Back in September 2004, podcasting was just starting to take off. Today, in July 2005, the recent addition of podcatching support to iTunes is exposing millions of people to an explosion of new audio content, much of it in spoken-word form and open to fair use.
Over the same period of time, we've seen a surge of interest in social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us. I've been using it for all kinds of things, but what's relevant here is the tag del.icio.us/judell/soundbite, where I've been collecting interesting quotes from shows appearing (mostly) on ITConversations. The RSS feed for that tag, del.icio.us/rss/judell/soundbite, is, in effect, an audio linkblog, albeit one that's a hybrid of a textual wrapper with pointers to audio segments. But it is also implicitly a podcast, and I decided to make it one explicitly. Full story at [O'Reilly Network]
In this installment of PrimeTime Hypermedia I refine the MP3 clipping service and use it in combination with autogenerated introductions -- made with text-to-speech software -- to transform a collection of soundbites into a podcast.
Yesterday, Nick Sieger wrote to point out that del.icio.us has more support for this idea than I realized. A feed for a tag set that includes the system-generated system:media:audio tag -- such as del.icio.us/rss/judell/system:media:audio+soundbite -- is already in RSS 2.0 format and has enclosures. Cool!
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/07/20.html#a1272