Podcasts

Recently I drove for 26 hours over two days between Switzerland and France and I used Audible rather than Audiobookshelf to listen. The reason for this is that when I am driving I do not want to fiddle with an app on a phone. I don’t even want to fiddle with apps on Car Play.

I noticed that PocketCasts, the Podcast App, MyCitroën and even TomTom can be quite distracting when you’re trying to set things up when you’re driving. Most of these apps are fine, if you start from a parking above ground with access to data, but if you’re underground you need to fiddle while driving. To be clear, I don’t, and that’s one of my reason for not using most car play apps.

Two or three days ago I noticed that I have spent at least sixteen thousand three hundred and fifty seven minutes listening to 320 items over 214 days via Audiobookshelf and I can honestly say that of my self hosted experiments this is my favourite.

What I Like

What I like about Audiobookshelf is that it gives me the opportunity to find podcasts I like, add them, download every episode and then slowly make my way through them.

There was a time when it was much easier to listen to every episode of a podcast for two reasons. The first of these is that they were new so it wouldn’t take too long to burn through one hundred episodes. The second reason is that podcasts were half an hour long so you could listen to two or three during a one or one and a half hour walk.

Within the next year FM broadcasting will come to an end in Switzerland in 2024 and people with old cars are sad. So are people who want to hold on to FM for nostalgic reasons. For hobbyists it’s a shame too, because then all FM radio equipment will become obsolete as we will no longer have content available, for people to listen to.

We Have Already Shifted

Having said this, it has already been replaced by Internet radio in people’s homes, and DAB+ in cars, and by people who switched to digital. The advantage of DAB+ and DVB-T2 is that you get many more programs thanks to a smaller antenna.

Over the years I have subscribed to hundreds of podcasts, YouTube channels, people on Instagram TikTok and more. I then stopped subscribing, and sometimes like, but never when I’m asked to by the content creators. The short reason for not liking and subscribing now is that if I subscribe I usually grow tired with the content and stop watching, so my subscription is an illusion. The reason I don’t “like” plenty of videos is simply that the videos are not worth a like.

Recently I have been Lunix Unplugged and Self-Hosted. It’s by listening to self-hosted that I decided to experiment and learn about Linux by experimenting with Pis and projects created for Pi such as PhotoPrismPi, Pi-Hole and Nextcloud, to mention just a few.

These podcasts kept mentioning boosts, sats, value for value and compatible apps such as Castamatic, among others. I haven’t played with the others but I have played with Castamatic. It behaves like other podcasts and you can choose between using the iTunes podcast list or the Podcast Index podcast list. I used the Apple Podcast list, for now.

Yesterday Twitter decided to re-brand as X. X.com redirects to Twitter.com. Within the next few days, weeks, months twitter will change its name and brand, and the URLs will be wrong. All twitter links, all embedded tweets, everything will become dead links. When we look for something on Twitter, we will be redirected to X.

The Podcast Legacy

Every single website, every single CMS, every Static Website, everything, will have to be re-written to point to the new domain name. Plenty of content will not be updated and will be a reminder of the past.

When you listen to podcasts, and you read articles, and you visit websites you always see Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram, to name the giants. In every podcast episode you hear the guests say “You can find me under this name on this network, and the same name on that network.”

The Shift to CrowdFunded Media

With the recent shift from Venture Capitalist Social Media to crowdfunded social media I expect to hear about a shift in where people can be found. I expect that we will soon hear “And you can find me on Calckey at this address, on Pixelfeed.eu with this username, and peertube.social. 

There was a time when I wanted to listen to hours of podcasts a day, and I did. I would listen on my walks, on my commutes to work, while driving and more. I would love listening to podcasts so much that I would wish I had more time to spend on listening to podcasts. That, unfortunately changed, as podcasts became livestreams, and thus unedited.

Too Long For Casual Listening

It’s not that I don’t like listening to people talk, but that when a podcast goes from being fourty five minutes to an hour long, to being one and a half to two hours long then it becomes too long for a walk, and too time consuming to listen to more than one podcast a day. It gets worse. The problem with This Week in Tech, and that entire network of podcasts is that by being unedited they waste our time. Instead of getting tech news we get personal stories. Instead of analysis and context we get opinion and sidetracked. They used to joke about rat holes. By being live and unedited, when shared as podcasts, they become irrelevant.
Hiking podcasts, programming podcasts and others all make this mistake. The result is that listening to podcasts is less engaging than it was. What makes this worse is that podcasts are sponsored and funded, so as they become profitable they become less engaging for the listener.

Today I ran and then walked a reverse journey of what I did yesterday. I wanted to take a picture of the corkscrew tree. It would have required for me to wait for two slow walkers and their dog to pass and because they insisted on walking two abreast it made more sense to turn around and take an alternate route.

Slight increase in the number of cases in Switzerland.