Welcome to Really Specific Stories: a series about tech podcasting, its devoted community of producing and listening fans and the value of a medium based on open RSS. Standing for 'Really Simple Syndication', RSS is a web feed that enables users and apps to receive updates from websites, including podcast episodes and blog posts.

Really Specific Stories is recorded, edited and hosted by Martin Feld—a Mac fan, podcast studies researcher and co-host of Hemispheric Views with Andrew Canion and Jason Burk. The show is also a part of a broader PhD project, in collaboration with Dr. Kate Bowles, Dr. Christopher Moore and Dr. Benjamin Ball at the University of Wollongong. Each episode includes an interview with a producer or listener from a selected tech podcast case study and uses the qualitative method of narrative enquiry to uncover their experiences. Responses from each interview have been included in a final PhD thesis, which is currently under examination and aims to achieve the following:

• determine what it means to participate in the community that surrounds tech podcasting and what role RSS plays;
• explore how shared creative practice and open infrastructure act as a form of creative resistance against platform capitalists (Srnicek, 2007) or vectoralists (Wark, 2004) in big tech, news media and broadcasting; and
• contribute to the academic field of podcast studies, drawing from other fields such as media ecology, blog theory, fan studies and persona studies.

Not to mention, the podcast acts as an open historical archive of MP3 files for all tech podcast enthusiasts. Academic research is important, however, these stories should remain accessible to the community that fuels it. The publication of any interview linked to a podcast case study depends on formal consent from and ethical collaboration with involved producers and listeners. So far, project case studies include:

• Accidental Tech Podcast;
• Core Intuition;
• Hemispheric Views;
• Naked Tech Podcast;
• The Talk Show with John Gruber; and
• Relay FM podcasts Connected, Parallel and 20 Macs for 2020.

Thanks for visiting! To learn more about what led to all of this, you can read a dedicated autoethnographic blog post.