Search for ‘Meta’

April 29, 2024:

Is Apple’s Messages app the latest new podcast player? Not really - but it does play podcasts. Send someone on Messages a link to a Podnews news page (like this) it renders with the image, headline, and a little audio button - which, when pressed, plays the linked audio. It looks quite neat. It uses the og:audio meta tag, part of the Open Graph protocol, which is supported in the Messages app on iPhone and MacOS.

April 10, 2024:

The Outer Limits Of Inner Truth, a metaphysical podcast, has celebrated its ten year anniversary. Over 435 episodes with over two million downloads, the program has encompassed freedom, deep introspection, self discovery, and spiritual growth.

March 26, 2024:

Apple Podcasts has updated its Content Guidelines. The main changes are that the company now requires use of AI to be prominently disclosed in both the audio and the metadata; and AI cannot be used to mislead. (¶1.11 and 1.12) Apple also requires creator-provided transcripts to accurately reflect and correspond to the content (¶5.1).

February 12, 2024:

Happy “podcast” day. Twenty years ago today, Ben Hammersley used the term “podcasting” for the first time in print. We’ve a full history of the word, which was popularised by Dannie J Gregoire. And if you’re wanting to hear some of the history of podcasting, we’ve a special podcast just here - with clips from Hammersley, as well as the first ever podcast to use the word “podcast”. Meta.

October 24, 2023:

The Women of Web3 Podcast returns for season three today. Hosted by Lauren Ingram, it's a beginner's guide to the metaverse, with plenty of jargon breakdowns, all delivered through interviews with inspirational female leaders from across the blockchain space. The guest today is Ashley McDonnell, the Global Client Activation Director at Puig, the owners of fashion brands like Jean Paul Gaultier.

August 11, 2023:

The Skeptic Metaphysicians is celebrating hitting 100,000 downloads in under a year. (101,521 when they looked, if you're interested). The show won two accolades at The Signal Awards last year and calls itself "a fun exploration of metaphysics, spiritual awakenings, healing modalities and magical personalities."

July 26, 2023:

Indian podcast hosting company Hubhopper is working with Superfan, an augmented reality and metaverse company. "Creators and brands can seamlessly enhance their content with AR elements, such as virtual objects, interactive games, and dynamic visual effects."

July 17, 2023:

A number of news podcasts are being censored by Meta's Facebook, Instagram and Threads in Canada, after the Canadian government passed Bill C-18, a new law requiring tech companies to pay to link to news content. The 905er podcast is one of those affected. In a video, Canadian YouTuber and journalist J.J. McCullough calls it "ill-conceived" and akin to extortion; our Editor has personal thoughts too.

July 6, 2023:

Threads, a new social media network from Facebook owner Meta, went live today in most countries, apart from Europe (for privacy reasons). You need an Instagram account to use it - so if you already have one, your username is safe. We've no idea what we'll do with our account.

June 19, 2023:

Facebook's owner Meta has announced an artificial speech generator, which can clone voices, edit and remove background noise.

June 12, 2023:

First look: Podcast hosting company RSS.com has launched PodViz, an in-house visualisation tool to produce videos from audio podcasts for services like YouTube. The service supports chapter art and YouTube metadata; an example is here. It's not limited to the company's hosting customers: any podcaster can try it here.

June 5, 2023:

There is more to your episode notes than meets the eye, suggests Podcast Marketing Magic.

April 10, 2023:

There's a crisis in the veterinary industry in Australia - a crisis that is killing the people who care for our animals. Sick As A Dog examines the mental health crisis in the vet profession. It shines a spotlight on the many challenges, but also explores the potential solutions that exist. The podcast was part funded through the Meta and the Walkley Foundation’s public interest journalism fund.

April 5, 2023:

Auphonic has released metadata variables, for quicker automation.

February 21, 2023:

Simon Cross is to join Soundwide, the owner of plugin company iZotope among others, as Chief Product Officer. He joins from Meta and the BBC.

January 31, 2023:

Malvina Goldfeld has joined Podimo as Chief Product Officer - she's ex Meta and PayPal; Johann Querné has been announced as VP of Growth, a position he's held for three months according to his LinkedIn. He's a former Twitter, Uber and Alibaba exec.

January 17, 2023:

The fourth and final season of Threatened from BirdNote launches today, taking us to Puerto Rico. We're promised good news about the Puerto Rican Parrot, a bird that, in spite of deforestation, hurricanes and the exotic pet trade, is full of life. His metabolic processes are abundant, he hasn't kicked the bucket, he has yet to shuffle off his mortal coil, touch a curtain or join any form of choir, whether visible or invisible. We learn the difficult tradeoffs that were involved to make sure that he isn't an ex-parrot.

January 12, 2023:

Redefining AI returned for a second season yesterday. The show, from Squirro, is set to focus on AI applications, Natural Language Processing, the Data Mindset, the Metaverse, and more. The show will be fortnightly.

November 18, 2022:

Cameron Moll has joined Buzzsprout as VP of Design. He is a design leader formerly of Meta and Pendo, and also founded short-form audio platform Spoken in 2015.

October 21, 2022:

Facebook is to stop supporting Instant Articles, their proprietary replacement for RSS.

October 14, 2022:

Decoder with Nilay Patel had Mark Zuckerberg on this week as a guest. The boss of Meta talked about the new Quest Pro headset and said: "There’s some reason why you want to do the podcast in person. There’s a connection that you have in person. There’s a reason why you didn’t want to do this over Zoom."

September 12, 2022:

Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter and blogger, writes a guide to making a podcast. He last wrote one in 2011, noting this year that "the way I create a podcast today is completely different than how I did it in the past, thanks mostly to maturing tools in the podcast space."

September 9, 2022:

Aparita Bhandari from Pacific Content tells us how to sonically recreate a virtual world experience for your podcast audience

July 14, 2022:

Land of the Giants returns for a new season, from Recode and The Verge. The new season explores the genesis and growth of Meta as a company, and its impact on society. It's hosted by Alex Heath and Shirin Ghaffary.

June 27, 2022:

OpenGraph has a number of properties around audio. <meta property="og:audio" has been in our page headers for some time linking to the podcast version of our daily updates; we see around 40 downloads a day of the audio from Trello and LinkedIn apps on iOS, among other things. (We've been using our AAC file; we've switched to MP3 to see if that's more widely accepted).

June 23, 2022:

Acast+ has announced an integration with Facebook. It allows Acast+ subscribers to offer members-only Facebook groups, as a launch partner of new Facebook functionality. Patreon offers a similar integration with Discord.

June 21, 2022:

Jaclyn Schiff from Podreacher covers the clever ways that NPR have been repurposing audio content, using a restaurant metaphor.

June 16, 2022:

Podcast Movement 2022 has made some speaker announcements, including Dallas Taylor from Twenty Thousand Hertz, Robert Riggs from True Crime Reporter, and Fireside Chat's Mark Cuban and Falon Fatemi, returning to speak about "The Power of Web3 and Metaverse: The Future of Podcasting, Media, and Entertainment". We'll be at the event too.

June 15, 2022:

In July last year, Podnews published data showing what metadata different podcast apps use: noting that Apple Podcasts does not search podcast (or episode) descriptions.

May 23, 2022:

First look: AudioAudit, a service to check online audio quality, has launched today. The service includes a check for loudness, swear words, encoding issues, and metadata. Here's Podnews's score.

April 15, 2022:

A year after it announced podcasts in its app and other audio tools, Facebook's interest in podcasting is waning, according to Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. The company still hasn't launched podcasts outside of the US, and was entirely absent at Podcast Movement Evolutions; it also hasn't renewed some deals with Live Audio Rooms partners, as it pivots to focus on the 'metaverse'.

March 15, 2022:

This Week in the Metaverse is a new weekly technology news show from Brand Content Studios, covering cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs and virtual reality. It's hosted by Mike Stiles, a former radio personality, and we're promised that the podcast is short, weekly, and snarkily funny.

March 7, 2022:

Accusonos is immediately shutting some products, and only supporting others until 'early next year', it has announced in an email. The company makes audio clean-up software, and was acquired by Meta last month. /thnx Levi!

February 23, 2022:

Spreaker has worked with Meta to produce a new, simplified way to add your podcast to Facebook. It uses a new API. Currently, podcasts on Facebook are only available within the US and on mobile.

February 2, 2022:

The sound of your own name is quite a personal thing. In today's Twenty Thousand Hertz, Dallas Taylor meets Dallas Taylor, Dallas Taylor, Dallas Taylor, Dallas Taylor and Dallas Taylor. One Dallas Taylor is a former lead singer of a heavy metal band; but not Dallas Taylor, who makes podcasts about sound.

January 14, 2022:

True crime rules; but exclusive podcasts don't much, and nor do any of the big acquisitions - at Pacific Content, Matt Hird took all the "top podcasts of 2021" lists he could find, and analysed all 432 podcasts they mentioned to see what can be learnt. 9/12 is incidentally, the top of the tops.

November 25, 2021:

Dr Jane Goodall is the first guest for season two of Now, Then, Ten, Facebook IQ's leadership podcast. It's hosted by Nicola Mendelsohn, who's VP of the Global Business Group at Meta. It launched yesterday.

November 18, 2021:

Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, launched Eclipsed, a new narrative history podcast that dives into stories hidden in the shadows of history. Hosted by journalist and executive producer Bijan Stephen, Eclipsed is a show about events most people have forgotten — or maybe never even knew about to begin with — like a disappearing lake in Louisiana, the two brothers whose obsession with precious metal nearly crashed the global economy, and the three Americans who went to the Moscow Olympics in defiance of Jimmy Carter’s boycott.

October 29, 2021:

And no, it's not changing its name. The owning company of Facebook has changed its name to Meta. However, the Facebook app will still be called Facebook.

October 14, 2021:

Object: stories of design and craft was launched today, talking to seven of Australia’s master craftspeople in ceramics, jewellery, textiles and metal. Why does their work matter? How do they keep going? What's their advice for creatives? Produced by the Australian Design Centre.

September 27, 2021:

A company called DDEX, which describes itself as an "international standards-setting organization dedicated to improving the exchange of data and information across the music industry", will hold an open meeting tomorrow to discuss proposed requirements for description and communication of music metadata in podcasts.

August 13, 2021:

Another paper from Spotify's R&D department describes "approaches for indexing and retrieving podcast content for ad hoc search" - to make better podcast search engine tools. This one, though, is behind a pay wall.

August 9, 2021:

Metallica has teamed up with Amazon for The Metallica Podcast, the band has announced. It focuses on The Black Album, which will be reissued on September 10th.

August 5, 2021:

At Podcast Movement, Futuri Media launched AdMatic, a tool to "organise and monetise the world's podcasts". "Two million podcasts all have the same problem: poor metadata sorting that leads to mismatched recommendations for listeners and ineffective advertising for businesses", says CEO Daniel Anstandig. It also includes automatic detection of copyright music in podcasts.

May 11, 2021:

Enterprise podcast host Omny Studio has added enhanced reporting functionality and additional metadata features.

February 5, 2021:

What's Joe Budden doing? He's supposed to have moved his podcast to Patreon, yet he is still hosting with Libsyn. He's quoted as saying that exclusive deals are prehistoric; yet has launched exclusive shows on Patreon. He spent two hours explaining why he was leaving Spotify, though, through the metaphor of strip clubs, stories about watches and 52 f-words, so no wonder we're a bit f-ing confused.

October 5, 2020:

A review of metadata fields associated with podcast RSS feeds is a specific look at the itunes:type, itunes:season and itunes:category data fields in podcasts. Written by a Spotify employee, and using data also from Spotify user behaviour, it concludes that the itunes:type field is often misleading or confusing, and is not of much use for recommendations.

September 22, 2020:

Another podcast about podcasts is on the way: and if it sounds a bit meta, that's because it literally is. Meta - A Podcast About Podcasts is presented by Nine's podcast reporter in Australia, Peter Wells, working with Acast.

August 13, 2020:

Auphonic is now integrated with Zapier, allowing you to automatically start processing your audio with Auphonic as soon as it's put into a Dropbox folder, and even to add metadata.

June 23, 2020:

John Gilroy writes about mistakes to make on the Apple Podcasts directory, especially focusing on your metadata.

December 20, 2019:

In an email, Stephen Hallgren from Simplecast has noted that preload="metadata" behaviour has changed on Android Chrome at some point recently, possibly since a new release in late October - trebling the amount of download data (and bringing it way above the IAB minimum). This potentially means that any player could succumb to the same issue that we noted earlier this week. Podtrac are keeping a close eye on this latest development: it may explain why the Us Weekly podcast saw such a traffic jump in November.

August 5, 2019:

Thank you to John Lee Dumas for becoming Podnews's latest personal supporter. Known as "JLD" to many, John produces the award-winning Entrepreneurs On Fire where he interviews entrepreneurs "who are truly ON FIRE" (we assume in a metaphorical sense rather than actually being burned alive, but if it's the latter we've a few business people we'd like to suggest for interview). You should be like JLD.

June 25, 2019:

True Crime Chronicles promises a new true crime story every week. Episode 1 is titled “Little Sky Gone”, and investigates the disappearance of 2-year-old Sky Metalwawa outside Seattle in 2011 and the bizarre circumstances that have baffled law enforcement trying to solve the case; Episode 2, titled “Mr. X”, looks into the largest cluster of strangulations in American history, in the Atlanta area and why dozens of murders are still unsolved. (VAULT Studios / Podbean)

March 4, 2019:

Jon Wilkerson suspects he knows what's behind Apple Podcast's recent attempt to clean up metadata: the ADA (the Americans with Disabilities Act). He points out that Apple received a class action last year because its website was "inaccessible to visually impaired users". Others point out that episode number tagging would enable, for example, "Siri, listen to episode 125 of The Daily" which is currently difficult to achieve. Here's our FAQ: we'd still recommend doing the tags, even if Apple isn't threatening you.

March 1, 2019:

Libsyn are putting on a free webinar tonight at 7pm New York time about podcast metadata; it'll contain some Libsyn-specific information but is open to everyone.

February 28, 2019:

Apple has sent an email to podcasters reminding them to ensure decent-looking metadata. They particularly don't want spammy-looking names or authors, and no episode numbers in titles. There's a tag for that. "These practices could result in your show being rejected or removed from Apple Podcasts," they warn. They have, though, unveiled a mechanism to resubmit podcast feeds if required.

February 12, 2019:

Thank you to new podcast host podcast·co for your kind support. You've helped us fix our schema metadata on the front page. Also, to the dutch De Radio Podcast for your kind personal support: dank je! Zijn dat pannenkoeken? Yum!

December 13, 2018:

Exclusive: NPR's RAD open podcast analytics standard (which we reported yesterday) will be supported by Hindenburg, the audio editor built for audio journalists. Chris Mottes, their CEO, tells Podnews that both Hindenburg Journalist PRO and Hindenburg Broadcaster will include a feature to add RAD tags and the related metadata: and that the release will be made this Friday afternoon. (Hindenburg regularly advertise with Podnews, promoting a 90-day free trial and discounted price, which we feel is probably relevant here even if this is an editorial news story.)

September 27, 2018:

Apple have shared podcast authoring best practices. It covers loudness levels (-16 LKFS, which is the same as -16 LUFS, and a -1 dB peak) - a good audio editor like Hindenburg, or online service like Auphonic, will enable you to hit that; formats and bitrates: "We strongly recommend using AAC over MP3", and a range of recommended bitrates; and discusses loudness metadata. (If you master to -16 LUFS, it's unclear what the benefit of adding this metadata is).

September 12, 2018:

Metadata: If your latest podcast episode was a book how thick would its spine be (Dan Misener)

August 31, 2018:

Dan Misener posts about "product packaging for podcasts", talking about metadata and artwork. (We covered a number of pieces yesterday about this, too.)

August 30, 2018:

Advice: "Mind your metadata" - Wil Williams highlights best practice for titles and descriptions; meanwhile, Circle270Media says that publishing your podcast notes is more important than you think

June 15, 2018:

Australia's NOVA Entertainment has also launched Word of Mouth, a "meta-cast [that] takes you deep into the world of podcasting".

May 31, 2018:

Plex, the media server, has added podcasts to its apps, including online; podcasts are available without subscription. TechCrunch is one of a number of outlets posting stories on it; your listening progress is synched across all your devices. Podnews is already listed; you can add yours within the desktop site. Podcasts are currently supported on Android, iOS, Roku, and desktop. We've added it to our big list of podcast directories.

February 19, 2018:

The Bookseller covers Entale, a platform "enhancing the current podcasting technical standards and introducing a new form of audio storytelling with enhanced media and richer metadata". Clients include Universal Music and Condé Nast.

June 22, 2017:

Interview (on a podcast) with Ira Glass, produced by Maximum Fun in partnership with Columbia Journalism Review. It's a bit meta - in this interview he explains how he, um, interviews.