What is a podcast?

Yabfog asks, “What is a podcast?”

The example he links to is n ot Rss 2.0, and subsequently doesn’t have enclosure tags in the feed.

If that is a podcast, it’s a poorly designed one, because few if any clients recognize that format, for more than linking to the audion from the newsreader.

The idea of the enclosure tag is that it tells certain clients what the media is, so they can treat it appropriately. For example, download it and move it to my mp3 player.

I say a podcast is (technically) ” an RSS feed with an enclosure tag that includes the url of audio or video.”

If you only have one post in a feed with an enclosure, and the rest are blog posts, you are really not making things user-friendly, if a podcast is your goal.

You shouldn’t call something like that a podcast, because it will confuse people and more importantly, the software that they use.

But, I’ll bet that when Feedburner states how many podcasts feeds they host, they are tallying any feed that has ever had an enclosure with audio or video.

As for the type of content that makes a podcast. People ought to forget about that argument. If it’s being delivered through enclosures and one person finds it useful. It’s worth it. It’s a podcast.

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

These memes ain’t random

Dan MacTough is dynamically building RSS Search queries from Delicious bookmarks. OPML is being used as the glue. At least I think that’s what is happening there.

There is a lot to think about here. This type of activity is exemplary of how we will consume information in the very near future. I think.