Podping Just Grew Again

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This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.

Podping is Unique

I believe @podping is the only non-social, non-gaming, non-financial use of Blockchain which actually makes sense and does something which can't be done better some other way.

Welcoming Spreaker to Podping

Podping puts notifications on Hive about new episodes of podcasts. Podpings are written to Hive by Podcast Hosting companies whenever one of their customers publishes a new episode. Last week a podcast host called Spreaker turned on Podping for all their shows.

https://twitter.com/emanuele_r/status/1765047045021467129
- emanuele_r

Spreaker is the podcasting hosting company from iHeart Radio and is pretty big. Up to now Buzzsprout was the largest hosting company using Podping and Spreaker is larger.

Spreaker sent out a maximum of 1,500 show notifications in an hour and are averaging 530 shows in the last 24 hours.

Interesting details

A little technical detail. Whilst anyone can send a Podping using their own Hive account and posting key (Podpings are just custom_json), most podpings are sent by a service run by @podcastindexorg. That uses 5 servers (very cheap bottom of the line Linode hosted machines) and they're load balanced by geography, three in the US, one in Europe and one in Australia.

Up to now the three US machines have carried most of the load, Spreaker's traffic is mostly coming out via the European machine and you can see that in the podping.eee red dots coming on stream around March 6th in the plot below.

podpings spreaker starting.png

Big Picture

When a podcast starts sending out podpings, that means that any application or service which wants to check if that podcast has updated, no longer needs to specifically check that podcast every few minutes or hours. The service can just watch for ALL podpings and act on the ones it is interested in.

The more podcast hosts adopt Podping, the more podcasts use Podping, the more valuable it becomes for apps and services to watch poding.

And what are the three biggest services which watch podcasts? Apple, Google and Spotify.

Podping is already being used by PodcastIndex (because Podping is an initiative from them under the auspices of Podcasting 2.0) to dramatically reduce their checking of RSS feeds for changes.

At some point we hope that one or all of the three big ones will see the light and start watching Podping on Hive.

What is Podping?

Podping is a decentralized system designed to solve a significant challenge in podcasting: discovering new episodes promptly after they're published. By utilizing the Hive Blockchain, Podping enables podcast hosting platforms to send out instant notifications whenever a feed is updated. This innovation allows podcast indexes and apps to re-poll only the RSS feeds that have changed, leading to more efficient use of resources and quicker updates for listeners. Podping has been embraced as a part of the Podcasting 2.0 movement, aiming to improve the podcasting ecosystem for creators, consumers, and hosting providers alike.

Value for Value

For the last few months while building @v4vapp I was generously supported by the DHF. Going forward I have a much more modest support which covers direct server costs and a little of my time.

If you appreciate the work I do on and around Hive, you can express this directly: upvoting posts on Hive is great. Also consider a direct donation (there's a Tip button on Hive or a Lightning Address) on all my posts.