also, you know, really good to actually see other people who are enjoying the same shows as you are. Cross app comments is so difficult and complicated to do it well.

25:29 And there have been a number of attempts to try and get it done. The current, the current work is something called the social interact tag, which basically, you know, plums into something like Twitter or Mastodon or various or, or various other things. It's really not quite there yet, but I agree. I mean, that would be a super useful thing to be able to actually turn every podcast into, you know, essentially a chat room. That would be a super useful thing. Very awesome. OK, here's what I'd love to do I. Should say, well, go ahead of the other one of the other things, one of the other features that I have forgotten to mention is actually a fantastic feature for finding new shows and that's podcast recommendations. So I obviously I do a couple of different shows. I would like to make sure that if you listen to the pod to the pod news daily, that you also listen to the pod news weekly review and the other way round.

26:30 But I also have a number of shows that I think you would like if you're listening to one of mine. And So what another of the podcasting 2.0 features. It's got a silly name. It's called Pod Roll, bit like a web ring, I guess, if you're, if you're as old as I am. So you can actually with podcast hosts like Cos Sprout, which supports this, I think rss.com does as well. And there are plenty of other podcast hosts which do you can actually put in your in your podcast feed. Here are links to other shows that I think you would really like. And those are beginning to appear in podcast apps as well. So again, if you're using Pocket Casts, the latest version of that has a thing called you might like in there and you might like both shows, individual podcasts that are recommended by the creator.

27:24 So podcasts that I have put in there, but also the automatic ones that might appear for every single show as well. So that's a really nice way of being able to share other shows that I think you will like and hopefully help people find a bunch of additional shows that they haven't actually found yet. Before we move into asking you a little bit about your own processes to create those multiple podcasts that you put out there, let's wrap on this. What's what's exciting you the most about the future of podcasting? If podcasting 2 point O, which I was going to say if it truly takes off, which it really it's already taken off.

28:08 So where do you see podcasting headed in the next few years with this new framework in place? I think one of the things around podcasting 2.0 is that it does secure a lot of the future of open podcasting. Open RSS is a really important thing. That's why podcasting is so successful as it is right now in comparison to, you know, closed platforms like Spotify and YouTube. Those are those are lovely. But we know in podcasting that actually the reason that podcasting is such a success is that it's open and that anyone can be a podcaster, regardless of how big or small they are.

28:48 Anybody can be on the same platform as Joe Rogan or indeed someone better. So from that point of view, that's a really important thing. And that I think is why I'm very excited about podcasting 2 Point O and why I've spent the time to, you know, to do a little bit of work on some of the features in it, because I can see there being a real benefit for keeping open podcasting alive. So I guess you know, that that's sort of one, one side of it. I'm fascinated by helping people find podcasts that they otherwise wouldn't have found. So that recommendation thing that I was talking about is really exciting, I think for where the future of podcasting is going. The location tag is another thing which I'm really excited about.

29:38 Imagine, and this isn't a podcast app, I'm talking about Imagine. If you're going to a website, maybe you're planning a holiday in Paris in France and you go to a website and that website, you can ask it for every podcast episode about something to see as a tourist in Paris. And that and that website comes back to you with a list of great podcast episodes talking about the, you know, the Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or all of the other things that are in Paris, you know, so. I prefer South of France.

30:20 Can we go to the South of France and see? So. So what we've got with So what we've got with being able to actually say what a particular episode is about, where a particular episode is about, that actually enables us to uncover shows have been made about those particular places in in ways that we've just simply not thought about in terms of current podcast apps. So I'm I'm super excited about, you know, if you're doing if you're doing shows, it it, it's always struck me as being really weird that you have to continue doing brand new shows otherwise your your episodes kind of fall off everybody's apps.

31:09 Wouldn't it be brilliant to help people find old shows that you have done, shows that are still, I mean, a show on the I was going to say on the Notre Dame, probably that doesn't particularly change very much. Obviously that's a a really good example of where it does. But a show on the Eiffel Tower wouldn't wouldn't change if you were to make that four years ago and talk about the history of the place. You know that that is still just as relevant now as it as it was when it was first it. It was first May. So I think, you know, just being able to help new listeners find new shows that they were otherwise unaware of is that is, I think, a really exciting thing. And just to step back a little bit wider, that's why I think we should stop talking about how many people are listening to podcasts and instead start talking about how long they're listening because our next job isn't to get more people listening to podcasts. Already over half of America listens to a podcast every single month.

32:12 My job now is to get people listening twice as long as they as they are right now. And if they listen twice as long, that should mean that there's twice as much money into the industry. And that's a good thing. So anything that can help people find new shows, increase the amount of time that they spend with a podcast is is a fantastic thing, I think. Agreed, and I want to check in with Sid. Sid, I think I saw you flash an emoji to ask a question, so is that true or should I move on? James, thanks for being here. It's a fascinating conversation so far as I've been listening to you describe podcasting 2 point O and one of the things that this kind of pops in my brain was like AI listen on Apple Podcasts.

32:59 I know there's dozens of options of where you could list, but is there any conversations in this about having a universal directory of creators? So when you're an apple and I click on the creator's name or image, it takes me to another page that has that person's name to the top, has bunch of recommended shows and it shows that person's episode. But how cool would it be to be able to click on, you know, the the creator's image It go to almost like a landing page, if you will, about that creator, not the show that they are made. People do multiple shows, but also any places they've been guest on that favorites list that you mentioned, like shows that I would recommend. Where would you find them?

33:42 And then you mentioned earlier like a donation button there. So kind of like a little web page about the creator built into the app. I I would completely agree. There is a feature which is called guest. Is it called guest or is it called out? It's called person. It's called person. And what that feature enables me to do is it enables me to list every person that is involved in in a particular episode. So a guest, a host, maybe somebody working behind the scenes, maybe somebody who's worked on the artwork for that particular episode, whatever it whatever it might be. And so that feature enables all of that.

34:22 That feature enables you to go, OK, I'm really enjoying Adam Curry's No Agenda, but what other shows does Adam Curry do? Where's he been a guest? How do I get in touch with him? How do I learn learn more about him and bringing all of that together? Now, it's a really good example actually, if you give of Apple Podcasts, because Apple Podcasts kind of has that, but it has that only for the biggest shows. So the likes of you and of you and me can't get in there. And it's all Apple Podcasts, you know, their own, their own data, their own stuff that they do. So it means that it only appears in the Apple Podcasts app and nowhere else.

35:06 Wouldn't it be great if that was open, if that was available everywhere? And so. Yeah, exactly. You know that that's the sort of thing that the that the podcast person tag enables you to do. Now that again is supported by a tonne of different podcast hosting companies and it's being a little bit slower to appear in some of the podcast apps, although it does appear in some of those. And actually if you search for a podcast in the in the pod news website, we use the person tag to actually show who the hosts are and that sort of thing. I think what is lovely about all of this is that we've all had ideas to make podcasting better and up until Podcasting 2.0 was started, there was no way of actually getting any of those ideas starting to be talked about, starting to be in podcast apps and everything else. Now that there is this, and it's very technical, but it's a new namespace in RSS.

36:12 It's a thing that enables you to add additional features without breaking anything. That's fantastic because it does mean that we can go, you know what, this is a great idea. You know Sid's, Sid's had this great idea about people. How can we link to people within the app? And then you you'll find a ton of people think about it and work out a way of doing it. So yeah, it's one of the reasons why I'm so I'm so excited by it. Thank you, James. Thank you, Sid for that question and a good chance here to remind anybody listening live right now. If you have a question for James, by all means come on up and ask or put it in the chat if you prefer. But either way, feel free to ask your questions as well.

36:53 This is an interview for you after all, and we actually asked James here, not originally anyway, to talk about podcasting. 2 point O That was just a bonus for us because we were intrigued. TR saw an article that you wrote at Pod News about the different tools that you're using, the process that you go through to create your podcast episodes and your list, your tools list. They're they're, I, I saw that you even code some of your own tools. You create the tools for yourself as opposed to maybe using third party tools. So why go through the trouble of building your own systems rather than just using that existing software or services that are out there?

37:40 That is a great question that you ask. I wish I had a a better answer other than my usual one, which is, well, you know, because I'm ticky enough and I might as well end up writing that. But yeah, I mean, right at the beginning of when I started the POD news newsletter, I thought, I need this thing to be as easy as possible for me to do. All about the workflow, all about making sure that I could do a full day's work for someone and then come home in the evening and I could get a newsletter out within an hour. Yeah. And that included making the podcast version and a bunch of other things in there as well.

38:21 And so I thought, right, anything that I can simplify, anything that I can put some code round will be a good idea here. And so that's really why quite a lot of the tools that I use are mine and I've written them, uh, because I'm, I'm lucky enough to know how to code, but also lucky enough to know how I can make life easier for myself in the way that I work so that I have more time for the creativity and less time doing things that just aren't creative and need doing. You know, layouts of emails and stuff. I don't worry about that because I've got code that sits there and does all of the layout for me, transcripts and things automatic uploading the audio to the website all automatic because I've written all of these tools that end up doing that and it does come down to the workflow.

39:11 Getting that workflow right, making sure that I can actually do what is actually quite a difficult job every single you know every single day, even when I'm on holiday. So I've written a bunch of things I've linked to in the chat. I've linked to a bunch of the tools that I ended up writing, but. Dr. Before you take one, I just want to ask James so I, I can appreciate doing a podcast five days a week for as long as you have. I certainly respect that. I I know what it's like to have to do a daily podcast. And have you ever missed a day there? Have been a few days where I have been a few days where I've used AI as my voice instead of me.

39:53 And that was mostly because the last time I did it, I was in an aeroplane. And Australia it turns out is a long way away from everywhere else. And and I was in an aeroplane and I thought I can't possibly sit in economy class and get my microphone out and start recording a microphone. I do have Internet access. Yes, I do have Internet access. So therefore I will just I will just use the Wonder Craft tool which I have access to. Clone my own voice and then and then that can do this show. So I've done I've done that a few times. I haven't missed a day, I don't think since 2018.

40:35 That's pretty amazing. So and the the missing a day is a little bit more complicated because obviously we all have different days off. So I guess you guys had Independence Day, which was a Brit I don't really talk about, but you had you had Independence Day last week. And of course we didn't here in Australia, I don't get holidays off. And so that sort of adds a little bit of, of additional, you know, hard work. And also I realized very early on when I wrote the, the tool for the classified ads on, on the website, I didn't build holidays into that. So I suddenly thought, Oh no, people have actually bought Christmas Day.

41:16 I still have to publish on Christmas Day. That's no good. So. Yeah, You know what actually caught my eye when reading that article was I read that you self host and that you actually don't rely on Buzz Sprout or Lipson or Captivate or any of those other distribution platforms that we all rely on. So talk to me about that. Where What made you want to self host? Did you just look out there and say all of these are crap, I'm going to do my own? Or did you say I can do a better job? Or what is the advantage of self hosting?

41:57 Well, one of the advantages is, you know, I was geeky enough to know how to do it and I thought, well, I might as well. I might as well do that. And that has actually led to a bunch of stories about because I was able to give myself unlimited e-mail addresses and so therefore be able to track where people were getting my e-mail addresses from and who was scraping RSS feeds and all of that kind of information. So you know, it, it gives me stories apart from anything else. But the other sort of side of it is firstly that again, it comes down to workflow and stuff. I use Buzz Sprouts for the Pod News Weekly review for the long podcasts that we do every single week, partially because they sponsor it. Thank you Buzz Sprouts.

42:44 But I wouldn't want to use them for the Pod News Daily for two reasons. Firstly, because I don't want to sit in front of a screen uploading an audio file manually through a web browser because that's not fun. Secondly, I also want to be able to be rude about the podcast host that I am with and write a honest story about them. So, you know, they have. Yeah. So there have been times, you know, so it's a journalistic thing. There have been times when I have, you know, covered some quite negative stories about Lib Syn, about I Heart and Spreaker and, and about and about a number of these other podcast hosts.

43:31 And you can't sit there and think, oh, I hope they don't take me off their website at the same time. You know what I mean? So you know, so that was the other real reason why I ended up, I ended up doing that. But that then allows me to learn about the tech side of it anyway, and of course allows me to play around with some of the new podcasting 2.0 features. It allows me to write, you know, stories about how difficult it is to host your own podcast or, you know, a bunch of this, a bunch of this stuff that I otherwise couldn't have done if I wasn't actually able to look into the, you know, into the into the tech.

44:19 So, yeah. So I thought, I thought that was an important, that was an important thing. Well, James, you've segwayed brilliantly into my next question is, is there any trade-offs that you've experienced in terms of like podcast directories, indexing or reach? What do you do for analytics? Yeah, so analytics and there is a free service out there called OP3. It's actually a service that I help pay for OP3 dot dev is the website address and that is a brilliant analytics tool and heartily recommended for everyone. Prior to using that, I I've of course wrote my own because of course I would, but it ended up it ended up being easier. Although I can still see my own analytics, it ended up being easier to use OP3.

45:14 So I think the difficulty there've been a few difficulties. 1 difficulty is something went I think a little bit wrong with Google a couple of months ago. And instead of getting a couple of 1000 downloads to my show, I was getting somewhere in the region of half a million a day, which sounds great, but unfortunately isn't so great if you're paying for the bandwidth because that then get that then makes it a very expensive thing. So I had to, you know, that that was an expensive month or two while I was trying to work out what Google was doing and why Google was behaving the way that it was. And that's still, you know, really a story which is ongoing, I guess.

45:58 So, you know, so that's been a downside. And obviously, you know, occasionally you mess things up and, you know, your podcast host is unlikely to mess these sorts of things up because that's their job. You know, my job is really to write a newsletter. And so occasionally you, you do end up messing things up. And that's a bit of a mistake. But certainly the flexibility it gives me, the opportunities it gives me in terms of trying, trying new things, trying weird and wonderful ways of encoding audio and stuff like that, you know, is, is has been really interesting. So do you recommend, James, that podcasters consider creating their own tools or have their own tools created for them? In other words, how does a podcaster know it's time to do that?

46:45 Or if maybe should they ever do it? Maybe it's not a thing you recommend? What? What are your thoughts? I would definitely not recommend it for hosting your own show because hosting shows gets expensive real quick. Podcast hosting companies have very good bandwidth deals, but that's not something that the rest of us can get hold of. In terms of writing your own tools for other things, absolutely. I would go for that wherever you can see what you can do with some of the AI tools out there. I don't use AI, but AI tools can be very helpful. For example, you know, just going to an AI tool and saying I'm going to interview this guy in a couple of hours, give me some questions that I should be asking him.

47:30 At least that is a starting point for coming up with some ideas of your own to get the AI tool to go out and do a little bit of research first for you to then please double check you know those sorts of tools, whether it's using AI, whether it's coding your own stuff. For example, one of the pieces of code that I have built sits there every single day and checks the IABS website to find out whether or not any new podcast companies have appeared with IAB certification. Deeply dull, but it helps me every single day with just spotting a story that that no one else has. So, you know, again, that's a useful thing. So yeah, but learn, learn how to code is definitely a good thing.

48:13 And if for some reason those that are listening don't feel like coding, don't want to learn coding, and don't want to complicate maybe their workflows. Based on your experiences, what's your best advice for simplifying podcast production, regardless of technical abilities? Well, I think again it comes down to the workflow. The reason why the Pod News newsletter comes out at 7:00 AM Eastern during the summer and 6:00 AM Eastern during the winter is because for me, it comes out at 9:00 in the evening. And that is a sensible time where if I've been working for somebody else during the day, which I occasionally still do, then I can still make sure that the newsletter goes out at the right time because I still have the right amount of time.

49:02 So a lot of avoiding burnout is making sure that you can simplify your workflow as as as much as possible understand. So there's another example. There's a section of the of the newsletter which is called podcast news. And if you look at that section, you'll see there's a beautiful little thumbnail of the podcast. And there, and there's a nice link next to the podcast linking you to linking you to various information about that particular show. Now, if I was doing that manually, having to go and find a podcasts thumbnail and then resize it and then put it in that particular place and then, you know, and then lay out the text next to it, I would go, I would go mad.

49:58 And so I've written a piece of code which just sits there and goes, oh, if this is the podcast news section, then look for where I mention a podcast and then go off and find the thumbnail for that myself and do the layout myself for that rather than leaving that to a, to a human being. We're all creative people and doing non creative things seems a bit of a waste of our time. So, yeah, so that those are the, those are the other sorts of things that I want to try and make as easy, you know, as easy as possible or even things like on on most computers now you can get it so that if you type in a, you know, an exclamation mark and then and then PN and then another exclamation mark, it will go, oh, you've typed in, you've typed in a short code. I will get rid of that and I will put this piece of text in there instead.

50:57 And so if ever any of you have got a story mentioned in pod news newsletter, that's exactly how I reply to you. I reply with exclamation mark, PN exclamation mark, which my e-mail system goes, oh, you want to say this story is in today's newsletter? Here's here's how to get it. Here's how to promote us, here's how to become an advertiser if you want to become an advertiser, blah, blah, blah. And all of that information is just automatically thrown into the e-mail rather than me typing that in every single time. You know, super, super simple things there. But they can really save time and effort. So yeah, there are lots of, lots of easy ways of doing it.

51:41 Sounds like it. And James, I want to take a second to thank you, by the way, for being a partner of the Empowered Podcasting Conference, which was born from this community asking for some kind of get together and somehow it blossomed into a whole conference and pod news, being a partner to help support what we're doing. We are really grateful and appreciate your help. And you've always been so kind to the podcasting morning chat since you kind of discovered what we were doing a couple of months ago. So thank you first and foremost and. No, it's a great pleasure. And also, thank you for being here. Now, we certainly have plugged Pod News a lot today, but if there's anything you want to share with the audience before we let you go, I'd love to love to hear.

52:22 Wow, I think we've done enough about the Pod news newsletter. The only other thing that I would probably mention is if you like chatting to people about all this sort of stuff, then I would recommend the podcast. The podcast index is social media network because they've because they've got one. Podcast index is the same people that do podcasting 2.0 by the way. You can find that at podcast index dot social. That's podcast index dot social. You just have to you have to ask someone. You'll probably be asking Adam Curry himself, please, can I have an account? And that is a really good way of firstly, it'll get you onto the Mastodon social media, you know, network anyway. But it's a really good way of actually of, of just seeing people chatting about all of this stuff, seeing what new ideas there are, you know, out there. And yeah, so and it's entirely free podcast index dot social. Awesome.

53:28 James, thank you so much for all of this information. It's been a plethora of information and yeah. There's been a lot of it. Yes, yeah, and and much needed, as I said at the top of the show because we here haven't really taken enough time to educate ourselves on 2 point O and it's really cool to hear in other podcasters processes and yours is certainly unique or if it's not unique, it's certainly rare the way that you do it. So thank you for sharing everything with us, James. Well, thank you so much for asking and yeah, and it's been great. I am now going to go to bed. Yeah, go to bed. It's 10:00 there your time. And. Thanks. Coincidentally, tomorrow, Wednesday, 7:00 AM Eastern, we are back and we are doing our news and comment edition of the Podcasting morning chat.

54:14 And yes, we get a lot of our information over at Pod News among other sources. But Pod News is definitely one of our go TOS for sure and we appreciate what James does over there. So until tomorrow, make it a great day everybody take care.