Australian Podcast Awards announce winners

• The Australian Podcast Awards are announcing the winners in Sydney NSW, Australia. Hosted by Mitch Churi, these are the sixth awards, with more than thirty different categories.

• In Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has placed its true-crime podcasts in a new “early, exclusive and ad-free” paid subscription on Apple Podcasts.

• Audio Drama Hub’s Podfest in High Wycombe, Bucks, UK took place over the weekend. See pictures and highlights on their social media.

• The finalists of the Audio Verse Awards were announced. They are “an annual celebration, dedicated to the greatest people and productions in immersive audio fiction around the world, whether it’s an audio play, improvised, or spoken word production”.

• Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast has signed an exclusive partnership with Not Even Mad, a new political debate podcast.

• Spotify announced the expansion of NextGen, Spotify’s program designed to grow podcast culture on college campuses, to Historically Black Colleges and University campuses across the US.

• Writing on Mastodon, Leo Laporte likens the current implosion of Twitter, a centralised social media platform, to where podcasts might end up. “If you like podcasts, use an RSS-based podcast player. Support the open ecosystem,” he asks.

• The EarBuds Podcast Collective this week focuses on five podcast episode recommendations from Canadian podcasters.

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The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• The OPAWG user-agent lists are changing for the better. The new user-agents-v2 repo builds on the previous approach, and is quicker and more detailed.

• Mastodon fun facts: if you add .rss to the end of someone’s account page - like this - then you get an RSS feed. Audio files attached to posts are given a proper enclosure tag (there’s an example in this feed), so theoretically every Mastodon user is already a podcaster. However, a) Apple Podcasts doesn’t like these RSS feeds, though other apps are fine with them; and b) it’ll add significant extra cost to your server instance’s bandwidth bills so best not.

• Lightning payment service Alby released v1.19.0 which adds support for Core Lightning nodes, one of the four major lightning implementations.

Podcast News - with CBC Podcasts

From CBC Podcasts #7 is: Covid lockdown didn’t stop Someone Knows Something host David Ridgen from following up on unsolved cases. In The Next Call, Ridgen takes his investigations onto the telephone - dialing victim’s family members, police and eye-witnesses in a methodical search for answers. 'You won’t be able to turn it off,' warns Cosmo.

What Was That Like, hosted by Scott Johnson, has surpassed 5 million downloads. The show features first-hand stories of extremely unusual events, such as a plane crash, a terrorist attack, or winning on a TV game show. The current episode is with Ella, a New York farmer who was attacked by an elephant in Thailand.

Hosted by Lola del Carril, who at 24 became the first female play-by-play commentator of a men’s soccer match in Argentina - and will become the first Argentinian woman to comment a World Cup - the Spanish-language Cada Cuatro looks at how the FIFA World Cup became the world’s most important, and corrupt, sporting event.

It’s a Sign: Your Daily Astrology Tip was launched today by LiSTNR, promising “studied, considered astrology based on planetary transits, moon phases and cosmic weather”. Host Katherine Gilles says “by learning to align your week with the cosmos, you can step into a rhythm and flow which is otherwise untapped”. Aussie rival iHeart launched an astrology show last week.

What if men could get pregnant? The Dragoning feed contains The Chip today - a new speculative fiction audio play about an experimental piece of tech. It’s from the Messenger Theatre Company.