Podcasting is getting huge
vox.com
vox.com
On bikes, at least where I live, using headphones is illegal. I'd love to listen to music or podcasts on my bike but I just can't do it with only one ear covered. It's probably not advisable anyways.
Interestingly, it is legal to ride a bike or even drive a car while deaf. It would be illegal for a deaf person to cover both ears while driving or biking if I'm reading the statutes correctly.
I work in DC, so DC and / or Federal law would also be relevant. I believe the distracted driving statutes in DC would also apply to bikes, so headphones would fall under that I believe.
DC, VA, and MD also have contributory negligence. You can read more about that here:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/24312/what-is-contr...
TL;DR you can receive no damages if you break the law in any tiny way while on a bicycle or on foot. Wearing headphones might be said to have contributed in some way, so you might get nothing.
In DC cops occasionally like to sit in the 15th Street Cycletrack and write tickets for running red lights. I'm sure if they found any violation of the law, they would also throw in another ticket.
For those not aware, 15th St. abuts the White House and, because of the many roads that are permanently blocked off, it is not possible for there to be car / bike conflicts for a stretch of this street from New York Avenue to the Ellipse where the bike lanes end (though bike / pedestrian conflicts can happen), except with emergency vehicles and the like. The markings on the road make it unclear whether or not bikes must stop at red lights or just when pedestrians are present.
Because of this, the vast majority of cyclists on this stretch of road ignore red lights and treat them as yields since it is perfectly safe to do so. You will almost never see any bike stopped unless there are pedestrians crossing the street or the bike is turning.
As for why you rarely see traffic enforcement, at least in DC there is no traffic enforcement division. Virginia has traffic enforcement (don't go over 80 MPH in Virginia on any road; it is automatically reckless driving, which is a misdemeanor. This applies even if the speed limit were 79 MPH).
Even without traffic enforcement of any kind, contributory negligence makes wearing headphones risky from a liability standpoint. Any minor law violation or safety hazard by a bicyclist can be used as a defense by a driver in court and end up with no damages awarded.
The saner comparative negligence standard does not apply in DC, MD, or VA.
I've just been hit by a car (I was completely uninjured) and I know people nailed for Virginia's reckless driving law (which can send you to jail).
Why do you view it as an alternative to reading, rather than a compliment?
I also find them much better for interviews and the like than text, you get a lot of information out of the tone people use, which is lost when it's committed to text.
They are great for that because, just like the Radio, it's not really important if you listen half of the time - because it's precisely low density, low quality content.
There are exceptions like Serial, but that's what they are: exceptions.
Sure, taken as a whole, most podcasts are terrible, and quality podcasts are rare exceptions. But then again quality books are also, on the whole, a rare exception when you include every self published manuscript floating around somewhere on the internet.
The absolute number of decent podcasts out there have increased massively over the past year or two, and there are easily a dozen podcasts that can match serial in quality and production values and more are coming online all the time.
People have been known to enjoy both the Game of Thrones books and the television series.
You could transcribe a Louis C.K. hour long show and read it in 15 minutes, but you would lose a lot.
For information you should continue to read as you were.
You mean a complement ?
It's possible to do actively of course, I know there are people out there that listen to music without any interruptions. The primary market for podcasts however are likely to be people who are doing something else and passively listening to them. They may focus in on a subject as it's talked about but a lot of the podcast will only be taken in as a distraction from background noise or silence.
Of course this is all guesswork based on my own opinion and use case, a little of how other podcast listeners I know ingest podcasts too
If I just let a podcast play on the backgrond, I'll certainly learn nothing at all from it.
Not a bad thing on either side of course, just differing use cases.
You can surely learn more by reading lyrics to a song than by listening to it - does that make music a lesser medium than writing?
Part of it is also just an addiction factor, I basically can't walk at this point without putting something in my ears.
To the broader point, there are a lot of instances where an engaged conversation produces fresher insights to my mind than a carefully constructed article. In the entertainment world, it's practically pioneered a new brand of confessional comedy. More to this audience's taste, hearing a founder pitch a product and answer some challenging questions on the a16z podcast is far more interesting to me than any profile I've ever read in Tech Crunch/WSJ/whatever.
It was a surreal experience hearing the Slate Gabfest live and having it sound completely different to what I was used to because IRL doesn't have a speed control function.
Something key for me was to find podcasts that don't "work better as articles" as you say. There are many tech related podcasts and I find most of them unlistenable.
Instead I found that more entertainment/comedy or seminar-like discussion works better in the podcast format. Maximumfun in particular has a lot of very high quality podcasts (with high production value, which tends to be a big factor in whether a podcast is listenable).
These are just my personal preferences, but one of these might "make sense" to you as a podcast if you give them a chance: The Adventure Zone, International Waters, Judge John Hodgman, My Brother My Brother and Me, The Partially Examined Life, Sawbones, Oh No Ross and Carrie, and of course Serial. For tech podcasts I only really like The Haskell Cast and occasionally a Changelog.
During the week I have a short commute to work (maybe 15-20 minutes each way) and for 3/4 of the year, when it's not too cold, I ride a motorcycle so listening to anything isn't really an option.
When I'm at work, I've got too much going on and much of it requires me to listen to something else (editing video, etc.) so podcasts or music are again not an option.
But when I have to drive somewhere that takes over an hour? Radio shows like This American Life are the best way to pass the time. Many podcasts follow a similar format where there's a narrative to get lost in and you don't need to deal with radio signals getting weak or hoping it's time for the show you want to hear. About once a year I take a ~9 hour drive to an event out of state and the only thing that keeps me sane is a phone or mp3 player full of podcasts.
Like reading a novel or watching a serial TV show, I can get caught up in the story or discussion and before I know it, another hour has gone by and I'm closer to my destination. Music just becomes background but podcasts give me something to focus on beside the fact that I still have hundreds of miles yet to drive.
Podcasts are presented as entertainment and performance art, in addition to the ones which are also informational. To say something broad like "podcasts aren't for me" seems like you might be missing out on many opportunities to experience creative storytelling based on some negative experiences you have had with the medium.
Is it impossible to imagine audio-only content you might enjoy? Because for whatever interest you might have, there is certainly a podcast serving that niche, whether it be fiction, non-fiction, drama, music, investigative journalism...
Surely someone can make a service that takes a podcast feed and packages it with different adverts for different markets and then creates new feeds.
I'd make it but the scaling sales end is not something I know how to do.
I suppose it depends how Apple interprets the feed as I assume Apple devices are the most used for podcast consumption.
I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying. You can't ignore them by looking away like you would on a screen.
Maybe we need an adblock for podcasts (even if it will be difficult to automize -> some manual stripping of the parts where they are promoting stuff)
Crowdsourcing? See if a lot of people skip over certain fragments of an episode and mark it as "advertisement". Granted, this requires some level of cooperation from podcast player applications.
Really? Most podcast apps replace the skip buttons with "jump forward/back 15/30 sec". Hitting a button twice is too much effort in exchange for getting content for free?
Thanks, but no sale.
Maybe you're just not the target market for ad-funded podcasts.
It would remove pre-recorded/repeated ads in the middle (assuming that's what cutaway means), but wouldn't be able to remove live reads. It would also remove intros/exits.
Without manual validation, it probably wouldn't be a good model for identifying and removing ads from podcasts, especially using a "repeated in multiple podcasts" model, which doesn't start with known ads.
Get headphones with forward/back buttons on them. As soon as the ads start it's one or two quick taps on a button by my neck and I'm back to the podcast.
This is the reason why you just cannot create dynamic ads if you want to stick to the standard RSS+client approach (like iTunes).
Some of the podcasters have started actually building their own native apps to have better control of the content they emit, but it comes with reduced visibility. This is why most of podcasters still release their stuff through iTunes, but invite the listeners to download their app.
As far as cached mp3s that are already downloaded, I don't see why that should have a huge impact on ads. The most important episode for advertising purposes is probably the most recent episode, and if someone pulls an archived mp3 that should have the new ads too. As for already-downloaded, cached mp3s you just gotta let those go.
Luckily with the podcasts I'm subscribed to most of the sponsors tend to be relevant to the actual shows. The only irrelevant sponsor I recall is Ting (a Canada-based US mobile provider I think).
I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio, they're not that annoying and usually relevant to the podcast subject matter. If they started playing multiple irrelevant adverts back to back, with accompanying audio compression, then I'd be upset about it.
Podcasts aren't expensive to produce at a basic level, it's mostly just the hosts sitting around and chatting on skype for an hour every week or two. I'm only aware of one podcast I listen to that frequently asks for contributions, and that's mostly because the hosts have found they work best when they're physically co-present and have to fly one of the hosts out every month to record a bunch of shows all at once.
> I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio
Yeah, I agree. When the parent discussed adverts before I was thinking of the more commercial radio type. I think it's an effort to try to monetize podcast audiences, but at least for me I'm able to find more content than I can listen to, run by hosts that aren't all that interested in turning their hobby into a money making venture.
I just skip the first 2-5 minutes of most podcasts and the last 1-3 minutes and pray they don't have ads in the middle.
I've personally thought about a paid platform where users subscribe to the podcasts they like best and get the perk of avoiding ads since they're contributing to the podcasts creators
> Podcasting has been around for about a decade — the term is a reference to the iPod, which older readers will remember as an iPhone that only played music.
Now I'm in the category of "older readers." Lovely.
My brother is 18 and he would probably be 'one of the last' to use a scroll-wheel iPod.
A friend and I have launched a podcast publishing platform, batteries included, called Podigee (https://www.podigee.com).
The backend runs on Rails + PostgreSQL, the frontend is a mix of Rails and AngularJS. Also, we run dedicated download / stream servers with some nice Lua scripts for caching the files and reducing overall costs for AWS S3 traffic.
The nicest feature is that once you upload an audio file, we will apply some good audio algorithms to it, encode it to different audio formats, and expose it automatically in your RSS feed.
Again in Rails, all running on AWS.
Literally, if it isn't something I can subscribe to in Youtube, or add it to my queue in Netflix, eventually it just gets lost and falls out of my entertainment workflow.
That's a bit of a contradiction.
Dan carlin's podcasts hardcore history[1] and common sense [2] both get uploaded to youtube whenever a new episode comes out. Both excellent podcasts as well.
I'm sure it's not very common however.
Oh, i also might as well mention that you can have itunes download your podcasts and put them in your plex media server or kodi server.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/user/dancarlinpodcaster [2]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3As7170z7TsHZ7-ShaRe1A
Is it ahead of where it was then?
Exactly the name I think of when I hear the word 'podcasting', and I'm surprised to see no mention of him in the article. In fact, I'm a regular podcast listener and I recognized few of the names in this piece, which was confusing to say the least.
If you're a Carlin fan, you definitely need to listen to Mike Duncan's podcasts - History of Rome and Revolutions. I'm also a fan of Skeptoid and Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. For lighter stuff, I enjoy Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast and Nerdist.
I don't know whether that's an indicator of a trend, or whether the domain knowledge just makes such a venture unfeasible, but I'd imagine to see people renting out recording studios and selling bundled podcasting setups with training and the like, if this were such a huge trend.
Is anyone currently doing this?
Basically if you are company and want a podcast they'll make it for you (or work with you to make it).
Also I have been working on this https://www.chirbit.com/ on the distribution/consumer side.
My biggest problems are that there's too many of them and it's easy to miss the one or two really interesting episodes in a sea of monthly/weekly content. Even more so if you listen to them at 2x speed and rarely have the time to stop and actively pay attention.
It's more of a form of pleasant background noise with the occasional glimpse of really interesting information. Like overhearing a conversation between colleagues.
Vox has short memory.
tbh, I'm subscribed to far more than I can ever listen to, and I'm in my car for at least 2 hours a day. Right now, I'm addicted to the ANTIC podcast which features an almost impossible number of interviews with people from all over the early computer industry who experienced working for a fast growth startup, the bust that followed and the hand-off to an unexpected acquirer. It took a few episodes to get going, but it's very addictive now.
I'm pretty much convinced that there's a selection of podcasts for just about any interest. They act as an audio-only companion to my youtube subscriptions...and there's even a bit of overlap between the two communities.
Everything I listen to is very amateur/hobbyist produced (like most youtube videos) and it often shows, but the enthusiasm is often enough to pull me through.
I had completely ignored podcasts until about 3 years ago and started seriously getting into them a couple years ago. I've even got my parents hooked on a couple.
Interesting. I like to dabble a bit in retrocomputing in my free time (mainly older languages, some of which I've used before, others not). Looked at that list of podcasts. A majority seem to be for games, which I'm not much into - I only play a few, sometimes. Only a few, like "retro computing roundtable", seem like they may be about more general computing topics. Do you know if any others are?
I believe they've even had a couple episodes reviewing the different dialects of BASIC available for the Atari 8-bit computer platform.
AMICast is a relatively recent show with not many episodes, but it's about the Amiga from a very European perspective.
I'd love to know more as well.
Sometimes i can even get away with listening to them at 3x speed, depending on how fast the host talks.
HN is a great discovery service, as is Facebook.
Email me if you wanna know the podcast my fiancé and I look forward to most each week! :)