Podcasting wishlist
July 25th, 2005 | by Tim Wilson |Blogging and podcasting has been the single most important part of my personal professional development over the last two years. Now that Apple has built blogging into OS X Server and has made creating blogs for users as easy as clicking a checkbox, my goal of getting blogs going at school just got a whole lot easier. But I also know that some key pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Here’s my short list:
- I need the built-in OS X blogs to support podcasting. They don’t support the full RSS 2.0 spec right now.
- We need a tool that teachers who don’t blog can use to create RSS feeds and it has to support enclosures. Two candidates: Feeder (overkill for my needs and a bit too expensive) and Dan Bricklin’s ListGarden (open source, but no enclosure support)
- iTunes has made it easy to subscribe to podcasts, but iTunes only supports enclosures of file types that it natively understands (e.g., MP3, AAC, QuickTime, and PDF). I want iTunes to download anything and put it in some default location if it doesn’t natively know how to display/play it. There are other alternatives like iPodder (which is also a cross-platform solution), but having it part of a standard OS X application would be better for our school.
- I’d like a better tool for producing “enhanced” podcasts that incude chapters and other artwork. The command line tool that Apple provides works fine, and I’m sure that something’s on the way, but it’s obvious that 99% of teachers aren’t going to touch the command line.
- And, of course, recording and uploading audio podcasts has to be really easy. I saw a demo in Cupertino last week showing how to record audio with QuickTime Pro. It was easy, but a more integrated solution that included recording, tagging, uploading, and RSS feed generation would be great. Vendors are starting to fill this space already (see this list), but I need more time to look through them and see if anything looks like it would work for my school district. Anyone have any experience with any of them?
Tags: ipod, Open source, Podcasting and iPod
3 Responses to “Podcasting wishlist”
By Wesley Fryer on Jul 26, 2005 | Reply
Haven’t worked with these yet Tim, but I hope to soon in upcoming months. I would like to see an RSS creator program that supports multiple feeds of similar content. In other words, I think I would like to publish both an mp3 version of my podcast as well as an AAC version that I enhance with chapter marks and some cover art. I would like to then offer two different RSS subscription options for people: one for folks using iTunes (the AAC version) and one for people who are not. I am very glad that Apple is supporting podcasting and the publication of amateur content, but I wonder about the overall impact of this move on the creativity and dynamism we have seen in the entire arena of podcasting. I am thinking there is a constituency out there who is not going to want to podcast in AAC and just stick with mp3 to steer clear of iTunes. I don’t know, maybe not. Anyway, if you run across RSS generation tools that will do something along these lines please let us know!
By Tim Wilson on Jul 26, 2005 | Reply
Wes, keep your eye on the newly released Atom 1.0 specification. Atom supports multiple enclosures (atom calls them “links”) that should allow for what you’re describing. None of the tools I’m familiar with support it yet since it’s so new, but I’ll bet we’ll see some adoption of atom for just the reason you describe.
By David Baugh on Jul 26, 2005 | Reply
Tim have a look at RapidWeaver.
This is client blogging and Website creation software that integrates Podcasting. Very easy to use.