Buzzsprout tackles podcast spam email

• Following a growing issue with spam email to podcasters, and after Apple said they no longer needed emails in feeds, Buzzsprout has become the first major podcast host to remove email addresses from RSS feeds. (They’ll give the ability to add them back in temporarily to help claim shows).

  • In The Tech Stuff today, below, read about podcast:txt, an alternative method to allow podcasters to claim their podcast without any email addresses.

• A fun podcasting glossary, “Written over many months while waiting for my computer to render and load files and stuff like that”, from F’ing Audio Art.

• Former podcast consultant Tanner Campbell has made his course on how to launch a podcast entirely free.

• Amazon has “fired half of its Amp live radio division”, reports Business Insider. The app is US-only, and still not available on Android phones. This appears to affect 150 people, suggesting that the product has 300 staffers.

• Twitter employee Leah Culver, the co-founder of the Breaker podcast app, has pictured herself holding the source code of part of Twitter Spaces, following an apparent order by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk to print out all the code for a code review with Musk himself. There are rumours that blue-ticked users will be forced to pay $20 per month to keep the verification tag.

  • Twitter has paused the sale of Ticketed Spaces, their equivalent to a paid Clubhouse room. Meanwhile, Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison spoke at a conference only last week.

• Detail is a new tool built for quickly shooting multi-camera video. It might be useful for podcasters producing video content.

• Earbuds this week has Spooky Funny Fun Podcast Recommendations for Halloween, curated by Anita Flores.

Moves and hires

• Natalie Hauptman, a former marketer for Manscaped, has launched Podscale, a podcast advertising agency. “We found that the vast majority of agencies that offer podcast advertising do not specialize in it, and only offer it because their clients demanded it,” she writes.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• The podcast:txt tag in the new podcast namespace has been formalised. It’s (partially) a way for a podcaster to put a piece of text (aka “challenge token” or “verification code”) in their feed to claim their podcast.

• We have removed the <itunes:owner> tags from our RSS feeds, too. (We’d removed email from one of them a while back, with no ill effects).

• Facebook is working on a new audio compression format, claiming to offer 10x better audio compression than MP3. This news comes a month after Google demonstrated their new speech codec, Lyra v2. Meanwhile, Opus (which offers 3x better audio compression than MP3) is supported by all Android phones, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome on Android/Windows/MacOS. It isn’t, however, supported by iOS.

• Currently proposed is podcast:remoteItem which allows podcasters to link to individual parts of other peoples’ feeds. If you’re wanting a feed to test this on, this remoteItem RSS feed contains trailers from shows we’ve recently featured. (Here are more details and a normal feed).

• There’s a new version of Umbrel out: v0.5.2

Podcast News - with Lemonada Media

From Lemonada Media: BEING Golden is your chance to see the world through the eyes of four people over 60 as they pursue their passions, make new connections, and experience loss and heartbreak.

The Vox Markets Podcast has Stuart Last, the CEO of Audioboom, as a guest. He discusses the company’s latest financial results and claims the company “outpaced their competitors in the fastest growing media sector of podcasting”.

One Minute Remaining - Stories from the inmates has hit #3 in the Apple Podcasts charts in Australia. The show hears from prison inmates about their stories - sometimes of innocence, sometimes not.

Lateral with Tom Scott is a new podcast about interesting quiz questions and even more interesting answers. Tom Scott is a popular British YouTuber.