Apple, and the Apple brand has been incredibly influential; I have often played a game identifying types of people, I can pick an Apple fan from the way they dress, speak and conduct themselves. You see Apple fans lining up outside tech shops and Apple brand outlets, often camping out for days in all kinds of weather conditions, with their sleeping bags and thermos flasks of hot drinks so they can purchase the next gizmo Apple puts out.

Anyway, you will recall that there was this device called the ‘iPod’ released in 2001 (that seems such a long time ago!) for those of you who don’t know this was an audio device, a storage and playback unit which became incredibly popular – people these days can use their phone to store MP3 files and playback, or stream directly, but it was Apple who gave this ‘iPod’ name to audio.

People began to refer to audio productions as being ‘Podcasts’ as a result of the iTunes platform, and the MP3 player that was given this ‘iPod’ name.

We know that people have been recording audio since the early 20th Century, and of course we had the enormous media industry of Radio that entertained and informed millions of people well before Television came along; in fact television was considered as being a part of the radio industry at first.

The super power of audio is that you can be doing lots of other things as you listen: you do not have to devote all of your attention to it; whereas with video you do.

So Podcasts, as a media type have this audio pedigree, we can of course also make a video of our show, and this offers us an additional audience if we upload these to our YouTube, Vimeo, Bitchute, Britheon, NewTube, Daily Motion, Twitch tv, or whatever social media video platform we prefer.

There is always an audio version of each show made available on the audio social platforms also: Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes, and of course our independently owned media platform!

I always aggressively promote this independent angle, to the point that I annoy people, the huge opportunity of the World Wide Web is not all of the Silicon Valley projects, you might think the slick, well funded social media platforms represent the ‘credible’ part of the web, I disagree.

What is exciting, and significant about the WWW is the open source and broad opportunity to produce media at the street level.

Terms of service and authoritarian media rules is not what the internet was established on.

If you own your private media platform you can publish whatever you see fit to publish, including political and social topics, people might seek to shut you down and silence you: this is way more difficult to execute when you are an independent media owner.