Podcasting

RSS Advisory Board Becomes Publisher of Media RSS

Last night, I finished creating a copy of the Media RSS Specification as part of its move from Yahoo to the RSS Advisory Board. We found out 21 months ago that Yahoo was amenable to the idea of finding a custodian to publish the spec, so several board members and I have been working with them to make it happen. Media RSS is a namespace that extends RSS to support sophisticated distribution of audio, video and image files. In the five years since it was created by Yahoo, it has become extremely ... (read more)

2009/12/12

Intel's New Chip: More Important Than Cancer

Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft blogger who's now a exec at podcasting startup PodTech, recently engaged in the following exchange with one of his readers: Reader: You think Intel making a smaller chip is more important than cancer? Scoble: having cancer is important to THAT ONE PERSON. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Scoble, the 86th-most-linked blogger on the planet, is angry that more blogs don't link to him, so he made an example of the tech site Engadget ... (read more)

2007/02/05

USPTO Rejected 'Podcast' Trademark Registration

I submitted a proposal today urging the RSS Advisory Board to support the common usage of "podcast" and "podcasting" as generic terms that cannot serve as trademarks for Apple Computer or any other entity. Since its coinage in 2004, the word "podcast" has referred to all audio files delivered as RSS enclosures. This usage became so popular that "podcasting" was declared the 2005 word of the year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary, who gave it the following definition: A ... (read more)

2006/09/27

Finding Good Soundbites in Bad Podcasts

Correction: The original version of this entry quoted Jason Calacanis for something that was said by Michael Arrington. I apologize to both for the error. The original was more interesting than this version. I apologize to the readers. I was listening to the latest episode of the Gillmor Gang this morning, one of the best-known and longest running tech podcasts. I endured 20 minutes of directionless chit-chat, complete with a five-minute "how good was this show?" self-evaluation, to hear one ... (read more)

2006/08/16

Most Major U.S. Papers Offer RSS Feeds

The Bivings Group has issued a study on RSS, podcast and blog adoption at the top 100 American newspapers: 76 of the newspapers offer RSS feeds 0 of those feeds contain the full text of articles 0 of the feeds contain ads 31 offer podcasts 80 offer reporter blogs 19 publish reader comments 77 don't require registration I'd love to have the study's list of papers that offer RSS and don't require registration, because they're the best sources for news articles to pass along on blogs like the ... (read more)

2006/08/07

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software. Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs. First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, ... (read more)

2006/04/24

Really Simple Syndication: The Joy of Specs

The ongoing Canterbury tale about the efforts of the RSS Advisory Board must be utterly incomprehensible to people who have enthusiastically adopted Really Simple Syndication without knowing the history of the format. Syndication is like sausage, major Congressional legislation and Bruce Jenner. You might be better off not knowing how it's made. Dave Winer, the co-creator of RSS and the person most responsible for its widespread adoption, argues that the current version of the RSS specification ... (read more)

2006/02/23

Podcasting: You're Soaking In It!

Jewish lesbian shock jock Madge Weinstein kicked my "S" yesterday during a 10-minute rant about Adam Curry's role in podcasting: You gotta realize, and I didn't realize this until I started getting more popular with my podcasts, when people blog ---- -- ----, did I spill my water? no -- when people blog ---- -- I'm resting the microphone on my fat, now. You're going to get mike noise, I'm sorry, and it's going to be all bad. This is bad. You know, it's all bad. When people blog things a lot of ... (read more)

2005/12/13

Podcasting: Accept No Imitations

Randall Stross, New York Times, July 3, 2005: "Podcast" is an ill-chosen portmanteau that manages to be a double misnomer. A podcast does not originate from an iPod. And it is not a broadcast sent out at a particular time for all who happen to receive it. Steven Chen, China Daily, Sept. 8, 2005: The term podcast, a portmanteau of two words, broadcasting and iPod, Apple Computer's now ubiquitous music player is something of a misnomer, since such files do not need either an iPod or a portable ... (read more)

2005/12/12

A Hundred Visions and Revisions of Podcasting

I don't want to get into an argument with Adam Curry, because he has better production values. It was a relief not to be criticized in stereo during his 40-minute mea culpa on Friday's podcast of Daily Source Code. I'm one of the only people who had no role in the history of podcasting. I was around when Curry asked Dave Winer to add the enclosure element to RSS and Radio UserLand in 2001, but I thought it was a dumb idea that would never go anywhere. My opinion was something along the lines ... (read more)

2005/12/03