The Savvy Technologist

Custom podcast feeds

If you haven’t discovered Technorati yet, you should. It’s one of the best sites on the Internet to track what’s being said in the blogosphere. Last week at the Apple Distinguished Educator Summer Institute in San Jose, those of us who were blogging the event agreed to use the “ade2005″ tag to facilitate aggregation of all of our blog posts, Flickr photos, and Delicious links. It worked great and you can see the results at http://technorati.com/tag/ade2005. Even better, the site provides an RSS feed for each tag allowing anyone to subscribe to a Technorati search. For example, the URL for the ade2005 tag is http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/ade2005.

That’s a lot of background information to get to the main point of this post. Currently there’s no way to generate a Technorati feed of podcasts. Even if the Technorati RSS feed points to blog posts that contain enclosures (podcasts), the feed doesn’t have the <enclosure> tags that podcasting clients like iTunes and ipodder look for. So here’s what I want: a special Technorati feed that will actually include the enclosure links. The feed URL might look something like:

http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/podcasts/tag/ade2005.

By subscribing to that feed I would automatically receive any podcasts that were tagged “ade2005″. You wouldn’t really know what you’d be downloading in advance, but at an event like NECC where the quality of the posts and podcasts are consistently top notch I think it would be worth a try. And it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to do. Technorati, are you listening?

Tags: delicious, flickr, rss, technorati