Canadian Podcast Awards winners announced

• The winners of the Canadian Podcast Awards were announced. The People’s Choice awards went to Frequency’s Parkdale Hunt.

• Australian podcast adspend is up by 33% year-on-year, according to ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia and Magellan AI.

• SCA and Veritonic measured brand sonic logos in Australia, including those in podcasts. Bunnings Warehouse scored highest (there’s a clip in our podcast today).

• Overcast is to close its web player next year. “I’ve never had the time or the modern-web-development skills to make it a great way to use Overcast”, says developer Marco Arment, adding that the experience is “terrible”. /ht Justin

• Faris Aranki decided to be on as many podcasts as he could in 2020. Here’s what he learnt - preparation is rare, most podcast hosts are blokes, and about 15% never get released.

• Love RSS feeds? Feedle calls itself “a search engine for blogs and podcasts”.

Moves and hires

• Breaker co-founder Leah Culver, who’s recently been working on Twitter Spaces, is still at Twitter; though she’s offering to help people hiring. Kimberly Le, the product designer of Twitter Spaces is, however, out. Or perhaps she might not be: Twitter is apparently asking people it laid off to please come back.
  • Your Editor is on @jamescridland@podcastindex.social should you want to follow on Mastodon.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Will Pocket Casts beat Apple Podcasts in adding a correct useragent for all podcast requests? Now it’s open source, John Spurlock submitted a pull request adding the correct useragent code, which has been accepted and will be in Pocket Casts later this month. Disappointingly, Apple Podcasts itself has yet to implement the company’s own code, introduced for iOS 16.

• Value 4 value streaming gives a lot of data to podcasters; and Conshax is a new value 4 value dashboard that interfaces with your Alby account showing it. You’ll be able to see, for example, the number of supporters throughout an episode of your podcast, as well as boost messages.

• Can a $798 AQVOX “audophile” network switch make an amazing difference to your audio? Linus Tech Tips take their claims apart.

• John Spurlock has been evaluating useragent lists for OP3, and has tried both OPAWG and Buzzsprout lists.

• Here’s a nice tool that generates a podcast GUID for your podcast. It should be in your RSS feed. (A GUID never changes, even if your RSS feed does).

• How was Libsyn’s hosting done when launched 18 years ago in 2004? Here, from one of the founders, is one of their notes - underneath an architecture diagram, the phrase “research colo and dedicated hosting”.

• Umbrel 0.5.3 is out, fixing a few bugs.

• Thank to Dave Jones, Adam Curry, RealCoachAndy, Mitch and the Optimal Living Daily podcast for your boosts.

Podcast News - with CBC Podcasts

From CBC Podcasts #16 is: Sorry About the Kid “Sorry About The Kid is only four episodes long, but it doesn’t need very much to make a lacerating impression,” says Nick Quah for Vulture. This series is an intimate, emotional exploration of memory, family and grief.

Astrology Coach claims a “galaxy first” - using dynamic ad insertion technology to tell your future using tarot cards. The show is an astrology and tarot show, using podcast tech to its fullest, from ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia and Deadset Studios.

Corinna and The King is a new investigative narrative podcast from Project Brazen looking at the shock abdication of King Juan Carlos in 2014, which opens a window into a dangerous world of greed, corruption, violence, vast pools of hidden wealth, international espionage, conspiracy, hedonism, and elephant hunting, all tracing back to one of the most secretive royalties in the world.

Corinna y El Rey is, as you’d expect, a Spanish-language translation of the above, created in partnership with podcast production companies Audiation Inc. in New York and La Coctelera Music in Spain.

More Than A Feeling returns for a new season, and it’ll start with The Dread Project - a week long social experiment - delivered via podcast — designed to help listeners get a little more acclimated to one of our most uncomfortable forms of fear. Throughout the challenge, our audience will have opportunities to hear from world renowned experts on the impacts of dread, how to work with it and road test therapeutic practices including dread focused journaling, productivity hacks, art therapy, walking in nature and even some death contemplation.