I know it's a lost battle because anyone whose not a nerd will never care, but I wish we could all just call content that moves to a centralised platform like Spotify an internet talkshow or whatever and leave the word podcast to the people distributing MP3s via RSS.
This is an interesting point. To me, it feels like an old-form talkshow would be radio or TV. Both of these are subject to heavy regulation and corporate gatekeeping. That is much less true for Internet publishing. Although, as Internet publishing becomes more and more centralised, the same regulations and gatekeeping are likely to emerge in similar form.
The only people who think that the medium is the message are people whose focus is studying media, and not messages. Kind of like "to the guy with a hammer everything looks like a nail" type.
Web hosting companies can be pressured into removing domains and hosting.
Companies running mobile App Stores can be forced to remove apps from their platform.
Social media sites are forced to take down content all the time.
This doesn't mean it will be impossible for people to find these types of content but with each level of restriction, the people who are able and willing to go through the pain to get the information will shrink to a point that they hold no power anymore.
The web was "open" because it was rather small and insignificant. Now that it can move markets and decide which way the world power shifts, those who are at risk of losing their power will do everything to control it so that it doesn't happen.
>The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!"
>The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
Also we have user-agents. Our userscripts (& amassed socialized, collective defenses they enable) should help provide us agency, to defend us against hijinx, to give us our own preferred view of systems. The web platform is uniquely able to handle these trivial little harassment cases, in ways far better than conventional software. This is just such a small-minded, speck-of-dust little concern to me, such a minor irrelevant point. Who cares how long & how stupid the thread on blink tag was, or how hyperbolic the lulz were at the time over it- this is easy to fix.
Podcasting not having a specification allows hollowed out soulless corporate ghouls to put any audio series they want online however they want & call it a podcast. Even a flawed, shitty specification at least defines some base idea, creates a general technical terrain that defines the idea. Podcasting got ripped the fuck off by monsters, because it had no specification. Technical cooperation is impossible without defined technical grounds.
Being serious: do you really think a lack of RFC killed RSS? If so, why not submit one now? I feel like RSS could make a serious comeback if given a chance, like built-in browser support for it.
