Jeremy Cherfas

Nifty (though I haven’t tried it yet). Useful tool for setting SoundCloud audio free if ever the huffduffer snarfer is not working.

Do you know anything as #indieweb capable as @withknown out of the box @raretrack ?

Eat This Podcast letting off steam www.eatthispodcast.com/but-there…

Jonathan LaCour (aka @cleverdevil) has done a fine job of articulating what it might take to make the web more interesting again. That it contributes to my feeling of being hopelessly underpowered might conceivably add to my motivation.

Another reason we need to own our data – because Manton’s fourth tip links to a post on app.net that is now, of course, dead and buried … unless it lives elsewhere. #indieweb

This is a perfect use of Huffduffer.com, to listen to audio with a specific tag where I might not want to subscribe to a #podcast that only occasionally deals with that topic. #indieweb

Curbing my own disappointment with congrats to @fuchsiadunlop and @evankleiman and all other #jbfa nominees.

Testing web mention plugin at Grav.

I really love this page, because I wrote it. But I am also out of my depth. Way out.

But I need some data to play with, that’s for sure.

Pork safety in Vietnam: further evidence from @ILRI that eaters and officials worry about the wrong things news.ilri.org/2017/03/1…

Nick Quah’s Hot Pod newsletter is a lode from which I occasionally extract a nugget. Today, in the wake of the latest Edison Report on podcast listening (in the US) he quotes a bloke from Audible who says:

To me, the fact that 40% of US adults have tried podcasting, yet only half of them listen regularly, that’s astounding. Show me any other medium that has that gap. None. When people sample and don’t habituate, it speaks to interest that isn’t being met by the content that’s available today. There either isn’t enough variety of things for people to listen to —or there isn’t enough of what they like to meet their appetite. With 350,000 podcasts, that seems like a strange thing to say, but the simple truth is that potential listeners aren’t sticking with it — and there are only two potential reasons: not enough good stuff — or they simply can’t find it. Solving this could go as far as doubling the audience for podcasting.

I wonder why “Eric Nuzum, Audible’s SVP of Original Content,” even bothers to raise the straw man of not enough content. And why he does not raise the question that discovery and subscription are two sides of the same coin. Right now, neither discovery nor subscription is easy.

Nick Quah himself doesn’t think discovery is a problem, and that’s a problem for me. He says:

It has always occurred to me that discovery functions in the podcasting space along the same dynamics as the rest of the internet; there is simply so much stuff out there, and so the problem isn’t the discovering an experience in and of itself — it’s discovering a worthwhile or meaningful experience within a universe of deeply suboptimal experiences.

But to me that seems to miss the essential difference between audio and the other things on the internet.

It is hard to get audio at a glance. And the solution is not to make ever shorter bits of attention-grabbing audio. It is to find other ways to recommend and share audio in ways that make it easy to hear a piece, to sample a show and eventually, maybe, to subscribe.

Rory Stewart reviews ‘Aleppo Observed’by Maurits H. van den Boogert · LRB 16 February 2017

Behind a paywall, alas, but trust me, this is a cut-and-paste quotation:

And although van den Boogert is more disparaging of the Russells’ichthyology – ‘based almost exclusively on what they were served at the consular table, and possibly what they observed in the stalls of the fish market’– he cannot fail to be impressed by their catalogue of more than seven hundred Syrian plants, two of which, a sage and a milk-vetch, are now named the Phlomis Russeliana and the Astragalus Russell.

Which just goes to show. You can walk across Afghanistan, be UK Minister of State for International Development, wear your extensive learning as lightly as you please and still screw up scientific names.

Scientific names are strong proper names, which take no the.

@KitchenBee Surely brains aren’t all that clean. Or are they?

In the end, I don’t think it is worth the extra faff. It is easy enough to mark up by hand for recipes. There really are only a couple of extra things to watch out for and I have got snippets for the more complex ones now. Need to check again, but I think it is all working.

@MatthewJDalby And if you’re wondering how they boiled them, 20k years before ceramics – www.eatthispodcast.com/neanderth…

My contribution to #trypod is @criminalshow and if the whole podcast thing is new to you, they have a handy dandy guide to how to listen thisiscriminal.com/how-to-li…

I’m totally in shock of the nicest kind after reading what @chrisaldrich had to say about Eat This Podcast.

@chrisaldrich Funny you just listened to that. More on “good” industrial food here www.eatthispodcast.com/good-indu…

@scottishbktrust @nicolakidsbooks Bet that tiger’s name was Yorrick.