Random Podcast Topic Generator

What this topic generator is for

Everybody who has thought about starting a podcast has got stuck at the same place. Not the microphone. Not the editing. The subject.

Press Generate and it gives you one. A few from the list:

• Personal Finance & Investing
• History
• Entrepreneurship & Startups
• Soapmaking & Natural Cosmetics
• Vintage Cameras & Film Photography
• News & Current Events

Read those two ends of the list against each other, because they are not the same kind of thing at all. One of them is a subject. The other is a category. Almost everything that goes right or wrong with a podcast is decided by which of those you pick, and this page is mostly about that.

Drawing a topic

1. Press Generate for one, and pay attention to your gut reaction before you evaluate it.
2. Ask for five and look for the two that could be combined, since the intersection is usually the show.
3. Type into Contains to explore a field.
4. Copy to keep the ones worth thinking about.

Where these topics come from

Subjects gathered and checked by hand, ranging from the enormous to the wonderfully specific. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The word was invented to pad out an article

On the twelfth of February 2004, a technology journalist called Ben Hammersley published a piece in The Guardian about a small strange thing that was happening. MP3 players were in a lot of pockets. Audio software had become cheap or free. Blogging was established. Put those together and people were beginning to make their own radio and distribute it themselves.

Hammersley wrote a sentence asking what this thing should be called, and offered three names. Audioblogging. Podcasting. GuerillaMedia.

That is the entire origin. He has since said that he made the word up because the article was running a little short and he needed to fill the space.

Nobody used it for another seven months. Then it turned up on a mailing list, got picked up by the people actually making the shows, and by 2005 the New Oxford American Dictionary had made it their word of the year. A word that a man invented to hit his word count is now the name of an industry.

There is something clarifying in that if you are sitting here wondering whether your idea is good enough. The medium you are about to enter was named by accident, in a sentence, by somebody who was not even sure the thing would last.

Named after a device that no longer exists

The word is a portmanteau: iPod, plus broadcast. So the entire medium carries the name of a specific Apple product in its first syllable.

Which is strange, because the iPod is gone. Apple stopped making it. And podcasting predates any podcast feature on the iPod at all, so the naming was never accurate even at the time. You have almost certainly never listened to a podcast on an iPod. Probably nobody you know has.

The medium outlived its own namesake, and nobody has ever seriously proposed renaming it, because a name only has to work once. Podcasting is now just a word that means a thing, in the way that we still dial telephone numbers on devices with no dial, and we still say we are taping a programme.

It also tells you something true about the medium. Nothing about a podcast depends on the technology in its name. It is a person talking, delivered as a file, at a time the listener chose. That description has not changed in twenty years and it is why the form has been so hard to kill.

Why the narrow topic beats the broad one

Go back to that list. History. Vintage cameras and film photography.

Everybody's instinct is that History is the better topic, because more people are interested in history than in old cameras. The instinct is exactly backwards, and here is why.

A person does not go looking for a podcast about history. They already have one. They go looking for a podcast about the Byzantine navy, or about disasters in engineering, or about the year 1177 BC. The broad topic has no door. Nobody can want it specifically, because wanting it specifically means wanting something narrower.

The narrow topic has three advantages that compound. It is findable, because somebody types those exact words into a search box and there you are, and there is no competition, because who else is making a show about vintage cameras. It is defensible, because a general history show competes with every well funded history show on Earth, and yours does not. And it is lovable, because the person who cares about film photography really cares, and will listen to every episode, and will tell three other people, which a person mildly interested in history will never do.

There is a fourth advantage that nobody mentions. A narrow subject is easier to make. You will never wonder what this week's episode is about, because the subject is small enough that its whole shape is visible, and every corner of it is unexplored.

The correct move is not to widen. It is to take whatever the generator gave you and cut it in half. Then cut it in half again.

The show you can still make at episode thirty

Most podcasts stop early. This is the least controversial statement anybody in the industry makes, and the reason is almost never audience size. It is that the thing was harder to produce than it was interesting to produce, and the ratio caught up.

So the real test of a topic is not whether it makes a good first episode. Anybody can make a good first episode. The test is whether it makes an acceptable thirtieth.

Some questions worth asking of whatever you drew.

Does the subject generate episodes on its own? Things that happen, arrive, or get released will refill the well for you. A topic where you must invent every episode from nothing runs dry around episode twelve.

Is there somebody to talk to? Not a famous guest. Any guest. A subject with a community attached has an infinite supply of people who have never been asked about the thing they know most about, and who will be delighted.

Would you still want to know this if nobody listened? This is the one that decides it. The shows that survive are made by people who were going to find the thing out anyway, and who are simply recording themselves doing it. The shows that die are the ones where the podcast was the point.

Can you make one in ninety minutes? Whatever your format is, if a single episode costs a weekend, you have designed a show you will resent. Cut the format until the making is easy and the thinking is the only hard part.

Questions people ask

What if somebody is already making a show on my topic?

Good. It proves an audience exists, which was the risky part. A field with no shows in it is more often an empty market than an untapped one. You are not competing for a slot; people listen to several shows on things they love.

Solo or with a co-host?

A co-host makes recording easier and editing harder, and it changes the show from an essay into a conversation. Solo shows demand that you actually have something to say. Both are fine. What fails is a co-host who is there because you were nervous.

How much does the equipment matter?

Less than people think and more than they hope. Listeners forgive an ordinary voice and abandon a bad one, because bad audio is physically tiring. A cheap microphone in a quiet room beats an expensive one in a kitchen, every time.

Can I start narrow and widen later?

That is the only direction that works. An audience that came for one specific thing will follow you outward, because they came for you by then. An audience that came for a broad category never arrived in the first place.

References

1. Hammersley, B. (12 February 2004). Audible Revolution. The Guardian. The first published use of the word podcasting. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.digitalmedia
2. Podcast, on the etymology, the delay in adoption, and the term predating the iPod's podcast features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast
3. Ben Hammersley, on coining the term and on the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year, 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hammersley