WTF is podping?

TLDR: It’s a new podcasting 2.0 feature that instantly lets you know when a new podcast episode is available (where supported).

And for the longer and perhaps more interesting explanation:

If you start with the most raw interpretation of what a podcast actually is, it’s a document in a specific format called RSS that references media content (audio and video typically). RSS is a standard way to publish lists of things, it pre-dates podcasts, and has been used for all sorts of things, traditionally news feeds. Want to host a list of articles and publish those to the world in a standard way that a lot of apps can use, RSS is your friend! BTW, anyone else miss Google Reader?

However, one of hangups with RSS “feeds” (RSS documents hosted on the web) is detecting when new content is published and updating a client app (such as a podcast app) whenever new content gets added. Most apps use a method called polling, which simply means downloading the RSS feed over and over again, checking to see if there’s anything new in the feed. This blows for mobile devices that are resource constrained, we don’t want to use our data or our battery unnecessarily, checking for content that might not be there.

Up until Podping came along very recently, the common solution was a technology called WebSub. I’ll omit the nitty gritty here, suffice to say that WebSub in this case didn’t solve the problem really, it just created more problems.

Podping is another fantastic innovation coming out of the Podcasting 2.0 community.

Podping uses the Hive blockchain to publish data in real time about new podcast content immediately as it gets published. In order to pull this off, podcast hosting companies (publishers) have to play along, and apps like ours (Podcast Guru) do our part as well. You can think of a blockchain (in this context), as a never ending stream of messages.

The podcast publishers toss little messages into the stream every time a new episode is published and Podcast Guru sits downstream, reading all these messages as they fly past on their way to eternity. When we discover that a new episode is published for a podcast that Jane is subscribed too (or follows, if you prefer that terminology) then we can tell Jane immediately with an app specific push notification, she doesn’t have to wait for the next time her device decides it’s a good time to check for new episodes, which could be many hours in the future.

You can even watch this information flow here as it’s happening right now at https://podping.watch/!

So that’s the slightly longer explanation, but if you really want to go further down this rabbit hole, we recommend Dave Jones’s great article on substack!