All the same: episode notes now display consistently

• For the first time, all major podcast apps display episode notes in the same way. As Podnews testing now reveals, in the <description> field, all major podcast apps now support <a href links, <p> paragraphs, <ul><li> bullet points, and make URLs clickable automatically. You should keep episode notes below 4,000 characters, though, to ensure they display everywhere (Apple has a limit of 4,000, Google Podcasts has a limit of 5,000).

  • According to our records, neither Apple, Spotify or Google have ever shown podcast episode notes this consistently before.

• “If people can’t find your podcast, they can’t listen to it,” says Steven Goldstein, after attempting to search for Brains.

  
  Sep 5 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Audio editor Audacity has posted “a quick statement to address the concerns around our new Privacy Policy”. “We do understand that unclear phrasing of the Privacy Policy and lack of context regarding introduction has led to major concerns about how we use and store the very limited data we collect. We will be publishing a revised version shortly.”

• What place is there for women in podcasting? So asks Le Pod, a French podcast website, sharing a survey that, if you speak French, you should fill in.

• Podcasts are “bursting onto China youth scene”, report AFP in a number of publications today. The story covers StoryFM, a podcast with an audience of 1.2m.

Podcast News

Congratulations to Wernham Blogg’s Office Podcast, a fan podcast for the UK version of The Office, which has succeeded in attracting a special guest for the show’s 20th anniversary - Ricky Gervais. “We’re a seriously independent podcast, and we record with a single mic balanced in a pint glass,” they tell us, “so this is a real rags to Ricky story”. The new episode is released on Friday.

The AppleInsider podcast focuses on the Apple Podcasts app this week, with a special guest of Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland. There’s a full transcript here, including the phrase “I think Apple has done a fantastic job there”.

Adam Curry was interviewed in School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson last week in this episode (and this summary).