May the podcast outlive me!!!

In case if you don't know yet, I'm running a Tamil podcast called Vaanga Pazhagalaam with Techies to learn from the journey, experiences and stories of techies. It roughly translates to Come! let's hangout with techies in English.

As part of the podcast, last week, I interviewed Shrinivasan - Senior Software Architect at Saama industries and one of the co-founders of Kaniyam Foundation. You can start listening to my episodes clicking through this link.

Now, You might begin to wonder why I'm promoting my podast in the first paragraph itself. Below are my reasons:

Shhh... I'm setting up the base for the story
and looking to reach more audience tbh :)

The interview I took with Shrinivasan went really good and smooth! He was awake until midnight to help me record it. The stories he shared with me during the interview was very inspirational for me. As we concluded the interview, he had asked me to consider uploading the podcasts in the Internet Archive and listed out a few reasons to do so. It immediately struck a chord to me and I was inclined to do it.

So, what is Internet Archive?

In the rest of this blog, I'll try to give you a good introduction to the Internet Archive and provide a link to my uploads in the Internet Archive.

Chaos and Unpredictability

The whole world is chaotically unpredictable and so are the resources available in the internet.

In the 90s, during the Dot-com bubble burst, most of the internet companies were out of business and got closed, but at the same time, the digital resources created by those companies were also gone.

Very recently, Sony has announced that, Play Sation store will not stream any of the purchased TV shows due to it's content licensing arragements. You can read more about this in this X(formerly known as Twitter) thread here.

I'm currently hosting my episodes on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts. What would happen if both of the platforms remove my podcast? What would happen if both the companies go bankrupt?

The rescue act

in 1996, knowing the unprectability of the internet, Brewster Kahle had founded the Internet Archive. It started out by archiving the web pages in order to preserve them and date back the history. Today, it is now popularly known as the Wayback Machine.

In addition to archiving web pages, they also preserve:

Books and texts
Audio recordings
Videos
Images
Software programs

Both of previous episodes are now uploaded to the Internet Archive and you can find them here. After completing each of my episode, I now commit myself to upload each of episode also in the Internet Archive in addition to the current streaming platforms. I hope it's a great value addition to my audience.

The upper edge

The Internet Archive isn't running towards making more money. They are a non-profit organisation with a clear mission and purpose to provide universal access to all knowledge. They've been operating for more than 26 years consistently towards their purpose and they're preserving around 735 billion virtual resources until now!!!

Do we start listening from the Internet Archive?

I highly suggest you to listen to the podcast from either Spotify or Apple Podcasts. They have a better UI than the Internet Archive. It'll be convinent for you to stream from the mentioned platforms as you might already using them to listen to other podcasts. Additionally, I get very good analytics of the listenership through these major platforms.

Please feel free to listen to them now in any one of your favorite platform here. The sole reason for uploading the episodes on the Internet Archive is to ensure it's available univesally for a very very long time. May the podcast outlive me!!!