Why we love podcast and RSS
published on 2022/12/13
Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere. You can choose how you want to engage with them and manage them and it is legitimately heartwarming that nothing has ever gotten in the way of that being a fundamental fact.
But here’s the problem. RSS is plumbing. It’s nice to put into your home when you’re building it, but it’s hard to pull out. And if Google pulls out that plumbing, suddenly a whole lot of RSS feeds—which are used for numerous other reasons besides simply reading—become useless. Podcasting, of course, is designed around them. So is a whole lot of website distribution. Many of the posts at Twitter, for example, end up there because they’re being directly syndicated from RSS.