Podcasting For Dummies 101

OK so podcasting is supposed to be the next big thing, right? This is about 95% of it:

<enclosure url="http://yourserver.com/download/coolvideo.wmv" length="131" type="video/x-ms-wmv" />

the enclosure element in the RSS item has 3 parts; URL, Length, and type (MIME type). That's it!

Your feedReader simply looks for an enclosure element, parses it, perhaps checking it against a hashtable of stuff that's already been downloaded (so you don't download it over and over) and you pretty much got it.

You decide where you want to save it, and with what player you want to play it, and how to display the play feature ("play" button, whatever). You could even render a Windows Media object player tag with the URL to the resource if you wanted to be really cool.

Now you watch. This is only a couple months old. Some dood from Maladaptive Pathetic or whatever will give it a newer, even different buzzword name, and start giving seminars and summits about it.

My Aunt Minnie will get suckered into spending 500 bucks for some seminar and end up having WMVs of her apartment in Queens on her blog. Podcasting, Schmodcasting!

Comments

  1. Anonymous4:45 PM

    My question is, suppose you wanted to track that someone loaded your MP3, but you wanted to use an ASPX page to do it. Could you make your URL in the enclosure point to an aspx page, do some scripting to log the load attempt in a database, and then redirect the user to the wmv file? Or is that not supported by Ipod and other podcasting aggregators?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:47 PM

    example:
    enclosure url="mytracker.aspx?mp3filetoredirect=blah.wmv" length="131" type="video/x-ms-wmv"

    Is that still valid?

    ReplyDelete
  3. sure you can do that. Just have the page do the database logging based on the querystring first, and then have it go ahead and serve the file. You could even cut down on the overhead by using a custom ASHX handler.

    ReplyDelete

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