Has Podcasting 2.0 failed?
The show In & Around Podcasting carried a rather clickbaity episode last week, called “Has Podcasting 2.0 failed?”. Hosted by Mark Asquith and Danny Brown, and with a guest of Claire Waite Brown, it suggested that the initiative has - five years on - failed.
I’m not sure I agree.
“Podcasting 2.0” is a collection of ideas. Some ideas work. Some don’t.
Some are total failures
Let’s talk about the podcast:images tag - totally unusable, and a duplicate of a different tag that already exists (the media:thumbnail tag, which YouTube uses). It’s a waste of time and effort, and is almost entirely unused. It ought to be removed, in my opinion, but there’s a belief that we never remove features, even when they’ve failed, which just adds to confusion and cruft to the Podcasting 2.0 documentation, such as it is.
Some are good ideas but don’t work well
The podcast:guid should be a great idea. In reality, it doesn’t work. It places a dependency on the Podcast Index, which is bad - there shouldn’t be any dependency on any service to run a GUID lookup tool, much less one that is run by volunteers. Most podcast hosts don’t support it anyway. A few of those that do haven’t supported it correctly, either - issuing new GUIDs when a podcast is transferred over to them (thus removing the entire point of the GUID); or allowing anyone to enter anything in the field; or issuing the same GUID for every podcast on their platform; or other, similarly broken, things.
The podcast:locked feature should be great. But it isn’t really supported, and adds confusion and complication. It’s failed - conspicuously broken in terms of a way of protecting podcast transferrals.
How long do we leave failures like this in the specifications? When do we remove them? Five years? Ten years? Never?
Some are brilliant ideas that have succeeded
Some are smashing ideas that even Apple Podcasts has taken up - the podcast:transcript allows us, the creators, to control our transcripts and even add speaker names. It’s supported by a number of different podcast hosts. It’s a good, well-thought-out specification, and is in use in many different apps already, like Pocket Casts, AntennaPod and Podcast Addict, as well as plenty of smaller ones. We should be proud of its success.
The “podroll” (creator recommendations) should be a smashing idea that everyone can do. It needs not to rely on the guid, but instead use the RSS feed address, but even so, it’s a great idea. It’s not, yet, been adopted by any (at scale) podcast app though.
So has Podcasting 2.0 failed?
To say it has “failed” or “succeeded” is a bit overly reductive. Parts have failed. Parts have succeeded. Parts are on the way to succeeding.
Has Podcasting 2.0 failed? No.
However, it’s certainly failing in terms of driving the initiative forward. As with any grass-roots initiative, it needs people with time and money to promote it and get it out there. Without a CEO/Founder who is keen to get out and do the hard work, its growth is being hampered.
The Podcast Standards Project has certainly failed. A loose alliance of podcast hosts and app developers, launched to - as far as I can see - be the adult in the room, choosing a subset of mature ideas from Podcasting 2.0 that make sense for everyone in the alliance, and then implementing them. It’s hard to see any visible measure of success overall. We need a team to advocate for open podcasting. It’s clearly not them.
For Podcasting 2.0, one way to help is to look at a “feature champion”: the one person promoting each feature and responsible for its take up. That would mean 20, 30 or more different people contacting podcast hosting companies and app developers, and trying to sell them on the benefit of their individual feature. It would mean a named specialist to help podcast hosting companies and app developers with their implementation. “Want to implement the location tag? James can help. The transcripts tag? Talk to Daniel.” Right now, I’m guessing most podcast hosts or app developers have zero contact with anyone from the project at all.
And perhaps that’s why it is seen to have failed. It’s not growing as fast as anyone would like; and it seems as though people are losing interest. Discussions and proposals for tweaking, enhancing or simplifying features are posted on Github and are ignored; starved of any attention, actively driving contributors away. Work is produced in isolation, without clear buy-in from each part of the podcast ecosystem, leading to features that are undercooked. No attempt is made to educate or inform the industry of its work, with no blog, no newsletter, no clear news section, etc.
Can we do better? Yes.
But has it failed? No.