One of the best aspects of subscribing to things is that it doesn't matter if they go dormant. Someone takes a break from feeding their website/newsletter/podcast? No problem. When they return, your subscription springs back to life.¹ So it was a special treat to see a new episode of Anxious Machine pop up in my podcast feed.

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Last week was a funny old week for podcast-prompted nostalgia. First, there was an episode of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking podcast: Taking the Long View with the Animal Kingdom. Two very old friends, Phyllis Lee and Tim Birkhead, talked entertainingly and at length about what they've learned from long-term studies of elephants and guillemots respectively. Not a lot of this was all that new to me, and Radio 3 is not exactly the most popular of channels, but it was very good that long-term studies were being given the public airing they deserve and, perhaps even rarer, that scientists were given the time to express themselves.

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Stewart Butterfield is the chap who accidentally invented Flickr and then Slack. That alone makes him a pretty smart person. He also studied philosophy before deciding to get into software development. I know this because Jeremy Keith in my Huffduffer network liberated the audio of an interview with Ezra Klein from SoundCloud's silo and shared it. ¹

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The slow process of migrating posts from old backends to new continues glacially slowly, prompted sometimes by a desire to link to something, sometimes by nostalgia, sometimes by lack of a greater priority. Today was a bit of all three. The announcement that ADN will be put out of its misery on 14 March made me wonder about updating all posts that mention it. I decided against that, and in doing so came across a post from about three years ago that continues to exercise me.

What podcasters need, I said, was a good way of finding new podcasts. Not coincidentally, that's also what people who listen to podcasts need. And we're still no nearer to either the human recommendation engines I proposed or to any kind of intelligent algorithm.

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A few weeks ago, a professional broadcaster asked me how I managed to get such good audio quality on an episode of Eat This Podcast. Once I'd got over the shock, I just told her that it was Skype (and a teeny bit of judicious tweaking). Every time Skype gives me any kind of trouble, I take a deep br...

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