podcast:person

A way to list hosts and other people involved with the podcast

• The official specification

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This tag is for you if you want to highlight the people involved in your podcast: your hosts, guests, composers and other people.

It defaults to a simple way to list your hosts, but you can use the full podcast taxonomy list here, to highlight almost everyone in your podcast that you think is deserving of a credit.

Some podcast directories might use this to enhance search (so, by searching for a person it finds all the podcasts they’re associated with, for example).

Support

This is easy to implement for podcast apps. It’s supported by a number of larger podcast apps including Podcast Addict and Podcast Guru.

For podcast hosting companies, it needs additional UX building for the user. It’s supported by some large podcast hosts including Buzzsprout, Fireside and Sounder. Some podcast hosting companies only support this on the <channel> element, rather than on a per-show basis.

Suggestions

The specification allows for images and links for each contributor. Sanitising these fields before display is recommended.

You might want to use Google’s suggested rel="ugc" attribute to the links, to signal that these are user generated content. You might also consider caching and resizing the images for each person, to ensure fast page loads and lower bandwidth costs for podcasters.

An example in the wild

The Buzzcast podcast contains, in the <channel> element,

 <podcast:person role="host" href="https://twitter.com/albanbrooke" img="https://storage.buzzsprout.com/variants/byutxwmvq601x1sny2gtnsyc3fmd/101950687c70b7e2f9ca148685b2ebc23e16838eb1d84e62f976687a774717da.jpeg">Alban Brooke</podcast:person>
  <podcast:person role="host" img="https://storage.buzzsprout.com/variants/iwguve03cmi6mwynebgillvq88q2/101950687c70b7e2f9ca148685b2ebc23e16838eb1d84e62f976687a774717da.jpeg">Kevin Finn</podcast:person>

Podcast Guru

Podcast Guru uses the supplied images, as well as the names of the hosts.

PodcastAddict

PodcastAddict displays supplied images in its information page. You can click the image to open the website link, and search for that person in new podcasts.

Podfriend

Podfriend shows the images on a podcast page. You can click through to the person’s web link.

Podnews

Podnews displays the names of the hosts and the links (in the above, Kevin Finn doesn’t have a link so his name is not clickable). Podnews filters for hosts only.