1 - Podcast Launch! Busy Inbox! Open Standards!
Did you know that podcasting is one of the only major forms of entertainment media that is primarily built on open web standards?
Ian:Hello, and welcome to the first episode of High Low Piccolo with Ian Steyn, where I share with you a success, a challenge, and something interesting I learned in the past week or so. I am, of course, the titular Ian Steyn, a curious guy and computer science student doing a summer co op at Transistor FM, the company that hosts and distributes this very podcast. It's just me this week, but in the future, we'll be hearing from some of my colleagues and peers and mentors. But I thought I would try to get this one out so that I can tell you about my first couple weeks here as a customer support engineer at Transistor.
Ian:It's been really fun. The team has been very welcoming, and I am just learning so much so fast. And so let's get into it. I'll tell you what I've been learning about.
Ian:HIGH. Launching the podcast.
Ian:I made cover art. I made a trailer. I submitted my podcast for distribution. I made a Apple Podcast Connect account. I made a Spotify for creators account. I made a podcast website. You can find it at pod.iansteyn.com.
Ian:I was asked to do this podcast by my boss, so I was I was a little bit skeptical. I didn't really know, like, what this was gonna look like. But, actually, it's really exciting to see something that you've made, like, show up out there on the Internet and on all the apps and stuff. I've barely really done anything with it so far, but I'm really happy with it. It's it's interesting to learn about.
Ian:I think a big takeaway for me is that I'm just getting to see the perspective of a customer, which is really gonna help me in customer support moving forward. Like, I have been in their shoes now, and I've made a podcast using our product. So that's gonna be really helpful.
Ian:And then also, I'm quite proud of the fact that I managed to do this in between all the support chats that I've been answering, which brings me to
Ian:LOW. Support chats take up a lot of time.
Ian:Okay. But I wanna reframe the low. So really a better name for this segment would be challenge. I call it a low because high low Piccolo has a nice ring to it, and that's kind of a framework that I've used to reflect on my day or my week for a long time. But on this show, a low is not a bad thing. It's just a low in the sense that maybe it's something that's a little more boring or a little more difficult, but it's always gonna be an opportunity for me to learn something, and that's good.
Ian:So a challenge for me this week was that support chats take up a lot of time, more than I expected. It was extra busy this week because I joined the the company right at a product launch. They're doing beta testing for video publishing features. Video podcasting is is really big right now. And so there's lots of questions coming in about that, and we're kind of trying to figure it out.
Ian:And what I found is it's quite hard to focus on customer support chats all day and to, like, get other projects and other work done in between that. But what I'm coming to terms with is, hey, I'm a customer support engineer. This is the primary thing that I was hired for is to do customer support. And so I don't need to feel bad about, like, spending a lot of time on it because that's part of what I'm here to do.
Ian:And I'm just gonna have to continue learning, like, how to find that balance between being responsive and answering people's questions and finding some time to work on some other projects as well. So that's something that I'm gonna keep working on.
Ian:PICCOLO. Podcasting is built on open standards.
Ian:So I've been learning a lot about the technology behind podcasts, and I'm gonna do my best to explain to you how they work briefly. So there's kind of two parts to it.
Ian:One is the audio files. So every podcast episode is basically just an audio file, like an m p three, and that has to be hosted somewhere, somewhere out in the world. So that's part of what Transistor does is they host people's podcasts for them. They keep all those audio files in their database.
Ian:And then the second part is how do you get those audio files and all the other information that needs to be attached to them to all of the platforms that people are listening on. And so how that works is every podcast has something called an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, this is just like a text file.
Ian:Technically, it's it's XML, which is extended markup language. So it's a way to encode two things: the links to all of those audio files to all the episodes and any other information that needs to be attached to the podcast. So, like, the podcast name, who owns it, the description of every episode, show notes, all that kind of stuff.
Ian:And so it becomes really easy then to distribute your podcast to all the various platforms because all you have to do is give them the link to your RSS feed, and then Apple and Spotify and all those platforms can just check back to that link, check your RSS feed every once in a while to see, hey. Are you adding new episodes? So they just go to that link, check your RSS feed, check if you've if there's a new link for a new episode on there, and then they can update it and present it in their user interface, you know, in Apple Podcast or Spotify or iHeart or whatever.
Ian:And so with access to the RSS feed, you can listen anywhere you want because there are standards that govern how the data is encoded. Every podcast platform is expecting you to provide certain information with it in a certain format, and then they can present it how they want.
Ian:And so this is kind of the real Piccolo for me. The thing that I found really interesting in learning about this the past few weeks is, like, this is pretty unique as far as media goes, entertainment media especially. There's not really much else out there that works like this. If we take video as an example, the main place people watch videos is on YouTube. And that's because there isn't a standard for distributing video in the same way that there is for podcasts.
Ian:The same is even true for, like, music or for books. There are different platforms that you can consume that media on, but as a creator, if you wanna distribute those pieces of media to different platforms, you have to do it in a different way for each one because they all expect different types of data to be attached to it, different details, and tags, and stuff. And so it's a really unique and really cool feature of podcasting that it's built on this open standard because it means that as a listener and as a creator, you can choose what platforms you wanna use without actually changing the core of your media. Transistor is actually involved in something called the Podcast Standards Project, which is dedicated to maintaining this openness and kind of modernizing it and, trying to prevent big tech companies from taking it over and making podcasting, like, locked into specific platforms, which is, I think, really cool, and I will link to that in the show notes if you're interested.
Ian:This has been High Low Piccolo with Ian Steyn. Thanks for listening, and tune in next time to hear about more interesting stuff that I am learning.
