Idea: Wikidata identifiers as topics

[nathangathright]

Inspired by @misener’s article about Apple tagging individual podcast episodes with topics. I was curious if we should explore the merit of creating a <podcast:topics> namespace tag based on Wikidata identifiers. From the article:

Not only could this lead to new and better podcast discovery features within Apple Podcasts, greater use of structured data also represents a potential win for podcast search and audio SEO.

…It’s not difficult to see how Apple could use relevance-weighted topic data to significantly improve podcast episode discovery…

For example, imagine being able to explore episodes on a particular topic, published in the last week/month/year…Or imagine diving into the back catalog of a long-running show through the lens of topics you care most about.

Obviously, I’d expect to see a lot of keyword-stuffing from "growth hacker" types, but that was also a concern with the person tag. Perhaps there’s a way to mitigate the incentives to act in bad faith.

[jamescridland]

If helpful to know, https://podnews.net/article/apple-topics is a viewer for those topics.

The person tag isn't used by larger platforms, partially because of the possibility of spam. But I think it's something that can be mitigated, I agree.

[thebells1111]

This would also solve the issue of categorizing music for enhanced searching.