Glossary

Words used on this site and inside our products, and what we mean by each. Some of them are ordinary podcasting words that get used loosely; a few are ours.

Nothing here is jargon for its own sake. Every entry is something you might actually meet.

Our products

4a — our daily podcast picker. Four topic queues a day, one of them deliberately unlike the others. The digit and the letter, lowercase, no space. See 4a.

foray — a common noun, lowercase, and not the name of the app. A foray is one named sequence on a subject, assembled out of stretches taken from several different episodes and played back to back as a single run. Three real ones are published in full. None is published in the app yet.

The app used to be called Foray, which is why the word still appears in the web app's address and in the names of its on-device storage. Renaming those would break saved links and orphan data already on people's devices.

longlive — a scrubbable timeline of Taylor Swift's twelve eras, on its own domain. Previously called swift2, which is why that name turns up in older references. See longlive.

JW Labs / JW Labs LLC — the same company. "JW Labs" is the short form of the legal name and not a separate entity, a brand of a parent, or a trading name. The company page.

Inside 4a

Queue — one of the four things 4a offers you on a given day. A queue is a group of episodes on one subject, not a single episode, and the card tells you how many and how long before you tap.

Stretch — the fourth queue, and the badge on it. Drawn from subjects next to your demonstrated interests rather than inside them, labelled so you know that is what it is, and it deliberately ignores your skip rate for the area it is exploring — because a slot that gives up when ignored is a slower route back to the same three shows. More.

Bridge — the one-line reason a Stretch pick is next to something you already like. A Stretch pick has to state one.

Why-line — the short explanation attached to a pick. Kept under about eighteen words, with a list of banned words, because a recommendation that needs a paragraph has not been made yet.

Thin — what 4a calls a result it could not fill properly. A playlist you asked for that came back thin found less than it wanted and said so, rather than padding itself out with filler.

Continue — the strip at the top for something long you started and did not finish. The ✓ on it means done with this, which also tells 4a you liked it enough to finish.

Family mode — a switch that hides episodes rated explicit, and also hides the whole comedy category, because older comedy items in the library predate per-episode ratings. Deliberately blunt, and we explain why.

Playback diagnostics — a record of what the player measured on your device: load times, where playback stopped, gaps at the seams of an assembled run, controls that did not respond. It holds no audio, no episode addresses and no account identifier, and it never leaves your device unless you copy it into an email yourself. How to send it.

Stretch, as a unit of a foray — on the sample pages we call each piece of an assembled sequence a stretch: one continuous run of audio from one episode, with a description in our own words of what it covers.

Podcasting words

Feed — the RSS document a publisher maintains, listing their episodes. It is the public interface to a podcast, and almost everything 4a knows about a show it knows because the feed said so.

Enclosure — the audio address inside a feed entry. 4a plays from it directly. There is no 4a server between you and an episode.

Moving window — most feeds serve a fixed number of recent episodes rather than a complete archive. A publisher with a 300-item window lists 300 episodes today and 300 next year, whatever their archive holds. Worth knowing because it is the most common reason a podcast statistic is quietly wrong.

Dynamic ad insertion — advertising stitched into an audio file per request, at the host, so that two people downloading the same episode receive different files of different lengths. Extremely common, entirely legitimate, and the reason a timestamp in a podcast is a much weaker thing than it looks.

Transcript tag — the feed element by which a publisher points at a transcript for an episode. Where a publisher provides one, 4a prefers it to anything else. Publishing one is free, helps accessibility and search, and is the single most useful thing a show can do to be represented accurately. More for podcasters.

Prefix / measurement service — a service a publisher puts in front of their own audio file to count downloads and attribute advertising. Your device follows it when you play, in any podcast app. It is the reason a publisher sees you and we do not.

Privacy words

Anonymous account — a real account that holds no name, no email address and no phone number. 4a creates one for itself on first run so that your events are yours; you never see a signup screen because there is not one. Plain language.

On-device storage — where most of what 4a knows about you lives: your interests, your positions, your history, your playlists, your settings. It is not transmitted. 4a uses two storage layers on your device, which matters only when deleting — and the deletion control covers both.

Content Security Policy — a browser-enforced list of the origins a page is allowed to talk to at all. Ours is short enough to print, which is what makes "there is no third-party code in here" a property of the software rather than a promise in a document.

How we talk about numbers

Every quantity we publish carries one of these, and they are not interchangeable. We adopted the labels after two internal write-ups had to be retracted in one week for mixing them up.

Measured — observed on real data or real hardware, with the method stated. Repeatable.

Estimated — arithmetic on an assumption. Useful for a decision, not quotable as a fact.

Projected — an extrapolation from a sample to a population that has not been sampled. Order of magnitude at best.

Designed — written down, agreed, and not built. Present in a document, absent from the product. The page that keeps track of that.

Label, never exclude — a standing rule. Something doubtful gets tagged and kept rather than silently dropped, because a thing quietly excluded is a thing nobody ever notices is missing. It is why 4a's subject labels are described as hints rather than promises.

Counts carry dates. A count without one is a claim that rots. Where two pages give different totals for the same thing, both say when they were taken — feeds serve moving windows and catalogues grow.