I've been trying to make Podcasting work. It is a mixed bag.
First off: For all the starry-eyed "TIVO for your iPod" buzz, "podcasting" is nothing new. MP3 blogs have been around for years, and sharing music on your webpage is as old as broadband. "Podcasting" is just a silly new buzzword for some simple RSS/Applescript automation tricks.
For podcasting to be useful to me, music hardware and podcast-aggregator software needs to be built way smarter. I've only used iPodder, but here's what it needs to do differently:
- Learn to treat ordinary MP3 blog feeds as podcast feeds. Just search the body of my RSS feed for links to MP3s, then download them. Don't wait for every good MP3 blog on the net to install their own platform-specific podcasting-plugin. It won't happen.
Better yet, let me point iPodder at a static HTML page and have it alert me when new links to MP3s appear there! Because some of my favorite mp3blogs still dont even have RSS feeds-- they ain't gonna start podcasting.
- Allow me to filter and change ID3 tags. "ID3 tags" are an MP3's meta-data. They're what tell iTunes an MP3's Artist, Album, Track Number, and so forth. Here's how it would help with podcasting:
Right now, iPodder throws a couple of gigantic hour-long (60MB!) MP3s into my iTunes every morning-- but there's no simple way for me to find them and delete them back out of iTunes. That means I'm losing disk space to MP3s that I don't want to keep and have no simple way to find and delete!
iPodder could, for instance, tag each MP3's comments field with the word "podcast" and maybe even the name and URL of the blog it was downloaded from. Then, presto, I could find all my podcast MP3s with a simple keyword search, and sort my MP3s by which blog they originally came from. iPodder tries to handle this right now using playlists, but keywords are better than folders.
- Give MP3s a history. An added bonus of ID3-filtering is that an MP3's comments field could turn into an annotated history of its travels. Once we get BlogTorrent working right, bandwidth and hosting won't be an issue, because we'll be trading small pointers-to-MP3s instead of the giant MP3s themselves. The result is that MP3s will start slinging from feed to feed as fast as any other meme. I want to be able to look at an MP3's history-- where did it start, and whose blogs has it passed through to get to me? Then receiving and rebroadcasting an MP3 will be like participating in a ForwardTrack petition- I'll get to check out the web of community surrounding your music as I listen to it.
- iPods should connect to the internet. Yup. You want to bet that the first live-audio iPods handle will be some DRM'd massmedia-managed satellite radio type thing? And that everyday humans wont be able to broadcast over it until some uClinux-weilding geek squad hacks the system? Because you would lose that bet.
This is all small beans though, in the scope of podcasting's ultimate goal-- opening up the media landscape to everyday humans without zillions of dollars or esoteric tech knol.
ILoveRadio.org sums it all up well:Yes, podcasting is off to a great start. But we need to keep focused on advancing the technology as a platform, not just a cool way to make little radio shows for our friends. We're at a dangerous moment here -- if we choose to keep pushing the envelope, this could be a huge Internet development. Or tomorrow's "flash mob." It's up to us to pick which.
Bonus links: An MP3 Blog Aggregator and Woebot's indispensible best MP3 blogs roundup. Find me podcast feeds this good and I'll start to believe the hype.
