Google's podcasting strategy; trolls and weather

• ICYMI: Google’s new podcasting strategy - and the player that’s already in your Android phone.

• For noting: the “new” Google Podcasts experience has a useragent of something like Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Pixel XL Build/OPM2.171019.029; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/65.0.3325.109 Mobile Safari/537.36 GSA/8.0.17.21.arm64 - “GSA/” would appear to be the user-agent to search for ('Google Search App’?) - the version number appears to match the version of the Google app that’s installed on my phone. Ask your podcast host to add this now to their analytics.

  • Here are a bunch more podcast app user-agents.

• The Weather Channel has launched a new podcast, Weather Geeks. The first one drops this week. (If you love that, you might enjoy the BBC’s Under the weather.)

• The Australian ABC release a new podcast, Troll Play. “The horrible things written online are making the world angrier and sadder. Troll Play helps you navigate a social media world where people have lost perspective online.”

• Will podcasting eat radio? - an op-ed piece for an Australian radio industry website. (Or, if you like it better, in a South African one).

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 1 2023

• Listicle corner: 7 of the best beauty podcasts (Elle)

• Steven Goldstein pulls seven interesting data stories out of Podcast Consumer 2018.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 1 2023

• A final column, Honest to Pod, explains the writer’s introduction to podcasts (word of mouth) and his relationship with the medium since then. It’s published in The Daily Trojan (stop sniggering, Australians), in South California.

  
  Aug 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

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