Openpod

These tips are ideas to consider. A host does not need to do any tip that is listed. The changes may have no impact on the podcast at all. A host will only benefit from experimenting with each tip. Did you know you can subscribe to the Open Podcast mailing list to get podcasting tips like this directly into the inbox - Click Here to Subscribe Today Better equipment != better content In terms of sound quality, people need to hear the podcast. The content matters more. If people hear the podcast and do not like the content, the sound quality does not matter. Have Fun The more relaxed a host is, the better the podcast will sound. A lighter tone will be more appealing to listeners. The podcast will have a lighter tone if the host is having fun. A host can make jokes smile and speak in a more conversational tone to have fun. This does not apply for podcasts that need a serious tone, such as true crime. Do Not Burn Out The goal should not be to produce as many episodes as possible in the shortest amount of time. A host should not want to burn out on podcasting. Which would not happen if a host does not overdo it. Do not record five episodes in one day. The quality of the episodes will suffer. Which might lead to the podcast losing listeners. One or two a week is a good pace for beginners. No Name In Title New hosts should not put their name in the podcast title. Having the name in the title only benefits someone with an existing audience. Someone might search for the name of a famous person. If their name is in the title, the podcast will show up. For an unknown host, no one will be searching for their name. A new host should be relying on SEO to help people find their podcast. Instead of putting their name, a new host could put keywords that people would search for. After years of podcasting, a host could add their name to the podcast title. "Podcast" in the Title Is Redundant When searching for a podcast in an app, people are already looking for a podcast. There is no need to tell them a podcast is a podcast. But this is what is being done when people put "Podcast" in their title. Having the word podcast in the title adds unnecessary letters to the official title. Create A Pre-Recording Routine In the early days of my podcast, I got nervous before recording. I created my own routine for podcasting to relax. There are three steps to the routine. First, I drink water, fill up a water bottle, eat some food, and sit down. This puts me in the mindset for podcasting, and I do not get nervous when I am speaking on the mic. Protect The Throat For a podcast host, the throat and voice is the most important asset. When you are out, do not abuse it. On days when a host is not recording, they should not overuse their voice. In cold weather, cover the throat to prevent getting sick. If a host damages their voice or loses it, they will hurt their podcast. If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It Do not rush to upgrade the equipment. If the equipment does not make the podcast sound worse, there is no reason to replace it. If a host wants to improve an element of the podcast, they should hire someone. This gives the host one less element to focus on. The new person should have more expertise, which would improve quality. Be Consistent There are two elements a host should be consistent in the quality and schedule. If a host is not consistent, people will stop listening. One Event Will Not Help Reach Goals To grow download numbers, a host needs to keep a routine. There is not a singular event that will help a podcast host reach their goals. Being interviewed by one famous podcast host will not lead to 1 million subscribers. A host needs to show up and do the work every day. More Equipment Means More Maintenance When equipment and software get added to the setup, those items need maintenance. A host needs to update the software and clean the equipment. The maintenance takes time away from the podcast. Keeping the setup as needed saves a host time. Do Not Consume Sugar Eating sugar makes the voice sound weird. The voice on sugar sounds higher than the regular voice. To keep the podcast's consistency, avoid sugar before recording. Drink water. The Average Commute Is 27 minutes People listen to a podcast based on the time that it will take them to complete a task. People will be more likely to listen to a podcast that matches their commute time. People looking to listen to a podcast during their commute might choose a podcast based on time. Which would give an advantage to the podcast that meets that time need. If the listeners enjoy the podcast, they will add it to their commute schedule. The average person commutes at least 10 times a week. This gives 10 chances per week that the podcast on the commute schedule will get heard. Which is different from being on the laundry schedule. The average person does laundry once or twice a week. Matching the average commute time means that the podcast will fit the average commuter's schedule. Editing Is Not Necessary There is no need to edit the audio of a podcast. Editing is one reason someone might be hesitant to start a podcast. The idea of having to learn to edit the audio makes them uncomfortable. Some people feel that an unedited podcast is more authentic. In an unedited podcast, the listeners will hear all the mistakes. People will hear the podcast as a real conversation. The time for editing is when a guest is on. If a guest asks for a portion of the podcast to get edited out. Another situation will be if a guest does not meet up to the standards of a podcast. A host might need to edit down the podcast to the best parts. A host does not need to add fireworks or clapping every time a point gets made. People Listen On More Than One Speed People listen to a podcast on 1.5x or 1.2x speed. That impacts how a host sounds. If a host speaks to fast, then the 1.5x will not hear the content. Which might lead them to stop listening to the podcast. A host should speak at normal speed with pauses for the 1.5x crowd. Not Everyone Has To Listen To A Podcast Bill Burr was a guest on a podcast. During the podcast, he said he does not need everyone to like him. The same goes for any podcast. A host should choose their niche and stay there. For example, a host might get 100,000 subscribers. A host that decides to put ads on their podcast will make at least $18 per 1,000 listeners. If a host does 4 episodes a month, that would be $7,200. Twice that if the host puts 2 ads in the podcast. In the grand scheme of the world, 100,000 is not many people. That is why a host should not bother trying to please everyone. Search Function Many people find podcasts through searching. They use the search function on their podcast player. For these people to find the podcast, a host should add details to the titles. Instead of episode #420. The title should be "Stand-up Comedy Discussion with Bill Burr." If anyone was searching for Bill Burr, Comedy, or Stand-up, there is a chance for the episode to show up. Which would be free traffic to the podcast. Swearing Having an explicit tag is not inclusive. Kids will not be able to listen to the podcast. A host is leaving out a group of potential listeners by swearing. In other countries, when a podcast episode gets tagged "explicit," the episode will not show in the RSS Feed. A host will be getting fewer downloads from specific countries. When every episode gets an explicit tag, then the people will not be able to listen. Listeners And Download Numbers Do not bother sharing download numbers with listeners. Someone listening to a podcast does not care about download numbers. If they want someone to listen to a podcast, they will share it. From a listeners' perspective, sharing download numbers is rude. That host does not care about their current listeners, only gathering new listeners. A host should focus on producing content that listeners want to share to grow a podcast. Read A Transcript This will help a host catch any verbal cues that they make on the podcast. A host will be reading all the "um's," "okay's," and "err's" that a host makes throughout the podcast. A host will know to avoid using those words after reading a transcript. Conclusion These tips will not make or break a podcast. Small improvements will add up and make a podcast great. These tips are part of that process. This post is an excerpt from the Open Podcast Community book. Which is available for . purchase here Previously published at https://blog.openpodcast.xyz/random-podcasting-tips/

Some Tips on Podcasting

For many growth methods, a host can take action on their own. Working with hosts that have similar podcasts is another option. Two hosts can do a podcast to podcast promotion. Did you know you can subscribe to the Open Podcast mailing list to get podcasting tips like this directly into inbox- Click Here to Subscribe Today What is a Podcast to Podcast Promotion? A podcast to podcast promotion is using another host's podcast to promote a podcast. Types of Swaps The Other Host As A Guest One form of swapping is to have the other host as a guest. The other host can discuss their podcast themselves. The other host can discuss the premise of their podcast. Then, a host can be a guest on the other host's podcast to give details about their podcast. Which is an opportunity for a new audience to discover the podcast. Add Episode To RSS Feed A type of swap is the episode swap. The swap is when a host adds the other host's episode to their RSS feed. Allowing the audience to listen to a preview of the podcast. Add Snippets To swap, a host might add snippets of the other podcast. The introduction can include the snippet of the other podcast. There are many options for the content of the snippet. For the content, the other host can describe the content of the podcast. A listener might be willing to record a review as a snippet. For the most part, the other host has to deal with the content of the snippet. A host needs to know where the snippet would fit into the podcast best. Talk About The Podcast A host discussing the other podcast is a type of swap. A host can mention their favorite episode or why they like the other podcast. The other host could even give talking points to discuss. Find Hosts To Swap With? Forums has a category for members to swap promotions. A host can create a post on the Open Podcast Forum looking for promotional swaps. A host can describe their podcast in the post, and the other hosts with a similar topic will respond. The Open Podcast Community Forum Email Hosts If a host listens to podcasts similar to their own, they can email other hosts. If the other host has a similar size audience, they may be willing to swap. A host should not take offense if a host with a bigger audience does not want to do a swap. The other host might see the proposal as a host trying to take advantage of their audience. Stick with podcasts that have a similar size audience to avoid problems. Ask The Audience A host's audience might listen to different podcasts with a similar subject matter. An audience can offer insight into the different podcasts of the same subject matter. Each podcast on the list is a chance for a host to swap. Tips Metrics In the podcast industry, metrics have a monthly count. For an individual episode, a host needs to measure downloads in 1 month. A host does not need to keep an episode of someone's podcast in their feed for longer than a month. Deleting an episode from the RSS feed after a month prevents problems. The RSS feed does not become cluttered with other hosts' episodes. Having an episode from a different podcast might confuse a new listener. Invite Other Host To Engage With The Community A host can invite the other host to their community. If the community knows the other host, they can ask them questions. The community might want to create questions for the interview. A host can set up an Ask Me Anything in the community to give members a platform for asking questions after the interview. Clarity Some people do not read the description of the episode. A host can state that the episode is from a different podcast by adding audio to the beginning. They can tell the audience that the episode is a different podcast. A second option is for the other host to thank the listeners of a host's audience. When Swaps Get Lowest Amount Of Listens A host might notice the "swapping episodes" are getting fewer downloads. In that case, the host should stop swapping. The decrease in downloads means that an audience does not like the swapping. If a host continues to swap, they will lose their current audience. Making the growth efforts of swapping pointless. The number of new listeners might make up for the lost listeners. If a host keeps swapping because new people learn about the podcast every swap. The number of listeners may still increase every swap. Have Standard Episode Ready To Swap A host can maximize the number of new listeners that join their audience after a swap. Having a standard swap episode is an action that can help maximize the amount. The standard episode can be the podcast's best episode. The new audience will hear the highest quality episode. Which will increase the chances of subscribing. Benefits Different Audience With Similar Interests By doing a swap, a host engages with a new audience with similar interests as their audience. Being that the audience's similar, the new audience is more likely to join the host's audience. Targeting an audience makes doing swaps more beneficial than other growth methods. Networking Asking other hosts to promote their podcast is a networking opportunity. The two hosts are working together. The other hosts can discuss working with a host. In the future, a host can ask the other hosts to help them promote any of their new content or projects. Get A Break For the week that a host does a swap, the host does not have to create content. They can use the free week to increase the quality of the next episode. Free A host is getting a free promotion for the podcast. While the host has to take the time to prepare. The financial cost of the swap is nothing. Backlinks A podcast gets added to many different podcast players. This creates domain authority for a link. Being added to a new podcast's show notes will increase the number of backlinks. The domain authority for the podcast's website will increase. Many Podcasts To Swap With There are many podcasts out there. Giving a host many options for swapping. If 4-5 hosts do not agree to swap, there are hundreds of other podcasts for swapping. Reaching out might take time, but there is a host that will swap. Do Not Swap Too Many Times In A Row A host might find themselves with many options for swapping. They should not do many swaps at once. Doing many swaps at once does not allow the host to get a feel for the audience's reaction. Depending on the type of swap, an audience might grow tired of over-swapping. Too Much Out Of The Category If a host goes too much out of their category for a swap, the swap might not achieve the results a host desires. If a host has a technology podcast and swaps with a swimming podcast. Then, the audience might not enjoy their podcast much. Making the odds of them subscribing to the host's podcast unlikely. Disadvantages Trust Someone Will Help For certain swaps, a host has to trust the other host. The other host might take advantage and not complete a swap. The other host might wait for a host to add their episode to the RSS feed and not do the same. The only way to prevent this from happening is to build trust with the other hosts. If the other host gets to know a host, they will be less likely to not fulfill their obligations to them. Episode Might Not Flow With Content Every host has an individual style for their podcast. Some styles will not mix well with a different podcast. Hearing the two different styles on one RSS Feed might sound bad. Which might impact the audience's enjoyment of a podcast. Listeners may unsubscribe from a podcast if they do not enjoy a swap. Get Attacked Online Some people from the other audience may not like a host's statement. People from that same audience might feel the need to attack the host online. If that is the case, there are measures a host can take to minimize that result. Some actions are blocking, taking a break from the platform, or letting the other host know. The other host might want to help solve the issue. Not Scalable Some swaps are not scalable. A host can only do so many of them. There is a limit to the number of guests for a solo podcast. The same goes for the number of interviews they can do. They can send out as many snippets as they want. Conclusion Above all, a host needs to have an audience to do swaps. Another host does not want to swap with a podcast that no one listens to. That is a waste of time for the other host and will make a host look bad. A new host should not try swapping right away. The exception is if both podcasts have small audiences or a few episodes. This post is an excerpt from the Open Podcast Community book. Which is available for purchase here. Previously published at https://blog.openpodcast.xyz/podcast-promotional-swaps/

How Another Host's Podcast Helps Promote Yours

When starting a podcast, it is normal for a host to want to grow the podcast as much as possible. The desire to grow might lead a host to take actions that are not moral. A host has to keep in mind that taking these shortcuts are short-term solutions. Any misdeeds will either backfire or not help in the long-term. Did you know you can subscribe to the Open Podcast mailing list to get podcasting tips like this directly into the inbox- Click Here to Subscribe Today General Do Not Steal Other People's Content If a host would mention other content from someone else, they should give them credit. To provide them with credit, a host should cite the source of information. The next best course of action would be to put the link to the source in the show notes. Do Not Use Music Without The Owner's Permission If a host were to find a certain song that they like, they should not use it as their intro music. This can cause problems with the creator of the song. There are two courses of action that a host can take to avoid problems. The first action for a host is to use royalty-free music. Royalty-free music is music that is fair use. A host does not have to pay to use a royalty-free song. The second course of action a host can take is to buy a song. There are websites where music makers put songs for sale for a small amount of money. A host can buy a song and avoid any royalty issues with that song. Do Not Inflate Downloads A host should not try to create fake download numbers. Some people claim they can get any podcast on Apple's top 200 list. They will only charge $5 for the service. My mother always says, "if something sounds too good to be true, then it is." This is the case with $5 growth hackers. Their "growth hack" is not a hack at all. They create 30-50 accounts to subscribe to a host's podcast every day. This course of action, for about a week, will get a podcast on the top 200 list. The problem with this technique is that Apple can recognize it as spam. They will remove any podcast from Apple Podcast that creates spam. The quick inflation of downloads is not worth the risk of getting banned from Apple Podcast. Do Not Trick People Into Listening To A Podcast If a host tricks someone into listening to the podcast, they are not a listener of the podcast. That person getting tricked is someone that happened to download a podcast. Relying on tricking people to listen to a podcast makes a host look bad. Decreasing the odds of the person that gets tricked continuing to listen to the podcast. Do Not Spread Fake News Mainstream media outlets try to force their agenda. Stretching the truth for their benefit. A listener does not need to hear fake news from a podcast. The purpose of a podcast is to be a different outlet of information from the mainstream media. Avoid being similar to the mainstream media by checking the sources of information. A host can check the reliability of information by checking with multiple sources. If different sources report the same information, the news is not faked or spun in a certain manner. Interviewing Cut Out Anything A Guest Asks To Get Out In the interviewing chapter, I discussed telling a guest that anything can get edited out. If a guest were to exercise this option, a host should respect their wish. By keeping the unwanted content, a host is burning a bridge. The entire purpose of having guests is to build bridges and build a network. In the future, when a host asks someone to be a guest, that person might reach out to previous guests. If the potential guest reaches out to the guests that had a bad experience, they might not be willing to be a guest. The bad experience of one guest snowballs and impacts the podcast's future. This might lead to a host not being able to find a guest. Which might end the podcast. Survey Do Not Go Overboard Remember that by filling out a survey listeners are taking time out of their own day. A host should not take advantage and ask 50 questions on a survey. The listeners might get annoyed by the action. The types of fans that fill out surveys for podcasts are loyal listeners. If they become annoyed by the host's actions, they may no longer be loyal listeners. Do Not Ask Personal Questions Keep in mind that the survey is for the podcast. A survey should not be to collect information on listeners. Asking personal questions could make a listener uncomfortable. Making a listener feel uncomfortable could lead to losing listeners. Social Media Do Not Spam Not every post on social media needs to be a promotion for the podcast. Someone on social media might discuss a topic related to a host's podcast topic. That does not mean that a host should post a link to their podcast in the comments. That person might have an interest in listening to the podcast. There is no need to inform them about the podcast right away. A host should build a relationship with that person. Interact with them by following and liking their content. For that person to see a host engaging with their content might be enough. When a host engages with the content, that person will see. They will click on the podcast's profile. Which would lead them to the podcast. But if out of context, a host promotes their podcast to that person, that might be off-putting. Which might prevent any type of relationship from growing with that person. Being a spammer may get a host banned on many social media platforms. People do not like spammers. They notice spammers when they click on the profile and see the same comment or post multiple times. Spamming does not help, it does the opposite. A host should want people to view content and by spamming that keeps people away. Some social media platforms consider posting the same comment multiple times spamming. Email Respect The Inbox People get a lot of emails. there is no need to over email subscribers. If subscribers expect an email on a specific day at a particular time, do not abuse that. Stick to the schedule. If people get an email from a host that is off the schedule, they will open it. After days or weeks of getting an unsolicited email, they will unsubscribe and mark the email as spam. Which will hurt the entire email list. Fewer people will be getting the emails, and the email list will be pointless. A host should focus on the quality of the content. By sending out several emails a week, there is no way the quality of each email can be high. The emails, even if they are being opened, are not getting clicks or reads. Doing so only hurts the podcast. Writing Do Not Keyword Stuff Articles Keyword stuffing is the act of adding keywords and places where they do not belong. Keyword stuffing is to increase the SEO score of a blog. A higher SEO score will lead to getting ranked higher in search engine results. Having a higher SEO score means being more likely to come up in search results for search engines. One form of keyword stuffing is adding keywords to a picture's caption. For example, an image of a cat, the caption should be "cat." For someone stuffing in the keywords, might have the caption as "stand-up comedy" or "funny joke." Keyword stuffing is not inclusive. The purpose of captions is for people who use adaptive technology to access the internet. They use a screen-reader, and the software reads the caption of the image for them. If keywords are getting stuffed into the caption, they do not know what the image is. Search engines know this trick. They will lower the ranking of any website that stuffs keywords. Video Mislead People To Watch Videos A host should not use a title that will misrepresent the content in the video. Many video platforms have search tags that a host can use to help people find their videos. A host should not take advantage of and use the most popular tags in hopes of getting the most views. People that feel tricked will downvote the video, and that will lower the video on search results. Meetups Harass People At Events At an event, a host might run into someone that does not want to listen to the podcast. A host should not harass them into accepting a sticker. Harassing a person into accepting a sticker is real-life spamming! Worse, that person that was getting harassed might live in a host's community. A host could run into them at the supermarket or getting their car washed. The worst-case scenario would be that a host runs into the harassed person at another event. That person might talk to other people about the previous event. Leading to those people not talking to a host. Those people might have a bad first impression of a host and not want to listen to a host's podcast. Streaming Do Not Miscategorize Streams As stated in the streaming chapter, platforms have no podcasting category. A host should try to categorize their podcast as close to a platform's categories as possible. A host should not categorize their comedy podcast as a sports video game. The viewers will feel tricked, and they will report any channel that tricks them. The platforms care more about their viewers than the streamers. That will lead to a host getting banned on streaming platforms. Small streamers are not hard to find on streaming platforms. They do not mind kicking them off the platform to make a better experience for the viewers. Podcast to Podcast Promotions Honor Commitment To Podcast To Podcast Partner A host has to build trust with podcast to podcast promotion partners. A host has to trust that their podcast to podcast promotion partner will add their content to the RSS feed. Do not be the person that does not include someone else's episode in the RSS feed. The other host will tell more podcast hosts about their experience. A host will lose the support of similar podcast hosts if they do not honor commitments. Monetization Do Not Lie About Metrics To Advertisers When advertisers approach a podcast host they will ask for download numbers. A host should not lie about their download numbers to an advertiser. Advertisers know the amount of engagement that is possible based on audience size. For example, an advertiser wants a podcast that gets a thousand downloads per episode. If a podcast only gets 100 downloads per episode and they say they have a thousand an episode. An advertiser is expecting 10 to 20 people to use the coupon from the podcast. When only five or six people use the coupon, an advertiser will know the host lied. They will stop advertising as soon as they get the numbers. Once a host reaches 1000 downloads, a different advertiser might reach out. They might contact the previous advertiser for a reference. The previous advertiser will have to tell the new advertiser about the lying. Which could lead to a host losing the new advertising deal. Honor Commitments To Donors Donors give their hard-earned money to a host. The donors have many options for people to give their money to. They choose to give it to a host. When a host says that they will do a certain activity for the donors. They should do it no matter what. If a host says, they will host a Q&A, then make sure the Q&A happens. The donors are paying for these things they are paying for the extra content, a host needs to give it to them. Do Not Cheat People When selling a product, be sure that the product's consumer is getting all the value possible. Do not sell a 5-page eBook for $35. When a host goes to sell a product that equals its value, people will not buy it. They will remember their experience of getting cheated. They will not want to take the risk of getting cheated again. Closing Statement About Ethics And Podcasting In the startup world, there is a belief that every market is a winner-take-all market. The thought process gets peddled by venture capitalists. To prevent competition in the market. Allowing them to squeeze out as much money as possible. For them to maximize their profit from their portfolio companies. There can be several competitors in any industry. In terms of podcasting, that means listeners can listen to more than one podcast of the same topic. One person can listen to multiple podcasts hosted by comedians. There is room for everyone. There is no need to steal listeners away from another podcast. In Terms Of Communities For the Open Podcast Community, there are over a million podcast hosts. Any one of them might join the community. At the same time, there are several podcasting communities. These podcast hosts can join more than one podcasting community. Not every person has to join a host's community. With that in mind, there is no problem for a host to not join or support someone else's community. A host should not join another community to hurt the community. There is no need to steal members away from another community. A host should not sell their community members' data. For a host to use their data to create a better experience for the members has advantages. Making money with a community without selling data is not difficult. There are ads, donations, or creating a product. Selling the members' data is the last option. For a host to sell data, there needs to be a significant amount of data. If a host's community gets to that point and they are not making money, then they suck. Comedians Comedians do not like other comedians that steal jokes. If word gets out that a comedian is a joke thief, that might make it hard for them to get stage time. Which will make it hard for them to grow a following and grow their career. Conclusion Podcasting is a long-term game. If someone is podcasting for a short-term gain, those people are in the wrong business. Some people might want shortcuts to gain an audience. Shortcuts will not work. The shortcuts might get listeners, but they will not lead to subscribers. There is a lot of content out there, and if people do not like a host's actions, they will listen to something else. Being ethical is having a long-term vision. This post is an excerpt from the Open Podcast Community book. Which is available for purchase here . Previously published at https://blog.openpodcast.xyz/ethics-in-podcasting/

Podcasting And Ethical Dilemmas

Monetizing a podcast is different from monetizing an ebook or Saas product. The methods for monetizing podcasts are not as obvious as other internet content. In this chapter, I will go over the methods of monetizing a podcast. Did you know you can subscribe to the Open Podcast mailing list to get podcasting tips like this directly into the inbox- Click Here to Subscribe Today Sponsorships Sponsorship is when a company pays a host to promote their company or product on-air. The amount of money a host gets from sponsorships depends on many factors. When the ad plays during the podcast episode. Another factor is how long the ad runs during the episode. An ad can run three different times. The first time is Pre-roll: at the beginning of the podcast. Next is mid-roll: stopping the podcast in the middle to run an ad. The last opportunity is post-roll: run after the podcast ends. The standard for the length of an ad during a podcast is 10, 30, and 60 seconds. According to AdvertiseCast the industry average for advertising is as follows: $15 for a 10-second ad CPM $18 for a 30-second ad CPM $25 for a 60-second ad CPM For a company to consider running ads on a podcast the podcast needs downloads. The more well-known companies want high download numbers. The monthly downloads numbers companies want can range from 1,000 to 5,000 per episode. By monetizing with ads a host is selling their entire audience to advertisers. Monetizing using sponsorship will not happen right away. The download numbers need to be high and consistent before companies will advertise. If a host wants to advertise a specific company's product they can reach out to employees. The host can find the employees on different social media platforms. Start on professional networking platforms where the people will have their titles listed. Looking for people in the marketing or advertising department. People in that department will decide if running ads on the podcast is the right fit for them. If there is no one from those departments then get in contact with another department. Someone else might be willing to connect the marketing department with the podcast. The broad approach is to get in contact with support. Many companies have their support on social media. The person running the support could tag a marketing person in the question. If the marketing employee has an interest they will reply. There are services that will connect podcast hosts with advertisers. The services will take a cut of any money made. The benefit is that the companies using the service want to advertise on a podcast. A host does not need to sell them on the idea. The companies that are using the service might not fit the podcast's content. A host can try an open call on their podcast. Someone in their industry might be willing to advertise a product on the podcast. A host has nothing to lose by asking. Affiliate Links Another type of ad to monetize a podcast is the affiliate link. An affiliate link is linking to a product for a commission when someone buys the product with that link. A host can become an affiliate by signing up through an affiliate service. Another option is to use the affiliate program of an e-commerce store. The type of e-commerce store that sells many different products. On my podcast, if I were to discuss a certain microphone then link to the e-commerce store of the microphone. That is an example of an effective use of an affiliate program. Hosts should be thoughtful when advertising a product or company. A host should ask “would my audience benefit from using their product?” In the case of Open Podcast, the audience is people that have started podcasting.. The companies that would benefit from more podcasts are companies that sell to hosts. These companies are microphone companies, podcast hosts, or audio recording software companies. By using affiliate links a host can start to monetize their podcast as soon as possible. A host may only be monetizing a fraction of their audience with affiliate links. There are services that a host can sign for to become an affiliate. The other option is to become an affiliate for an e-commerce store that sells many products. Sell Products or Services Selling products allows a host to remain independent. While providing extra value to their audience. The products a host can sell to their audience are products such as an ebook, services, or a course. Selling products gives the audience a choice to pay, which may lead to low conversion rates. A host should ask their audience what products they would be willing to buy. This method does not force a host to invest time in a product nobody wants. For the Building an Indie Business I could sell services surrounding podcast creation. Listeners might want consulting services or an ebook about podcasting. Anyone needing help and that is willing to pay would have the option of getting my help. Selling products or services is not an overnight monetization method. A host needs to build trust with the listeners. Build trust for listeners to find that products or services will provide value. In most cases, the host has to take the time to create the product they will sell to listeners. A host sets the price for products or services. For a host to set the price can make their profits higher. The host has to deal with fixed prices for affiliate links and sponsorships. To sell the product a host has the ability to sell the product to listeners themselves. There are DIY e-commerce services that a host can list their product on. The services will handle payments and send the host a check every month. A host can add the product to e-commerce platforms. The platforms will take more money but more people might buy the product. A host can accept donations for the product. Once a donation gets made they send the product to a donor. There is a second impact of selling products and services than money. A host can grow their audience from the people that buy their product. If people that do not listen to the podcast by the product they can start to listen. A host can convert a buyer to a listener if the buyer knows about the podcast. A buy can learn about the podcast by seeing the podcast in the product. A host can mention the podcast on the cover, use examples from the podcast, or put a link to the podcast in the product. Listeners Pay The final monetization method is by having the listeners pay. There are two routes a host can take in the listeners' pay model, donations and private podcast. Donations For donations, hosts need to set up an account to accept donations from listeners. The donations would be optional for the listeners. Private Podcasts For a private podcast, a host would need to set up an account to accept donations. The donations platform will give donors access to the RSS feed. In the case of the listeners' pay model, a host may need to provide extra content to the listeners. For the listeners to get extra value for their money. A host could have a Q&A with donors or give extra details about the episode. Some donors might want a behind the scenes look into the making of the podcast. The listeners' pay model is similar to selling products. Being that the host has to build trust and provide value to the audience before giving their money to the host. For Building Indie Business listeners the type of extra content I could create is videos. Videos that would help donors create their podcasts. By showing how to use recording software or upload audio to specific podcast hosts. Comedians Comedians monetize their podcasts with two methods. The first method is by listing their tour dates on the podcast. Announcing their tour dates on the podcast sells more tickets. Listeners will buy tickets if they know the comedian is touring in their city. The comedians are selling an experience. Some comedians monetize through ads too. Conclusion A host does not have to stick with only one method for monetizing a podcast. A host has the ability to use more than one method in more than one method. But the host has to manage each method of monetization. They have to manage the relationships that each method creates. This post is an excerpt from the Open Podcast Community book. Which is available for purchase here . Previously published at https://blog.openpodcast.xyz/make-money-podcasting/

How To Monetize A Podcast

Some people that want to start a podcast feel they need a co-host or to interview someone to start one. When they cannot find someone, they give up. There is no need for a co-host or interviewee, but a solo host needs to prepare more before recording. To be a successful solo host, a potential host needs to choose a format for a podcast. While there are some advantages to having a solo podcast. There is an opportunity cost that comes along with the solo podcast. Did you know you can subscribe to the Open Podcast mailing list to get podcasting tips like this directly into the inbox - Click Here to Subscribe Today Formats to Use Listener Questions One format a host can use to create content for a podcast is to gather listener questions to answer on the podcast. A host can gather questions from their listeners with a survey. A host can promote the survey using social media. Giving a link to the survey and mentioning the answers will be on the podcast. Soon, listeners will email questions for the podcast. Review Other Content Another format for a host is reviewing other content. A host can review content related to their industry and then give their take on the content. For example, a comedian can watch comedy specials during a podcast and give their opinion about the special. Create a Format A host can create their own method of presenting information to a listener. For The Building an Indie Business podcast, I created my own format that is "State, Reason, Example." For the format I state my claim, I give my reasons for making that claim, and then I provide an example of my claim. One episode I stated that "I get ideas for episodes while I work. An episode that resulted from work was the "Vanilla JS dark mode" episode. I got the idea for the episode after adding a dark mode to my website. Benefits of Solo Podcasting Less Equipment When a host is recording alone, there is less equipment and software involved in the process. With less equipment or software there are fewer chances for an error happening during recording. Can Record at Any Time When interviewing someone, the time to record needs to account for both parties. This may take some time, or one person involved has to make some sacrifices. A solo host can record any time without constraints. Subtracting a barrier from the content creation process. Easy Way to Get Started By podcasting solo, a host can try podcasting. On a solo podcast, a host has total creative control and has the liberty to experiment with the podcast. Doing a podcast with a guest or co-host can limit creative control. If a solo host records a few episodes and decides podcasting is not for them, there is no harm done. If the host wants to change anything, such as the format or flow of the podcast, they can make changes. No Searching When a host interviews guests, the host must spend time searching for guests. By hosting a solo podcast, a host can focus more on content. Sometimes the amount of time between recording will change. For one episode, a host might have 2 weeks to prepare. For the next episode, a host has three days to prepare because they had trouble finding a guest. The amount of preparation time impacts the quality of the podcast. If a host has more time to prepare, the host will create better questions to ask. Increasing the quality of the podcast. This is not an issue for solo podcasts. Disadvantages of Solo Podcasting Hard to grow passed host’s network Having guests is one method to grow an audience. A new audience discovers the podcast when a guest promotes their appearance. Being introduced to a guest's audience introduces a host's content to people that would not have found it. For a solo podcast host finding new listeners beyond their network takes time. Continuous guests would make growing an audience easier. New people would find the podcast with every guest. Only Source of Content When having a guest on a podcast, the host can rely on the guest to create content for them. Being the only person on the podcast means being the only source of content. If the host is having a bad day when recording, the content will suffer, and the audience will notice. If the podcast quality continues to go down, some people might stop listening. Benefits of interviewing Expanding the host’s network Having guests on a podcast is one method to grow a host's network. Which is a missed opportunity for hosts. Although, listeners will reach out, and a host can grow their network with listeners. Accountability When hosting a podcast alone, there may be a day when a host needs to record but does not want to. Having a guest or co-host creates a sense of responsibility. A host does not want to waste the guest or co-host's time by having to reschedule. Comedians Many comedians host a podcast. A comedian's podcast allows fans to connect with the comedian. The comedian creates another source of income. Some comedians might use their podcast to work out material before trying the material on-stage. Giving listeners a preview. Conclusion The most important factor for any podcast is the value a listener receives. For a podcast to have value, the content needs to educate or entertain the listener. There is nothing wrong with having a co-host or doing interviews. Not having access to them should not stop someone from starting a podcast. This post is an excerpt from the Open Podcast Community book. Which is available for . purchase here Previously published at https://blog.openpodcast.xyz/solo-podcast/

How to Host a Solo Podcast

This paper proposes a real-time approach to detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. OpenPose is an open-source multi-person detection system supporting the body, hand, foot, and facial key points. Human pose estimation is focused on finding individuals and their pose from an image. This problem is quite challenging and is quite complex to determine the number of people that can appear in an image. Moreover, the interferences caused due to contact or proximity between people make the association of parts quite challenging. The current state-of-the-art techniques use a top-down strategy that estimates the pose of each person in each of the detected regions. This approach suffers from performance issues because the run time is directly proportional to the number of people in the image. The method used in the paper uses a nonparametric representation called Part Affinity Fields (PAFs). This approach uses the location and orientation of body parts to encode unstructured pairwise relationships between the body parts of the individuals in the image. In the earlier version of the same paper, they refined both the confidence maps and the part affinity fields (PAFs) at each stage using a branched multistage Convolutional neural network (CNN) and this resulted in much more computation and time at each stage. [1] This paper focused on refining the existing techniques and the architecture of the CNN [1]. They found that PAF refinement is crucial for maximising accuracy, while body part prediction refinement is not that important. In the paper, the author used the first 10 layers of the VGG-19 model as a baseline network to extract feature maps. These feature maps are input to the model to derive the PAFs that define the degree of association between the parts and the confidence maps, which are then refined using the greedy approach. The paper OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields is published by Zhe Cao, Student Member, IEEE, Gines Hidalgo, Student Member, IEEE, Tomas Simon, Shih-En Wei, and Yaser Sheikh under IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence journal. Summary of the work, results, and findings In the first stage, the feature maps of the input image are processed by passing it through a baseline network. In this paper, the author uses the first 10 layers of the VGG-19 model for generating the feature maps. Then the feature maps are processed with multiple stages of CNN to generate a set of Part Confidence Maps and a set of Part Affinity Fields. The system uses a multi-stage CNN. It consists of two types of stages. The first set of stages predicts part affinity fields i.e., degree of associations between the body parts the last set of stages predicts the confidence maps. By replacing each 7x7 convolutional kernel with 3 consecutive 3x3 kernels, the current model was able to preserve the receptive field while computation expense is reduced. Using an approach like DenseNet [11] the output of the 3 convolution kernels is concatenated. This approach tripled the non-linearity layers and helped the model to keep both higher and lower-level features. A loss function is applied at the end of every step in both branches. Finally, the Confidence Maps and Part Affinity Fields are processed by a greedy algorithm where optimal partite graph matching is used to obtain the poses for each person in the image. The results and findings are presented, and the accuracy of the multi-person keypoint detection has been compared to the existing methods [2][3]. The real-time performance metric for the system has been specified by mentioning the number of frames it can process each second. All findings are visualized, and graphs are provided for better understanding. The author finds that the newly refined approach increased both the speed and accuracy by approximately 200% and 7% respectively. The paper contributed to the field of foot detection by presenting an annotated foot dataset with 15K human foot instances that have been publicly released for further study and development. The author open-sourced their work and the OpenPose system provides easy-to-use pipelines with command-line interfaces, python API, Unity plugin. It has also been included in the OpenCV library for ease of access. The system runs on CPUs and GPUs such as CUDA and OpenCL. They also provide portable executable binaries which can easily be downloaded and run with minimal setup. Pose-ShuffleNet is a lightweight multi-person pose estimation method developed by integrating the concepts of this paper [4]. This method is highly suited for resource-constrained scenarios. It is based on the building blocks of the ShuffleNet unit [5] for image analysis in place of VGG-19. An architecture of multi-stages with two branches, jointly learning parts detection and parts association has been used. Pose-ShuffleNet has a significantly lower resource (network size and FLOPs) consumption than some of the available leading methods. Using the concepts of OpenPose the research has been further extended to the 3D human pose estimation [6]. Further research on Intention Recognition of Pedestrians and Cyclists by 2D Pose Estimation has been carried out. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides promising results on the intention recognition of vulnerable road users. [7] Pros and Cons of the paper: Explanation with pictorial references clarifies the topic in a better way and was effective in clarifying relationships, simplifying complex topics, and was one of the main key factors that had me inclined toward the paper. All the edge cases have been acknowledged and future actions that can mitigate the failure cases have also been suggested. The accuracy and performance of the combined model with body and foot key points is also an important contribution to the paper. The generality of the method by applying it to the task of vehicle key point estimation and the use of the approach has contributed to the wide applications and competitive performance of the model. The paper also showcased three benchmarks performed on reputed and easily available datasets such as MPII [9], COCO [10], and a subset of COCO used as a foot dataset. And provide runtime analysis comparison against Mask R-CNN and Alpha-Pose to quantify the efficiency of the system and analyses the main failure cases. The model performs up to 3 times faster on GPUs when compared to CPUs and in the case of the body and foot model the performance difference is up to 30 times. Making the system more optimised on CPUs can help to make the model more accessible in smaller and less powerful systems and increase the use cases. [8] Potential Advancement and Future Work There have been many advancements in the field of pose estimation, and it is being used in various fields and applications, but at present, the practical applications are limited due to the challenges of crowded people and occluded body parts. A hybrid system of both top-down and bottom-up approaches along with Using anthropometric ratios for determining context can make the model more efficient [7]. Future developments can be made to generate a similar performance on CPUs using lightweight CNNs such as MobileNetV1, EfficientNet or a combination and can help the system be more efficient so that it is less reliant on GPUs and work on embedded systems. It can have various applications in security cameras, child monitors, automating warehouses, gesture control etc. Data plays a key role in improving the robustness of the network. Adding complex scenarios of human poses along with samples of human statues and paintings would boost the accuracy by avoiding the problem of occluded body parts. Improvement in the greedy approach can help to make the pose estimation more accurate. The greedy approach used in the current system suffers from limited structural context when subjects are occluded. Also, the Hungarian algorithm [8] employed is having a cubic complexity. By using a larger structural context of a subset of pre-assigned parts rather than using only the immediate predecessors as in [7], this time complexity can become linear in the number of candidates of any single part-class. Refining the algorithm to reject less likely or complex poses and adding an animal dataset to train the system can have wide applications in pest control, animal farming, analysis of the bees as shown in Honeybee Detection and Pose Estimation using Convolutional Neural Networks [10]. References [1] Cao, Zhe, et al. "Realtime multi-person 2d pose estimation using part affinity fields." Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2017. [2] Fang, Hao-Shu, et al. "Rmpe: Regional multi-person pose estimation." Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision. 2017. [3] He, Kaiming, et al. "Mask r-cnn." Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision. 2017. [4] Guan, Chen-zhi. "Realtime multi-person 2d pose estimation using shufflenet." 2019 14th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE). IEEE, 2019. [5] Zhang, Xiangyu, et al. "Shufflenet: An extremely efficient convolutional neural network for mobile devices." Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2018. [6] Schwarcz, Steven, and Thomas Pollard. "3d human pose estimation from deep multi-view 2d pose." 2018 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). IEEE, 2018. [7] Fang, Zhijie, and Antonio M. López. "Intention recognition of pedestrians and cyclists by 2d pose estimation." IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 21.11 (2019): 4773-4783. [8] Osokin, Daniil. "Real-time 2d multi-person pose estimation on cpu: Lightweight openpose." arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.12004 (2018). [9] Andriluka, Mykhaylo, et al. "2d human pose estimation: New benchmark and state of the art analysis." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2014. [10] Rodríguez, I. F., et al. "Honeybee detection and pose estimation using convolutional neural networks." Congres Reconnaissance des Formes, Image, Apprentissage et Perception (RFIAP). 2018. [11] Huang, Gao, et al. "Densely connected convolutional networks." Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2017. 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Reviewing “OpenPose - Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields”

When building apps in Angular, you will likely need to trigger a modal or pop-up at some point. Sometimes, this is easy and can be done with some simple CSS, but other times, it may be more complicated. You may need to append markup to the bottom of your document so that it can be placed on top of everything else. Or maybe, depending on the scroll position, a pop-up will need to open upward instead of downward. There are lots of possible scenarios where you may need more than what’s capable with CSS by itself, and that’s where the CDK Overlay Module comes into play. In this post, we’ll look at how we can use the CDK Overlay Module to create a globally positioned modal that’s placed on top of everything else and centered within the viewport. And to contrast, we’ll create a pop-up connected to a button that will automatically position itself within the viewport based on scroll position. Alright, let’s get to it! https://youtu.be/S7d2zvbFKhs?embedable=true The Angular CDK Overlay module is really powerful and provides many features. And this means there’s a lot to know and understand. The aim of this post is to demonstrate a basic setup for two common types of overlays, modals, and pop-ups. Since there’s so much to cover within the Overlay module, I will be creating posts of more advanced Overlay module features in the future, so keep an eye out for those. For now, though, let’s start with a basic modal example. Creating a Modal With the Angular CDK Overlay Service Here, we have this list of NBA players. We have this button in the upper right corner of each player. When we click this button, we want to open up a modal to display more information about the specific player. This is something that is fairly easy to do using the CDK Overlay module. How to install the Angular CDK But, before we can use it, we first need to install the Angular CDK, which we can do with this command within our Angular app: npm i @angular/cdk How to import the Angular CDK Overlay prebuilt CSS After we have it installed, we will want to include the overlay-prebuilt CSS file from the library. It provides some basic styles in order to create modals and pop-ups that work correctly. I normally include it in something like the global stylesheet for the Angular app, so let’s import it there. global_styles.scss @import '@angular/cdk/overlay-prebuilt.css'; Ok, now we’re ready to wire up our modal. The first thing we need to do is inject the Overlay service into our constructor so that we can use it. player.component.ts export class PlayerComponent {
    ...
    constructor(private overlay: Overlay) {}
} Now, let’s create an method that we’ll call at the click of a button. Within this method, first, we’ll create our overlay using the method from the service. This method will create an overlay and return the reference to it, so we’ll set it as a variable named overlayRef since that’s what we will have after calling . openModal() create() create() export class PlayerComponent {
    ...
    protected openModal() {
        const overlayRef = this.overlay.create();
    }
} Ok, at this point we’ve created it, now we need to attach some markup to the overlay. So, we’ll use our overlayRef variable, and we’ll call the method. This method has a parameter where we need to pass a . attach() CdkPortal export class PlayerComponent {
    ...
    protected openModal() {
        const overlayRef = this.overlay.create();
        overlayRef.attach();
    }
} This template portal will need to wrap whatever markup we want to display in our modal. Before we can add this portal, we first need to import it into the Portal Module. ...
import { PortalModule } from '@angular/cdk/portal';

@Component({
    selector: 'app-player',
    imports: [..., PortalModule]
    ...
} Ok, now we can switch over to our component template. We’ll add an . On this we’ll add the directive. And within this let’s add our player details component. This component has an input where it takes in a player object, so we’ll pass it to our current player. ng-template ng-template cdkPortal ng-template player.component.html <ng-template cdkPortal>
    <app-player-details [player]="player"></app-player-details>
</ng-template> Now, we also need to import this player component, so let’s do that real quick. player.component.ts ...
import { PlayerDetailsComponent } from './player-details/player-details.component';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-player',
  imports: [..., PlayerDetailsComponent]
  ...
}) Ok, the next thing we need to do is access the portal that we just added in the template so that we can pass it to our attach method. We can do this using the Angular View Child decorator. And for the , its selector will be the . We’ll call this property , and we’ll type it to as well. @ViewChild CdkPortal portal CdkPortal import { CdkPortal, PortalModule } from '@angular/cdk/portal';

export class PlayerComponent {
    @ViewChild(CdkPortal) portal!: CdkPortal;
    ...
} Now that we have a handle on the portal, we can simply add it to our attach method. export class PlayerComponent {
    @ViewChild(CdkPortal) portal!: CdkPortal;
    ...
    protected openModal() {
        const overlayRef = this.overlay.create();
        overlayRef.attach(this.portal);
    }
} And the last thing we need to do is call this open modal method when the button is clicked. So, back in our component template, on the button, we bind to the click event, and then we call our method. player.component.html <button (click)="openModal()">
    ...
</button> Ok, now let’s click our button and take a look. And there it is, the click opens the modal with our player details. So, this is pretty cool, but at first glance, this may not seem like anything special, but let me tell you, it actually is. If we inspect the modal, we can see that the markup for our player details is actually getting injected into a container at the end of the . This is pretty crazy since our player component is up above within the app component. body This is what ensures that this modal will properly be placed on a layer that is unaffected by anything else within our app. And that can be really handy in many modal situations. How to Customize the Angular Overlay Settings With a Custom Overlay Config Object Now, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of functionality and configuration available with the Overlay Module. For example, if we want to position our model in the center of the viewport, We can do this by passing a custom configuration object to the overlay. To do this, let’s create a variable. This will be set to a new object. We’ll need to make sure that class is imported. Within this, we’re going to set the for the overlay. config OverlayConfig positionStrategy We’ll add , and then we’ll call the method. It’s going to be a position, which just means that it will be positioned relative to the viewport and not any specific element. From there, we’ll call , and then . this.overlay position() global() centerHorizontally() centerVertically() Let’s also set a width of sixty percent to keep it from growing too wide. Then, we can pass this custom config in our create method. The items we’ve included in this custom config will now override the default values for those properties. ...
import { ..., OverlayConfig } from '@angular/cdk/overlay';

export class PlayerComponent {
    ...
    protected openModal() {
        const config = new OverlayConfig({
            positionStrategy: this.overlay.position().global().centerHorizontally().centerVertically(),
            width: '60%'
        });
        const overlayRef = this.overlay.create(config);
        overlayRef.attach(this.portal);
    }
} Ok, let’s check it out. Looking pretty good right? How to Close an Angular CDK Overlay on a Backdrop Click Now, what if we want to put up a layer over the viewport when the modal is open, and when we click on that layer, we want to close the modal? Well, we can do this by adding more custom configurations in our . We can add true. This will add a backdrop element to our overlay. OverlayConfig hasBackdrop Now, to close the modal when this backdrop gets clicked, we have a method on our overlay ref that we can call. This method returns an observable that will fire every time the backdrop is clicked as long as it is open, so we can subscribe. Then, in the callback here, we will close our overlay by calling . backdropClick() overlayRef.detach() ...
export class PlayerComponent {
    ...
    protected openModal() {
        const config = new OverlayConfig({
            ...
            hasBackdrop: true
        });
        ...
        overlayRef.backdropClick().subscribe(() => overlayRef.detach());
    }
} Now, let’s try this. Cool, it closes when we click on this backdrop. Now, there’s a ton more available to us here, so I’ll save it for a future post. Just know that there’s quite a bit more functionality and configuration available to you if needed. For now, let’s look at an example of a Connected Position overlay. Creating a Pop-up With a Connected Position Angular CDK Overlay Creating a “connected position” overlay means that our pop-up, instead of being globally positioned within the viewport, will be positioned relative to the button that we clicked on to open it. As if it’s attached to it. For this, we can use a couple of directives provided by the Overlay module instead of using the Overlay service. We’ll use the directive, which will be applied to the item that we want to position from, in our case, our button. And then, we’ll use the directive that will be applied to the that we want to inject into our popup. cdkOverlayOrigin cdkConnectedOverlay ng-template For this example, since we’ll be using these directives, we can actually remove most of what we added when we were using the Overlay service. Well, get rid of the , the constructor, and the function. We can also remove the , , , and imports as well. @ViewChild openModal() PortalModule CdkPortal Overlay Overlay Config Now, within the component template, we can replace the click binding on our button with the directive. cdkOverlayOrigin <button cdkOverlayOrigin>
    ...
</button> On the overlay , we can replace the directive with the directive. ng-template cdkPortal cdkConnectedOverlay <ng-template cdkConnectedOverlay>
    ...
</ng-template> Now, we need to connect the overlay to the origin. To do this, the overlay has an input called . We need to pass this input to our origin directive instance. So we add a template reference variable, let’s call it trigger, on our origin button. cdkConnectedOverlayOrigin <button
    cdkOverlayOrigin
    #trigger="cdkOverlayOrigin">
    ...
</button> Now, we can pass this reference to the overlay with the input. cdkConnectedOverlayOrigin <ng-template
    cdkConnectedOverlay
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOrigin]="trigger">
    ...
</ng-template> To make this pop-up open, we’ll use the input. This input expects a boolean value telling it whether it should be open or not. So, let’s add a property called , and initialize it to false. cdkConnectedOverlayOpen detailsOpen ...
export class PlayerComponent {
    protected detailsOpen = false;
} We’ll toggle the property when the button is clicked using a click event binding. <button
    cdkOverlayOrigin
    #trigger="cdkOverlayOrigin"
    (click)="detailsOpen = !detailsOpen">
    ...
</button> Then, we can bind our input to this property on the overlay. cdkConnectedOverlayOpen <ng-template
    cdkConnectedOverlay
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOrigin]="trigger"
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOpen]="detailsOpen">
    ...
</ng-template> Ok, let’s give this a try. Cool, now it gets positioned next to the button. And, if we inspect this again, the markup gets injected in the same location, at the end of the body. What’s even more cool is that on the item at the bottom of the viewport, we will want it to open upward because we don’t have room to see it if it opens downward. Well, if we click on the button, we can see that this actually happens without us doing anything at all. Super cool. This really saves us a ton of effort. All the tough stuff has already been figured out for us. And just like the global positioning method, when using the Overlay service, there are a bunch of configurations available to us. This time, with the directives, however, we use s and s. @Input @Output So, if we want to add the width, for example, we can use the input. cdkConnectedOverlayWidth <ng-template
    cdkConnectedOverlay
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOrigin]="trigger"
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOpen]="detailsOpen"
    cdkConnectedOverlayWidth="60%">
    ...
</ng-template> Now, the pop-up won’t grow beyond sixty percent of the width of its container. And if we want to close this pop-up when we click anywhere outside, we can use the output, which will fire when it detects a click outside of itself. When this happens, we can set our details open property to false. overlayOutsideClick <ng-template
    cdkConnectedOverlay
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOrigin]="trigger"
    [cdkConnectedOverlayOpen]="detailsOpen"
    cdkConnectedOverlayWidth="60%"
    (overlayOutsideClick)="detailsOpen = false">
    ...
</ng-template> Now, when we open our pop-up and then click outside, it closes. Just like with the Overlay service, there’s a ton more available to us, which I’ll save for a future post. Just remember that there’s more functionality and configuration available outside of what I’ve covered here. So, some pretty cool stuff is happening in these examples. It’s all actually quite complex from a development perspective, but there’s not much for us to figure out in order to leverage it, thanks to the folks who built it. Found This Helpful? If you found this article helpful and want to show some love, you can always buy me a coffee! Want to See It in Action? Check out the demo code and examples of these techniques in the Stackblitz example below. If you have any questions or thoughts, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. https://stackblitz.com/edit/stackblitz-starters-hnqgln?ctl=1&embed=1&file=src%2Fplayer%2Fplayer.component.ts&embedable=true Also published . here

Learn the Basics of Angular CDK Overlay: Angular Modals and Pop-ups

Are we on the brink of debunking Moravec’s Paradox? In the 1980s, AI and robotics researcher Hans Moravec highlighted a counterintuitive aspect of AI: tasks requiring high-level reasoning — like chess or Go — are easier for to master than basic sensory and motor skills — such as walking or identifying your mom’s face — which humans find instinctive. Adding complexity, these “simpler” skills actually demand much more computational power. This insight sheds light on the complexity of replicating human-like perception and dexterity, outcomes of millions of years of evolution, as opposed to logical reasoning, a more recent development. In today’s AI and ML landscape, this paradox underscores the challenges in creating robots and AI systems capable of seamlessly navigating and interacting with the physical world. AI However, last week, Bernt Bornich, CEO and founder of 1x, a humanoid robotics company, , “ .” I suspect that this has something to do with the advancements in foundation models. Originally known for their ability to perform a wide range of tasks based on a single type of data (like text for language models), these models become “multimodal” when integrating and interpreting information across different sensory inputs, closely mirroring human-like understanding. wrote New progress update on the droids dropping in 4 weeks, looks like Moravec’s paradox might be debunked, and we just didn’t have the data Could the embodiment of AI, with all its sensory inputs, plus reasoning-imitation algorithms like LLMs, be the pool of data that disproves Moravec’s paradox? Another intriguing development caught my attention. Huang Jensen, Nvidia’s CEO, to a question from Wired about what current development could change everything. Jensen replied, “ ” responded There are a couple of things. One doesn’t really have a name, but it’s part of the work we’re doing in foundational robotics. If you can generate text and images, can you also generate motion? The answer is probably yes. And if you can generate motion, you can understand the intent and generate a generalized version of articulation. Therefore, humanoid robotics should be right around the corner. Something to observe in the coming weeks! In related news from the robotics universe, Figure AI, a humanoid robotics startup, made headlines by raising approximately in funding. What’s more impressive is the list of backers: Amazon, NVIDIA, Microsoft, OpenAI, Intel, LG, and Samsung. This indicates a strong belief in the potential of humanoid robotics to disrupt various sectors. $675 million Yet, there are skeptical voices. Rodney Brooks, who coined Nouvelle AI*, last week: “ ” posted Tele-op robots presented as autonomous, like the Tesla Optimus humanoid folding a shirt, and 1X humanoid robots, are misrepresentations of what robots are actually doing, which can also be called LIES. Note that the Stanford robot cooking and cleaning videos are also tele-operated. If 2023 was the year of LLMs, are we ready to evolve to an embodied AI and make 2024 the year of robots? 🎁 Bonus: The freshest research papers from the week of Feb 19 — Feb 25 Enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) : Expands the processing capability of LLMs to handle over 2 million tokens, pushing the boundaries of context window sizes for more comprehensive understanding and generation tasks. LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens Read the paper. : Demonstrates the versatility of LLMs in performing numerical regression tasks, suggesting their potential as universal tools for predictive modeling across a variety of domains. . OmniPred: Language Models as Universal Regressors Read the paper : Investigates efficient strategies for distilling large models into smaller, more manageable ones, particularly for reasoning tasks, emphasizing the importance of decomposition over problem-solving. . Divide-or-Conquer? Which Part Should You Distill Your LLM? Read the paper : Proposes a method to enhance the efficiency of self-attention mechanisms in LLMs, crucial for improving performance and reducing resource consumption. . ChunkAttention: Efficient Self-Attention with Prefix-Aware KV Cache and Two-Phase Partition Read the paper : Introduces a framework for personalizing LLM interactions using user embeddings, enhancing the model’s responsiveness to individual user preferences and histories. USER-LLM: Efficient LLM Contextualization with User Embeddings Multimodal and Multi-Agent Systems : Explores integrating video and language for advanced AI understanding and interaction, leveraging a novel RingAttention mechanism for efficient multimodal learning. . World Model on Million-Length Video and Language with RingAttention Read the paper : Develops a multi-agent platform that enhances cooperation and flexibility among agents, addressing the complexity of multi-agent systems and their practical applications. . AgentScope: A Flexible yet Robust Multi-Agent Platform Read the paper : Focuses on the design and analysis of small-scale multimodal models, proving that with strategic optimizations, smaller models can achieve or surpass the performance of larger counterparts. . TinyLLaVA: A Framework of Small-scale Large Multimodal Models Read the paper : Introduces a versatile multimodal language model that processes speech, text, images, and music, demonstrating the power of discrete representations in unifying various data modalities within a single framework. This approach simplifies the integration of new modalities without needing to modify the underlying architecture or training methodologies. AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling read the paper : Presents a novel dataset that enhances multimodal understanding by incorporating touch with vision and language, aiming to advance touch-vision-language alignment and understanding through a tactile encoder and text generation model. A Touch, Vision, and Language Dataset for Multimodal Alignment read the paper Advancements in Specific Domains : Introduces a novel object detection model that leverages programmable gradient information for enhanced accuracy and efficiency in learning. . YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information Read the paper : Demonstrates the application of Transformers in complex planning tasks, offering a method that surpasses traditional search algorithms in efficiency and effectiveness. . : Better Planning with Transformers via Search Dynamics Bootstrapping* Beyond A Read the paper Developer Tools and APIs : Presents a vast dataset designed for training LLMs to interact with APIs, addressing the challenge of creating effective models for API usage and integration. . API-BLEND: A Comprehensive Corpora for Training and Benchmarking API LLMs Read the paper : Develops an open-source system for code generation, execution, and refinement, facilitated by a dataset of multi-turn interactions, aiming to bridge the gap between code generation models and practical coding tasks. . OpenCodeInterpreter: Integrating Code Generation with Execution and Refinement Read the paper Security and Adversarial Research : Explores the susceptibility of LLMs to a wide range of adversarial attacks, highlighting the need for comprehensive security measures to protect against unintended behaviors and data extraction. . Coercing LLMs to do and reveal (almost) anything Read the paper Model Efficiency and Quantization : Discusses a novel framework for quantizing LLM weight matrices to 1-bit to drastically reduce storage and computational demands while maintaining performance, enabling efficient deployment of LLMs on resource-constrained devices. OneBit: Towards Extremely Low-bit Large Language Models read the paper Instruction Tuning and Data Quality : Introduces REALIGN, a method for refining instruction data quality for LLMs to better align with human values, emphasizing the importance of instruction data quality in model alignment and suggesting areas for further exploration in LLM science. Reformatted Alignment read the paper : Proposes a novel method for instruction tuning that generates synthetic instruction data across all disciplines, showcasing a scalable and customizable approach to instruction tuning without relying on specific training data. Synthetic Data (Almost) from Scratch: Generalized Instruction Tuning for Language Models read the paper : Proposes a pre-instruction-tuning method to enhance LLMs’ knowledge updating capabilities, demonstrating significant improvements in factual knowledge absorption and cross-domain generalization. Instruction-tuned Language Models are Better Knowledge Learners read the paper *Also published . * here

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