Episode 266: Research Velocity

Show Notes

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FROM PREP.md — Adam's PC20 items

Pod News — podcast app revenue (source for 'cut the apps into the money')

Pod News — the ad-skipping player

Board Q (Adam): "If you go to another chapter, is that a new play?" — for the AMP play=30s definition.

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00 - DAVE'S WORLD: THE ALTERNATE ENCLOSURE FINALLY GETS PICKED UP + HLS-IN-RSS SURGE

<b>Take the lap:</b> Podbean and Buzzsprout are now testing/supporting the <b>alternate enclosure</b> — letting other apps (Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, iHeart, TrueFans) reach the video/alt versions instead of everything vanishing into the Apple-only void. Lead the boardroom with the namespace win.

<b>HLS video in RSS is accelerating:</b> @js — "the rate of podcast hosts publishing high-quality video in podcast feeds using HLS has gone up quite a bit, thanks mostly to Transistor and Flightcast." The open path is winning adoption; watch it live.

<b>Namespace repo status:</b> attribution bylines merged for the <i>block</i> and <i>alternate enclosure</i> tags (PRs #772/#773). Quiet week on commits — the plumbing is holding.

<b>Dave in the wild:</b> on the LLM-vs-tags thread — "A 'weight' is just a form of heuristic. Regression is literally built into the LLM at a fundamental level. Re-weighting a model will always regress other weights." (Continues the on-device-AI vs authored-tags fight from 265.) Also: Hover auto-renews domains 2 days out — @genebean's alert script gets a Dave thumbs-up.

HLS-in-RSS tracker (livewire)

Dave Winer — distributable is not distributed

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BM - FROM THE TIMELINE — podcastindex.social this week (JS & Dave)

@js: "the rate of podcast hosts publishing high-quality video in podcast feeds using HLS has gone up quite a bit — thanks mostly to Transistor and Flightcast." (tracker: hls.livewire.io)

@js: "Waves of new podcast listeners may exist, but they aren't downloading episodes via RSS, no matter how many podcast apps are being vibe-coded."

@js shared Castro's "Podcast apps: a framework for dying" — his read: "well thought-out, but a bit too pessimistic imo — the next few years are going to be interesting." (Steven B: "anyone interested in the PC2.0 namespace read and consider this.")

@js on Patreon's "painful update" (Conte, layoffs): "I'd love to know what change Patreon's operational market has undergone in the last six months."

@js on the scraping wars: a court ruled aggregated search data (URLs, snippets, index facts) are "publicly accessible facts," not copyrightable — relevant to index/crawler rights.

@js (amplifying Dave Winer): "Threads and Bluesky are not distributed. Distributable is not the same as being distributed."

@dave: "A 'weight' is just a form of heuristic. Regression is literally built into the LLM at a fundamental level… one slider." — the on-device-abstraction vs authored-tags thread, continued from 265.

@dave, namespace repo: merged the block-tag + alternate-enclosure attribution PRs (mid-May); no new commits this week — the action is in adoption, not spec.

@csb → @dave @adam: "bros, I've just sent you $15.55 via bitcoin gram and amazingly only one split failed" — boosts still flow on-network (counter to 'streaming sats is over').

@mgdell (Mike Dell): "21 years of podcasting: the thing I don't want us to lose."

Mike Dell — 21 years of podcasting

Castro — Podcast apps: a framework for dying

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01 - "WHAT IS A PODCAST?" — THE AMP ACCORDS PUT A FORMAL DEFINITION ON IT

<b>The AMP Accords landed this week</b> (Oxford Road's Dan Granger + Giles Martin), a year-long, commercial-end-of-the-industry group defining what a podcast IS, what a "play" is, and building exposure/attribution standards to replace the download. Note: the definition still names <b>open RSS feeds</b>.

<b>The formal definition:</b> "an on-demand show rooted in the spoken word and fully intelligible as audio… accessed as audio or video via open RSS feeds and other distribution methods." The commercial world catching up to what this room has said for years.

<b>The play = 30 consecutive seconds</b> (audio OR video); Spotify already adopting it, YouTube ~same ballpark. No time-window qualifier yet. Downloads called "a faith-based metric" (Tom Webster). "Amen," says James.

<b>It's in the air everywhere:</b> Mike Dell (@mgdell) — "21 years of podcasting: the thing I don't want us to lose." And @js flagged Castro's @dabluck must-read "Podcast apps: a framework for dying" (@StevenB: "anyone interested in the PC2.0 namespace should read it") — @js pushes back: too pessimistic, "the next few years are going to be interesting."

Mike Dell — 21 years of podcasting

Castro — Podcast apps: a framework for dying

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06 - QUIPS / TRANSITIONS / LINK DUMP

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