The Blog Gets Spoke.

I’m resuming this blog that I had written for a limited time last year. A good place to begin again is with “Spoke,” a new social audio app developed by SiriusXM satellite radio. Spoke comes a little closer to being a single place to find podcasting content – something that did not seem as possible when writing this blog about podcasting last year (see July 24, 2016 entry).

Spoke also does two important things for the podcasting medium. The app makes it possible to share insightful bits from podcasts or streaming audio programs through social media. It also pairs, possibly for the first time, content from satellite radio with content from podcasts. These are key advances that I think I also identified in this blog last year – or if I didn’t explicitly do so, at least skirted doing so in some entries.

Of course, a new app or service isn’t going to be perfect overnight. Aside from SiriusXM show clips, on first glance, it’s pulling from Vox Media, Recode, Midroll (on a limited basis), and small independent unaffiliated podcasts. Spoke probably is, naturally, walled off from getting clips from the shows on Amazon’s Audible Channels. Spoke also does not appear to have clips from Gimlet, Howl, Panoply, Earwolf or Wondery.

All that said, though, Spoke has the architecture to add more sources of streaming audio content as it works out permissions and licensing. Spoke has the potential to get stronger as an aggregator, overall. It’s already married satellite and free content. On top of that, making social sharing of clips from programs spreads seeds that can grow podcasting well beyond the 2% share of all audio entertainment listeners that Edison Research reported as of August 2016.

Editor’s Note: Watch this space for shorter, but more frequent insights on the podcasting industry and its development as a medium. And, again, recommendations for full episodes of shows (footnote – the point of podcasting, even with greater availability of clips, is their ability to go in-depth), starting with:

Podcast of the week:

Hidden Brain, July 25, 2017 “You 2.0: Deep Work.” A good, old friend I reconnected with recently turned me on to this NPR podcast. It’s the first of several episodes in its “You 2.0” series. This episode tackles how one can be more productive by enforced disconnection from constant streams of emails and messages in a work environment – in order to devote more hours and more sustained attention to thinking through work challenges and producing output, whatever the product or industry.