Podcast Index
The Podcast Index is here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem.
Website: podcastindex.org
Latest news
- Feb 2:
Fun fact: in the Podcast Index, there are 112,200 duplicates (showing the same title and author). (There are a surprising amount of duplicates in Apple Podcasts and Spotify as well.) Algorithmic search normally hides the duplicates - but as the number of podcasts grow, so will the number of duplicates too. Widespread use of the
podcast:guidcould help this. - Jan 19: Fun fact - it's valid for podcasts to include PDF files as enclosures instead of audio files - Apple Podcasts says so on their website, despite not actually supporting PDFs any more. Breaking Bad News is an example of a podcast that includes PDFs, and we can find 1,718 shows with PDFs in the Podcast Index. We can't find any podcast apps that support PDFs, though, so we probably wouldn't recommend it, and we'd probably like to ask Apple to officially remove support for PDF on this page. (But we've added PDF support to our podcast episode viewer, like this, so...)
- Jan 12:
Chartable closed for everyone on Dec 8; and now no longer works. That means that all shows with
chtbl.comorchrt.fmin the enclosure URL will no longer play (Spotify hasn't maintained a simple redirect). As of this weekend, that's affecting 10,667 different shows, according to The Podcast Index. Here's how to remove the Chartable Trackable RSS prefix in Megaphone if you use that. - Jan 6: The Nigerian Podcast Index has been announced - a definitive, independent record of Nigerian podcasts, according to the founder, Tony Doe.
- Jan 5: Dave Jones from the Podcast Index is working on a tool that will show you all the new shows being published at any one time, and you can listen to them and help humanly categorise it. He's calling it "the crap trap". He also has suggested that there may be a way for Podcast Index to "verify" feeds, to avoid some feeds being pirated by bad actors, and to give more control to podcast publishers.
Data credits: Podnews newsletter