Marco Arment
Really Specific Stories
The Rise and Fall of Tech Podcasts
The Apple tech podcast thing was still pretty young in 2006, 2007. There weren't a lot of tech shows that really grabbed my attention back then. I think most of the tech podcast renaissance happened maybe five or six years later. It was an amazing time for blogs and RSS. And there's a lot of reasons why it went away or got much smaller. But I miss that world and I think back on it very fondly.
Marco tells the story of how he became a Mac enthusiast, indie app developer and tech podcaster, covering his work on Tumblr, Instapaper, Overcast and Accidental Tech Podcast, among other projects. He also explains why he thinks it's so important to maintain the open Web and podcasting through RSS, in the face of more exclusive publishing platforms and audio hosts.
Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (producer)
Find Marco at marco.org.
Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.
Links and Show Notes
The Stronghold of Podcasting 00:00:00
- This Week in Tech (TWiT)
- The Word Nerds (Archive)
- Tumblr
- You Look Nice Today
- Ricky Gervais
- Stack Overflow
- Joel Spolsky
- Jeff Atwood
- Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)
- CD-R
- MP3
- CD player
- iPod
- The iPod Video was the fifth generation of a product line that is now collectively referred to as the iPod Classic.
- iPhone
- This American Life
- COVID-19 pandemic
- Audiobook
- Cable television
- Leo Laporte
- AM broadcasting
- Talk radio
Self-taught 00:09:11
- Videocassette recorder (VCR)
- Microsoft Paint
- BASIC
- 3-2-1 Contact Magazine was an American educational television show about science that aired on PBS from 1980 to 1988, with an adjoining children's magazine, and which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
- Windows 3.1
- Disk operating system (DOS)
- QBasic
- Visual Basic (classic)
- C (programming language)
- Unix
- Solution stack
- Sun Microsystems
- Segmentation fault
- Mac (computer)
- IBM PC compatible (now more of a historical term that relates to our current usage of the term ‘Windows PC’)
- Vivísimo
- Yippy (originally developed and released as ‘Clusty’)
- Computer memory
- Version control
- Software bug
Tumblr 00:20:24
- Craigslist
- Tumblr
- Software development
- Indie (disambiguation)
- West Coast of the United States
- Amazon (company)
- Bloomberg L.P.
- Davidville
- David Karp
- PHP
- Shard (database architecture)
- Content management system (CMS)
- Microblogging (The first micro-blogs were known as ‘tumblelogs’.)
- Myspace (formerly known as MySpace)
- LiveJournal
- WordPress (content management system)
A Great Time to Be a Mac User 00:33:02
- Apple, Inc.
- Desktop computer
- Windows Update
- Digital Visual Interface (DVI)
- Vim (text editor)
- Terminal emulator
- Linux
- Server (computing)
- Ruby on Rails
- TextMate
- MacBook (2006–2012)
- PowerBook G4
A Better Audience 00:38:13
- Web development
- 5by5
- Weblogs, Inc.
- Engadget
- Gizmodo
- Lifehacker
- RSS
- News aggregator (or in certain cases or implementations, RSS reader)
- Digg
- Hacker News
- Dan Benjamin
- Instapaper
- iPad
- Build and Analyze was a weekly news and discussion show about technology by Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin, which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
- YouTube
- Overcast (app)
- Merlin Mann
- John Siracusa
Accidental Tech Podcast 00:49:43
Overcast 00:58:16
- Overcast
- Overcast (app) (further information)
- Music (software) (The app to which Marco refers was originally known as the iPod app on iPhones.)
- Downcast (app)
- Android (operating system)
- Pocket Casts
- Apple Podcasts
- Stitcher
- App store
- TikTok
- Proxy server
How the Internet Is Supposed to Work 01:05:06
- World Wide Web
- Web standards (redirecting from ‘open Web’)
- Decentralisation
- Comcast
- Verizon Communications, Inc.
- UUNET
- Internet Protocol (IP)
- Walmart
- Monopsony
- Amazon Kindle
- Spotify
- Trade magazine
- Eddy Cue
Credits
Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio
Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion
Contact
- Website: rsspod.net
- Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
- Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
- Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld
A Special Note
Martin is a paid subscriber of Marco Arment’s shared membership program for Accidental Tech Podcast; this did not influence any of the questions that were asked and did not place any expectations on Marco as a participant of this academic podcasting project.
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