What if they were used to help our different types of listeners? Rather than marking the different topics within our episodes, what if we marked the parts…
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These are much easier for us to figure out where to place within our show. Sometimes just figuring out a list of topics is tough—when I did chapter marks for Movers Mindset episodes it took a lot of time.
Let the highlight stay where it is; rather than having to pull it out to a cold opening—more editing saved. Head for that chapter and you’re dropped right on the best quote. Bonus, you can simply keep listening, or scrub backwards to hear more from before the quote. (Unlike when we pull it out to the front and listeners have no idea where it is found in the episode.)
Heard this show a ton? just hit Introduction, or even just jump to Conversation.
Someone shared this with you, and you just want the take-aways? Jump to More about this episode, where our unique-for-this-episode outtro lies with all the books, people, etc.
Does anyone use chapter marks when they are LISTENING?
@craigconstantine - No, don’t use - and never heard of this before! Like the service to the listener though. Need to do some digging to find the “How to set it up.”
They had an article, from 2017 if I recall correctly, saying “don’t bother, they’re not supported by the podcast players.”
These days, most things seem to support them. But there’s now more than one way to do chapter marks. They can be embedded directly into the audio files, or they can be provided as an additional data file that chapter-marks-aware-players can download…
This list of apps (apps which have chosen to self-report themselves into The Podcast Index’s list of apps) shows chapter-marks support, Podcastindex.org
…and the ongoing work on the podcast namespace (“namespace” is a technical term for the definition of how our RSS files are laid out) has direct support for chapter marks, https://podcastnamespace.org
The open podcast ecosystem is powered by RSS feeds. RSS can be extended with a “namespace”, a set of new tags that enable new features. Apple added their own iTunes podcast namespace in 2005, which allowed podcasters to specify things like podcast artwork, categories and other elements. Other namespaces have also been proposed; but in 2020, a new, collaborative, podcast namespace was first worked on by a wide number of interested people, aided and encouraged by Adam Curry and Dave Jones.
I don’t use them when listening via an audio podcast player. My listening is passive and so I’m probably driving or walking or gardening or… Well you get the picture, I’m not clicking after I press play.
But if it’s on YouTube, then I’m potentially more active and using my desktop computer. Often those podcasts aren’t the ones I’m subscribed to and I’m just there to soak up information about something I’m trying to get done with my business, or my garden, or my health, or… And so then if there are chapters and I just want to know how to, say spot when a bee colony is about to abscond, then I’ll skip to that chapter and avoid all the stuff I think I already know.
