Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Microcast #5

posted this on and tagged it with Anchor Microcast

Some #feedback on the Anchor app.

Download and listen to Microcast #5

Second wave

posted this on and tagged it with Anchor Microcast Microcasting The open web

I responded to a wave by Joel Comm on Anchor suggesting the name ”micro podcasting”. Here’s my response, both as an audio file and as text.

(This is part of my microcast feed so you can subscribe to it in your podcatcher of choice.)

Two thoughts on that:

  1. I’m with Adam and Erik, I prefer microcasting since it’s shorter and has been used ”in the wild” before Anchor.
  2. If a name alluding to podcasting should be used, Anchor needs to actually embrace the openness of podcasting. Each user account should have an RSS feed with the Waves so that it’s not locked down in Anchor and instead can be used in regular podcatchers as well.

A (manual) cross-post of my first Wave from Anchor

posted this on and tagged it with Anchor Microcast

I decided to manually cross-post my first Wave from Anchor. I don’t know if I’ll keep doing this or not, but I’ve created a tag for it here so that you can subscribe to my short-form podcasts in your podcatcher of choice.

Feed URL: http://blog.henrikcarlsson.se/tag/microcast/feed

Or you can just listen to it here:

Or download it: The post

Please Anchor, be a good citizen of the open web

posted this on and tagged it with Anchor Podcasts The open web

I’ve tried Anchor today. It’s a service that let’s its users post short audio posts, like Twitter but for audio. Or put more accurately, it allows its users to make short-form podcasts. I thought it was really fun to use, and discussing a topic on it with a friend seemed much more fruitful that doing the same thing on Twitter.

The setup procedure in the app was simple and as far as I know there are no easier way of recording a piece of audio and broadcasting it ”to the people”. (Note the quotes.)

However, there are quite enough silos around already and I really don’t like to lock myself into yet another one. I want to own the data – or content if you prefer – that I create. Therefore I’d like the following:

I also want to mix and match sources. I want to be able to consume similar content in one app, not having to constantly switch from one app to the other just because people lock their content in various silos.

As I said in the beginning, what Anchor does is provide a way to easily record short-form podcasts and publishing them to the people following you. There is nothing about this that is new from a podcasting perspective. What is new, is how easy they’ve made it. I love that! But since they are podcasts I want to treat them as such. I want people to be able to listen to the things I publish even if they don’t have, never have had, nor ever will get, an account on Anchor.

So I would like Anchor to provide a way for its users to use the content they – the users that is – create outside of the Anchor. The simplest way to do this, that almost certainly would require very little effort on Anchor’s part, is to have some sort of feed for each user of the service. Making those feeds RSS feeds with <enclosure> elements would make them compatible with pretty much all podcatchers that are currently in use.

That would make the service so much less of a silo. It would mean that other people could listen to my stuff outside of Anchor and I could interleave the ”Waves”1 of people on Anchor with other short- or long-form podcasts that I listen to. It would also mean that I could set up automation to cross-post my waves to my own site.

And it wouldn’t even have to be RSS/XML. Any kind of easily parseable feed available without authentication would do for me. Once upon a time even Twitter provided this function for its users tweets and it was great.

Sure, it would be nice to have a posting API for Anchor and it would be equally nice to have a way of using their app to post directly to another service, or to my own blog, but the simple act of adding feeds would take them so far along the way of becoming good citizens of the open web. And I want them to be that since I thought the app and service was great, but I don’t want to lock up my content.

One good thing about it is that there are more or less easily accessible URLs for each Wave. Unfortunately, those URLs are not easily crawlable for the media they are meant to display.

I’ve asked Anchor, both on Anchor and on Twitter, whether they are going to add feeds or not. So far I’ve not gotten a respons. If you who read this also finds this important, please ask them about it you too. (They are @anchor on Twitter.)

So please Anchor, please, be a part of the open web. In your Medium posts you claim to be ”the world’s first true public radio”. Make this real by actually making the content created by your users public. Embrace feeds, embrace the open web.


  1. A post on Anchor is called a wave

Replies and comments

So I have a question for Anchor…

posted this on and tagged it with Anchor Silos The open web

Does the service have an API? Or a way to listen to peoples waves inside a regular pod catcher? Do the people behind Anchor intend to play nice with the open web or is this just another silo that want to usurp the web?

I’ve searched their help and found nothing regarding APIs or XML/RSS.