How the Balcao platform organizes and manages content like podcast directories and channels on decentralized storage

Balcao is a platform that allows for open, decentralized, and democratized podcast listing and discovery built using blockchain-based storage.

Discovering new podcasts and relevant content that suits our interests has been a pretty rudimentary affair for us, podcast listeners. On most podcast platforms, we have to hunt for new podcasts in a categorized directory, then subscribe to them and periodically check for new content through the listening apps. Moreover, content curation, moderation, and ranking processes are not open or accessible to the public. Balcao is here to change things! Our approach to content curation is topic oriented — the focus is on presenting trending topics, conversations, themes, and news stories to the listener instead of podcast directories. The user sees curated content as the primary view in the Balcao app while the traditional podcast directories/subscriptions interface is also available. Being an open platform, Balcao allows anyone to create and manage their Podcast channels by curating podcast feeds molded in their perspective. Also, developers can build independent client applications that consume curated/aggregated content.

The traditional podcast directories/subscriptions interface

The Balcao Content Model

Balcao Content Model

Channels
A channel is the primary building block of the Balcao Platform. Content curators publish curated content through channels for consumption by subscribers. Channel owners can be individuals, organizations or collectives.

Channels can be very flexible in terms of what content they feature:

• An organization/collective owning multiple podcasts could have all the podcasts in their catalog feature on their channel.
• An individual podcast creator could manage a channel that features content only from a single podcast that they own.
• A content curator could create a channel that features content from multiple podcasts through their public RSS feeds.

Balcao Channel Example

A channel’s curated content is composed of the following:

1. Headlines: featured episodes that are the top highlights of a channel.
2. Stories: a list of stories that belong to the channel. Each story is a list of podcast episodes featuring a common theme and can optionally contain an introductory audio snippet (like a trailer).
3. Featured Stories: featured stories that revolve around a specific theme.
4. Featured podcasts.

Topics
A Topic is a conversation, theme or discussion around which discourse is happening. Topics belong to and are collectively managed by the Balcao community.

Stories
A Story is a more specific instance of a topic, featured on a channel. Channel owners own and manage the stories they create.

Categories
A Category is a label assigned to a Channel, Story, Topic, Podcast, or Episode and facilitates the classification and discovery of various content units.

In terms of specificity: Story > Topic > Category.
Here’s an example:
Topic: HBO’s House of Dragons
Story: House of the Dragon S01E03 — Second of his Name
Category: Entertainment

Balcao Content Workflow

In the initial phases, the focus would be on generating, managing, and hosting channel content through decentralized storage and smart contracts. Channels will primarily feature podcast content sourced from Web 2.0 sources such as RSS feeds.

Balcao Content Workflow

The content workflow would consist of 4 stages:

Creation

1. Podcast publishers publish content to RSS feeds.
2. Podcast publishers register a podcast through Balcao’s Podcast registration smart contract.
3. Alternatively, platform users can add a list of podcast feeds (list of RSS feed links) to the podcast directory through Balcao’s Podcast directory smart contract.
4. Decentralized Content Aggregator protocol nodes then periodically process the podcast directory to extract and store podcast and episode content on decentralized storage.

Curation

1. Content curators create a channel — minted as NFTs to establish ownership (ERC-721 or ERC-1155 TBD).
2. Channels, Stories, and Topics that are generated are stored on decentralized storage.

Indexing

Decentralized Content Indexing Protocol nodes (The Graph or similar) index the content stored on the blockchain and make it available through a public API.

Consumption

1. Podcast listeners discover and engage with channels through client apps.
2. User data is stored on decentralized storage.

Content Moderation

We appreciate the fact that content moderation is a complex and sensitive subject and should be handled in a nuanced manner. We firmly believe that the moderation process should be community owned and managed. During the initial phases, content moderation would be fully managed by the Balcao team — decentralized modes of content moderation would be built in later phases.

Conclusion

That’s a wrap! Now that you have a basic understanding of the Balcao content model and content generation/curation process, we are looking forward to you joining the Balcao community! Stay tuned for more updates from the Balcao team. We’ll be releasing new features, functionality, and content regularly. We welcome your feedback and hope you share your thoughts with us. You can also help us build Balcao by taking this survey.

Balcao is your platform. It’s your voice, unshackled! Join now!

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