RSS

People can't subscribe to my vlog feed with FireANT at the moment -- although iTunes seems to work.

UPDATE: This has been fixed now. If you're running into this problem, then check down at the bottom for how to fix it. [Coming soon...]

It seems as though that Drupal may be causing a problem with my Drupal RSS feed for my vlog being sent to FeedBurner, which is causing the FireANT videoblog aggregator to not parse the Feedburner vlog feed correctly.

I'm still not totally sure if it's Drupal or FeedBurner that's causing the problems, but I'm posting more technical details below so that I can ask around in the hopes of trying to debug this issue.

The social bookmarking site of del.icio.us announced on their blog earlier this week that they are now automatically detecting media files and adding invisible "system:filetype:" tags to the post.

Bookmarked items in del.icio.us that end in one of a number of filetypes will now automatically get some system tags added. You can use these just like normal tags. RSS feeds that have one of those system tags added will automatically become a rss-with-enclosures file.

What the does this mean in English?

Let's start from the beginning to show how this latest development is going to further democratize the media by giving people more and more choices for how they consume their information and media diet...

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.

The same folks who said that 2004 would be the "Year of the Blog" are saying that 2005 will be the "Year of RSS" (Really Simple Syndication). [UPDATE: This is something I've probably heard at the Berkman Conference on Journalism, but I don't have a citation. Here's one]

RSS basically allows the user to have more control over the content, as Tim Yang demonstrates in his buzzing post 15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away).

My high school picked me as an alumni of the month for Feburary, and they are setting up a display case where they want me to send some awards and other things about me. But instead of doing this, I've decided to write an open letter directly to the students -- It's very influenced by the types of things that I've been reading for my open-source documentary, including Dan Gillmor's We The Media

TO THE STUDENTS OF BEECH GROVE HIGH SCHOOL:

My name is Kent Bye and I'm working on a documentary about the media.