Proposals for new podcast tags in RSS unveiled

Proposals for new podcast tags in RSS unveiled

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  • Our cover story: In “The Tech Stuff” below, we highlight the most exciting news for independent podcasters for some time: the proposal of a set of new tags for RSS from The Podcast Index. For podcasters, this could mean better discoverability and accessibility, more revenue and protection against piracy.

  • Amazon has bought two domain names: podcast.com and podcasting.com. They both forward to Audible, which doesn’t have third-party podcasts on it. (Amazon Music does, in four countries).

  • US radio personality Howard Stern was apparently approached by Spotify, claims Bloomberg. His contract with SiriusXM seems close to renewal, however.

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The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

  • The Podcast Index has unveiled a first draft of a new, “wholistic”, RSS namespace for podcasting. The specification includes additional tags like location, a locking mechanism to protect feeds against piracy, links to this show on other podcast apps, transcripts, multiple enclosures and funding. The namespace is to be done in phases, allowing full industry contribution; and it’s fully backwards-compatible with existing feeds. There’s more in their podcast.
  • JSON Feed v1.1 has been released. A simpler, easier-to-parse alternative to RSS, this has support for multiple attachments (“enclosures”, to use RSS terminology), and for extensions (“namespaces”). We’ve updated our JSON Feed.
  • Apple Podcasts rejects new podcasts with show images bigger than 500Kb, or bigger than 3000x3000 pixels - but you can change that image after you initially publish. So, congratulations to the Canadian podcast Entreprendre Ensemble for managing to have a podcast in Apple Podcasts which has an image measuring 5833x5833, and is an astonishing 102MB large! Wow. No wonder it’s broken our page… (h/t Mike Kelley)
  • PodcastPing - an upcoming “monitoring system just for podcasters” - has worked to integrate Podcast Index into its service.
  • PodcastAddict now offers multiple podcast search engines, including The Podcast Index.
  • Libsyn appears to have started automatically forwarding insecure RSS feeds to their secure HTTPS versions.

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