Journal tags: podcasts

I did an episode of the Clearleft podcast on innovation a while back:

Everyone wants to be innovative …but no one wants to take risks.

The word innovation is often bandied about in an unquestioned positive way. But if we acknowledge that innovation is—by definition—risky, then the exhortations sound less positive.

“We provide innovative solutions for businesses!” becomes “We provide risky solutions for businesses!”

I was reminded of this when I saw the website for the Podcast Standards Project. The original text on the website described the project as:

…a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.

I pushed back on that wording (partly because I’ve seen the word “innovation” used as a smoke screen for user-hostile practices like tracking and surveillance). The wording has since changed to:

…a grassroots coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.

That’s better. It’s more precise.

Am I nitpicking? Only if you think that “innovation” and “improvement” are synonyms. I don’t think they are.

Innovation implies change. Improvement implies positive change.

Not all change is positive. Not all innovation is positive.

Innovation goes hand in hand with disruption. Again, disruption involves change. But not necessarily positive change.

Think about the antonyms of change and disruption: stasis and stability. Those words don’t sound very exciting, but in some arenas they’re exactly what you should be aiming for; arenas like infrastructure or standards.

Not to get all pace layers-y here, but it seems to me that every endeavour has a sweet spot for innovation. For some projects, too little innovation is bad. For others, too much innovation is worse.

The trick is knowing which kind of project you’re working on.

(As a side note, I think some people use the word innovation to describe the generative, divergent phase of a design project: “how might we come up with innovative new approaches?” But we already have a word to describe the practice of generating novel and interesting ideas. That word isn’t innovation. It’s creativity.)

The Clearleft podcast is currently between seasons, but that’s not going to stop me from yapping on in audio files at any opportunity.

By the way, if you missed any of season two of the Clearleft podcast, be sure to check it out—there’s some good stuff in there.

I’ve been continuing my audio narration of Jay Hoffman’s excellent Web History series over on CSS tricks. We’re eight chapters in already! That’s a good few hours of audio—each chapter is over half an hour long.

The latest chapter was a joy to narrate. It’s all about the history of CSS so I remember many of the events that are mentioned, like when Tantek saved the web by implenting doctype switching (seriously, I honestly believe that if that hadn’t happened, CSS wouldn’t have “won”). Eric is in there. And Molly. And Elika. And Chris. And Dave.

Here’s the audio file if you want to have a listen. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed in your podcast-playing app of choice.

If you’re not completely sick of hearing my voice, you can also listen to the latest episode of the Object Oriented UX podcast with Sophia V. Prater. Our chat starts about eleven minutes into the episode and goes on for a good hour.

It was nice to be on the other side of the microphone, so to speak. The topic was Resilient Web Design but the conversation went in all sorts of directions.

I do enjoy a good natter. If you’ve got a podcast and you fancy having a chat, let me know.

I’ve been on a few different podcasts recently.

The tenth episode of the Design Systems podcast is myself and Chris having a back-and-forth about design systems: Overcoming Entropy and Turning Chaos Into Order:

Chris and Jeremy Keith discuss imbuing teams with a shared sense of ownership of their design system, creating design systems able to address unforeseen scenarios, design ops as an essential part of an effective design system, and more.

Gerry has started a new podcast to accompany his new book, World Wide Waste. He invited me on for the first episode: ‘We’ve ruined the Web. Here’s how we fix it.’:

Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet, and what to do about it. In this session, I’m chatting with Jeremy Keith. Jeremy is a philosopher of the internet. Every time I see him speak, I’m struck by his calming presence, his brilliant mind and his deep humanity.

We talked about performance, energy consumption, and digital preservation. We agreed on a lot, but there were also points where we fundamentally disagreed. Good stuff!

If you like the sound of some Irishmen chatting on a podcast, then as well as listening to me and Gerry getting into it, you might also enjoy the episode of The Blarney Pilgrims podcast that I was on:

Jeremy Keith is the founder and keeper of thesession.org, probably the greatest irish music resource in the world. And this episode hopefully has something of the generous essence of that archive. We flow, from The North as a different planet to Galway as the centre of the ’90s slacker world. From the one-tune-a-week origin of thesession.org and managing an online community to the richness and value of constancy.

I’ve already written about how much this meant to me.

On the same topic—Irish music on the web—I made a brief appearance in the latest episode of Shannon Heaton’s Irish Music Stories, Irish Tunes in the Key of C-19:

How are traditional musicians and dancers continuing creative careers and group music events during the Covid-19 pandemic? How is social distancing affecting the jigs and reels? In this unexpected open of Season Four of Irish Music Stories, musicians from Ireland, England, Belgium, Sweden, and the U.S. address on and offline strategies… from a safe distance.

I wrapped up last year with a list of some of the best audio I listened to in 2017. This year I huffduffed about 260 pieces of audio, so I could do a similar end-of-year list for 2018. But I thought I’d do something a little different this time.

It seems like podcasting is going from strength to strength with each passing year. Some friends of mine started new podcasts in 2018. Matt started Hobby Horse, where he talks to people about their tangential obsessions. Meanwhile Khoi started Wireframe, a jolly good podcast about design.

Apart from the trend of everyone having their own podcast these days, there’s also been a trend for quite short and manageable “seasons” of podcasts. See, for example, Horizon Line by Atlas Obscura, which is just four episodes long. Given the cherry-picking nature of my usual audio consumption (the very reason I made Huffduffer in the first place), this trend suits me quite well. There have been a few podcast runs in 2018 that I can recommend in their entirety.

The Secret History Of The Future is a collaboration between Seth Stevenson and Tom Standage, one of my favourite non-fiction authors. They look at modern technology stories through the lens of the past, much like Standage has done in books like The Victorian Internet. There are annoying sponsor blurbs to skip past, but apart from that, it’s a top-notch podcast.

I discovered Settling The Score this year. It’s a podcast all about film scores. The two hosts have spent the year counting down the top 25 scores in the American Film Institute’s list of (supposedly) greatest scores in American cinema history. It’s a pleasure to listen to them take a deep dive into each film and its score, analysing what works and what doesn’t. It will also make you want to rewatch the movie in question.

By far my favourite podcast listening experience this year was with Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years. It’s just six episodes long, but it manages to tell the sweep of human history and technology in an entertaining and fascinating way. I’ll admit I’m biased because it dwells on many of my hobby horses: the printing press, the telegraph, Claude Shannon and information theory. There are no annoying sponsorship interruptions, and best of all, you’ve got the wonderful voice of Stephen Fry in your earholes the whole time. Highly recommended!

So there you have it: three podcasts from 2018 that are worth subscribing to in their entirety:

• The Secret History Of The Future,
• Settling The Score, and
• Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years.

I huffduffed 290 pieces of audio in 2017. I’ve still got a bit of a backlog of items I haven’t listened to yet, but I thought I’d share some of my favourite items from the past year. Here are twelve pieces of audio, one for each month of 2017…

Donald Hoffman’s TED talk, Do we see reality as it really is?. TED talks are supposed to blow your mind, right? (22:15)

How to Become Batman on Invisibilia. Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller challenge you to think of blindness as social construct. Hear ‘em out. (58:02)

Where to find what’s disappeared online, and a whole lot more: the Internet Archive on Public Radio International. I just love hearing Brewster Kahle’s enthusiasm and excitement. (42:43)

Every Tuesday At Nine on Irish Music Stories. I’ve been really enjoying Shannon Heaton’s podcast this year. This one digs into that certain something that happens at an Irish music session. (40:50)

Adam Buxton talks to Brian Eno (part two is here). A fun and interesting chat about Brian Eno’s life and work. (53:10 and 46:35)

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis on Kreative Kontrol. This was far more revealing than I expected: genuine and unpretentious. (57:07)

Paul Lloyd at Patterns Day. All the talks at Patterns Day were brilliant. Paul’s really stuck with me. (28:21)

James Gleick on Time Travel at The Long Now. There were so many great talks from The Long Now’s seminars on long-term thinking. Nicky Case and Jennifer Pahlka were standouts too. (1:20:31)

Long Distance on Reply All. It all starts with a simple phone call. (47:27)

The King of Tears on Revisionist History. Malcolm Gladwell’s style suits podcasting very well. I liked this episode about country songwriter Bobby Braddock. Related: Jon’s Troika episode on tearjerkers. (42:14)

Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars: The True Story of a Real Rocket Man with G.A. “Jim” Ogle. This was easily my favourite podcast episode of 2017. It’s on the User Defenders podcast but it’s not about UX. Instead, host Jason Ogle interviews his father, a rocket scientist who worked on everything from Apollo to every space shuttle mission. His story is fascinating. (2:38:21)

R.E.M. on Song Exploder. Breaking down the song Try Not To Breathe from Automatic For The People. (16:15)

I’ve gone back and added the tag “2017roundup” to each of these items. So if you’d like to subscribe to a podcast of just these episodes, here are the links:

• RSS
• Subscribe in Podcasts app
• Subscribe in Overcast
• Subscribe in Downcast
• Subscribe in Instacast
• Subscribe in another app

I was pointed to this discussion thread which is talking about how to make podcast episodes findable for services like Huffduffer.

The logic behind Huffduffer’s bookmarklet goes something like this…

1. Find any a elements that have href values ending in “.mp3” or “.m4a”.
2. If there’s just one audio on the page, use that.
3. If there are multiple audio, offer a list to the user and have them choose.

If that doesn’t work…

1. Look for a link element with a rel value of “enclosure”.
2. Look for a meta element property value of “og:audio”.
3. Look for audio elements and grab either the src attribute of the element itself, or the src attribute of any source elements within the audio element.

If that doesn’t work…

1. Try to find a link to an RSS feed (a link that looks like “rss” or “feed” or “atom”).
2. If there is a feed, parse that for enclosure elements and present that list to the user.

That covers 80-90% of use cases. There are still situations where the actual audio file for a podcast episode is heavily obfuscated—either with clickjacking JavaScript “download” links, or links that point to a redirection to the actual file.

If you have a podcast and you want your episodes to be sharable and huffduffable, you have a few options:

Have a link to the audio file for the episode somewhere on the page, something like:

<a href="/path/to/file.mp3">download</a>

That’s the simplest option. If you’re hosting with Soundcloud, this is pretty much impossible to accomplish: they deliberately obfuscate and time-limit the audio file, even if you want it to be downloadable (that “download” link literally only allows a user to download that file in that moment).

If you don’t want a visible link on the page, you could use metadata in the head of your document. Either:

<link rel="enclosure" href="/path/to/file.mp3">

Or:

<meta property="og:audio" content="/path/to/file.mp3">

And if you want to encourage people to huffduff an episode of your podcast, you can also include a “huffduff it” link, like this:

<a href="https://huffduffer.com/add?page=referrer">huffduff it</a>

You can also use ?page=referer—that misspelling has become canonised thanks to HTTP.

There you go, my podcasting friends. However you decide to do it, I hope you’ll make your episodes sharable.

I’ve noticed lately that my experience of films is lasting long after leaving the cinema. I end up reading opinion pieces and listening to podcasts about the film for days or even weeks afterwards.

Interstellar, Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road …I enjoyed each of them in the cinema, and then I enjoyed thinking about them again by huffduffing related material to catch up on.

Sometimes I find myself doing it with other media too. I finish a book, and then listen to reckons about it afterwards.

I guess this is the water cooler effect, but extended to the internet.

Marco Arment has released his podcast app Overcast for iOS—you can read his introduction to the app.

It plays nicely with Huffduffer. If you want to listen to any Huffduffer feed in Overcast, it’s a straightforward process.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

It’s pretty straightforward to subscribe to Huffduffer URLs in other iOS apps too. Matt has written up the process of using Huffduffer and Instacast. And there’s also a write-up of using Huffduffer and Downcast.