iPod Catching & RSS Casting of MP3s

Over in the comment sections of the Personal Democracy Forum podcasting page, etherson points out that MP3's posted to a website without an RSS feed are not really "podcasts." Podcasting could be better described as catching MP3's on your iPod by subscribing to a RSS syndication feed -- rather than casting MP3's out. The "casting" is really describing the RSS syndication aspect of the MP3 file, and the iPod is there just receiving the file -- you don't even have to have an iPod to receive or listen to podcasts.

As ZDnet's David Berlind says:

The incredibly ironic thing about the term podcasting is that the iPod pretty much stinks as a device that you’d "cast" your audio from. In no way does it come ready to record audio. For that, you need to add third party products to it and even after you do that at some reasonable cost, you’ll end up with limitations in the quality of audio you can record.

So even though there are lots of cool things you can do with an iPod, the fact that the iPod is associated with being able to easily record and "cast" out audio is a bit of a misnomer. It's a bit of a marketing coup for Apple that putting MP3's in RSS feeds is being widely described as "podcasting."

The podcasting revolution really has more to do with other technological innovation that has brought the barrier to entry for broadcasting audio completely down. Doc Searls told me in an intervew at PDF that people now how the power to produce their own culture, and that the centralized points of mass media-produced culture are going away.

The Personal Democracy Forum podcasting operation fell into the trap of posting MP3s on their site without the RSS feed aspect of it, and it caused a bit of a ruckus in the comments section.

Gregory Heller says in the PDF comments:

I want to listen to all of these audio clips, but because they were not put in a feed, I have to go to each page and download the file (into my itunes directory) and then move them on to my ipod.

I realized this, and it was a bit daunting for me to try to figure out how to enclose audio into RSS feeds back when I was using Movable Type. But now that I'm on a Drupal base, I hear that it'll be very easy to start doing podcasts when the time is right.

Heller explains more about podcasting in Drupal in the PDF comments:

I am running civicspace/drupal on my website and I put short audioclips into my blog (attach to the blog entry, Drupal does the enclosures), identify the post as a podcast and people can subscribe to my feed for blog posts so identified. I also put a link to download, or launch the audio file in the blog text. Essentially the best of both worlds.

Heller says that he can just put a link in the download -- does this mean that I can I use OurMedia.org to upload & host the audio file on archive.org and the various podcatching software programs will follow the link and still download the MP3 to people's iPod's? If so, then this will be really simple and save me a lot of headache.

I'll ask Heller for a response.