Summary
Tomorrow is World Podcast Day. There are over four million podcasts available, but many are no longer active. However, a new plan to modernize podcasting is bringing changes to the industry. Here is what is coming to podcasting.
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Transcript
Tomorrow is World Podcast Day, and you’re listening to one of the over 4 million podcasts available worldwide. However, just like all technology, podcasting is changing. Here are some of the changes that you can expect to see in the next few years.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
In 2020, Adam Curry, one of the founders of podcasting, began a project intended to revolutionize podcasts, which he called Podcasting 2.0. Here are two of its most significant elements.
First, the Podcasting 2.0 project proposed several new tags in RSS feeds. Podcast players check for new episodes by visiting a show’s RSS feed, which specifies critical elements of each podcast, like the title, show art, and description.
Your podcast app reads this feed and displays it in a way that is much easier to read and navigate. Some of the new tags include a tag for transcripts and a tag for funding, which allows podcasters to add ways that listeners can support the show.
A second innovation of Podcasting 2.0 is the idea of a value for value exchange. This allows listeners to directly support podcasters, utilizing the Bitcoin network.
A complete discussion of how this works would require more time than we have here, but listeners can tip creators a small portion of a Bitcoin called a Satoshi for episodes they appreciate. Listeners can also configure their app to provide a set number of Satoshis for each minute of a podcast they stream.