DISQUS

Scripting News: Casting in late 2007 (Scripting News)

  • shiva · 1 year ago
    Zooomr image, actually have meta data in them. Of course, it is difficult to pull them out, since you need to download them to get meta data. But then, 90% of them don't populate EXIF or IPTC for zooomr to support them in the rss (Also, Kris is struggling with fixing bugs .. and getting a stable system)
  • lemon obrien · 1 year ago
    casting/catching == publish/subscribe
  • jystervinou · 1 year ago
    5- Appcasting: delivering application updates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkle_(software)

    (Like Frontier/Manila/Radio did BTW.)
  • RacerRick · 1 year ago
    Feedburner actually does a decent job of "MP3 casting" to iTunes. I realize that you're not a big fan of feedburner, and I assume the same of iTunes.

    But the way they take the MP3 url from the RSS feed and submit it to iTunes is pretty cool.

    Do you think that the lack of MP3 casting tools has lead to the downfall (bubble burst) of podcasting?
  • dave · 1 year ago
    Actually I think podcasting is doing well. You're doing something that politicos do all the time, embedding an assumption in a question. Don't happen to agree with your assumption.

    In any case, what's been limiting the growth of podcasting is the lack of a standalone portable podcast receiver/player.
  • RacerRick · 1 year ago
    You're right, I did make that assumption.

    But from blog roll, almost every blogger that used to have a Podcast has given up.
  • RacerRick · 1 year ago
    I meant "from my blog roll".
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    There was a guy a while back who posted in your comments a twitter hack that enabled him to post his location to his twitter account. I guess that's Location Casting?
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    Turns out I bookmarked it

    example: http://twitter.com/joelaz/statuses/318918342

    howto: http://avc.disqus.com/twittering_photos/

    see joe lazarus comment.
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    Of course, It would be nice to have a way to publish your location information on its own so you could use any mapping software, not just google maps.
  • Jeff Tupholme · 1 year ago
    I'm interested in the formative standards around geo/location markup in RSS, GeoRSS/W3C Geo. I guess the natural way to see these is as metadata embellishments for whatever's in the feed already, but when does the relationship flip over and the standard parts of the feed become metadata about the location?
  • Ron Schott · 1 year ago
    I'm using Wordpress to deliver both text and MP3's for my geology classes (e.g., Blog: http://www.outcrop.org/GSCI100/ and RSS feed: http://www.outcrop.org/GSCI100/index.php/feed/). I suppose that it could deliver photos, too. Isn't this MP3 casting, or am I missing something? Perhaps the RSS feed isn't up to specs?
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    It's weird, when you think about it you can cast all sorts of things as long as the right tool is there to help you do it. Some of these things might seem completely trivial and pointless. Who would have thought that it would be worthwhile to answer the question "What are you doing right now?" in 140 characters, over and over again. I certainly didn't, but look I use Twitter every day now.

    How about some other questions. What are you wearing right now? Believe it or not some people actually wear cool clothes and would probably love to tell people where they bought them. What movies are you watching right now? Movie reviews. What food are you eating, what books are you reading, what pets are you owning?

    Maybe that's what these social networks let you do. They give you the tools to cast trivial things about your life. They're also acting as a catchers. All day long they allow people to cast and catch the most trivial of information. Pointless right? How much was Facebook worth again?

    But why have all these tools under one roof? I mean they're pretty simple tools right?
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    Upon re-reading my comment I noticed that it may have come across that I was having a go at your sense of style, which was absolutely not intended, I was speaking to everybody with my pathetic wardrobe in mind. :)
  • dave · 1 year ago
    Not at all, your comment caused serious thought over here. Not sure I agree that's location casting, because it seems to be casting implies some kind of metadata treatment. I think that's the big missed opportunity of Twitter. What would be the harm, seriously, in allowing payloads, and passing them through the RSS? And oh how incredibly enabling that would be. I'm getting close to the point where I'm going to ask the big infrastructure companies to take a look at this. It's such an obvious area of exploration, I wouldn't invest there myself because it's going to be such an active and competitive area. If I were in Twitter's shoes I'd get something up asap. But then I'm not Twitter. Not sure to put a happy smiley there or a sad one. :-)
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    Casting your location was just the first thing that came to mind after reading your post, and I thought it was quite weird since it kind of implies a map could become a catcher. So I was wondering whether there were any other odd things that could act as catchers, and then there is Facebook, which I don't really understand either to be honest, yet people seem to be casting events they are attending, bands they are fans of, gifts they have given, games they are playing etc. It seems to me that the generic file catching ability could be embeded in many things. The payloads could be very big or indeed very small.
  • marksmith · 1 year ago
    I think you're right about Twitter. If you had the chance to become the defacto way of subscription based media exchange, you should probably go for it.
  • stefan constantinescu · 1 year ago
    tvrss.net is amazing. it essentially is a torrent file attached to an RSS feed that you feed into your torrent client (I prefer utorrent) and from now on all your shows come down to you in high quality, for free. when piracy is this easy i wonder why the big heads can't do it. personally a lot of people my age (21) like to wait until a season is over and then watch a show in chunks. they don't like this whole bit by bit plot fed to them.
  • Geoff · 1 year ago
    I find blogging/cms software pretty easy for podcasting . I use Drupal with the audio module, I login click create content, Audio and fill out a few fields including a file upload field for my mp3. I know Wordpress works in a similar way. For production software like Garageband and a few others have good podcasting support.

    Still I agree in part there isn't a push record and then when your done push upload and your done type of app. Closest thing I've seen is Garageband/iWeb/.Mac
  • Digeratist · 1 year ago
    I'm excited about Torrent feeds, myself--specifically, video. Can't wait to turn my news reader into a TiVo...
  • jurjanpaul · 1 year ago
    Google's Picasa offers RSS feeds for photo's, that at least work well (surprise!) within Google Reader.
  • jurjanpaul · 1 year ago
    Ouch... what was I thinking calling Atom RSS (even on Dave Winer's blog no less...), as if I never read hundreds of blogs about the distinction and their respective histories... In the UI of http://picasaweb.google.com it is actually called RSS though :-(. Anyway, I don't expect FlickrFan to work with Picasa very soon :-)
  • mykoleary · 1 year ago
    Full Disclosure - I helped write the application I'm about to describe. Network Magic (networkmagic.com) includes a 'remote access' website which gives access to all files and folders shared with the application from a bundled website. That part of the product is called Net2Go, and on supported routers, it does the job of setting up your site, forwarding ports in your router, and maintaining DynDNS. Each publicly accessible web share has its own RSS feed with the Media RSS NS, as well as some custom NS tags for our own photocasting application. The site itself has its own feed which details the shares that exist so you can subscribe to see when a site has added new shares. Non photo files show up in the feed as enclsures.
  • Garrick Van Buren · 1 year ago
    the iPhoto - Photocasting is primarily the poorly supported apple-wallpapers namespace.

    Thankfully, iPhoto also understands Yahoo's MediaRSS, (Flickr feeds) - and I've had success in getting iPhoto to parse feeds using the mediarss namespace.

    1. http://lists.apple.com/archives/syndication-dev...
  • Chris Anderson · 1 year ago
    Podcasting is great and useful. I'm not big on entertainment, so I like to listen to ITConversations when I walk the dogs (instead of music). There is plenty of podcast content.

    There is more and more music content using RSS as well. My website Grabb.it provides RSS feeds of every playlist that ends up on the screen.
  • jfedor · 1 year ago
    I suppose fits under #5 Lifecasting/event stream aggregation -- products like Onaswarm (my fave) or FriendFeed. Then you get FF in Facebook get this bizarre mirror in a mirror event happening.

    Also there's the personal feed aggregation/interest casting -- stuff like RSS Mix or Google Reader Shared Feed.
  • djuggler · 1 year ago
    Flickr.com offers rss feeds for pictures and a separate feed for comments on pictures.
  • benedett · 1 year ago
    For videocasting, WordPress + the PodPress plugin works OK.

    I also use www.videobomb.com to create a videocasting feed for videos I didn't create myself. It's not ideal. I wish del.icio.us had better videocasting features; I actually maintain the feed for one of my podcasts with del.icio.us.
  • Jay Fienberg · 1 year ago
    From 2003--2005, my RSS 2.0 feed enclosed m3u playlists (these then linked to multiple mp3 files). Today, I would do this using the XSPF playlist standard.

    Sharing playlists and/or doing podcasts as multiple audio segments (in separate files) has been a really natural use cases to me. But, since no reader / 'catcher has supported this, I've stopped doing this for now.
  • graemehunter · 1 year ago
    I still feel hard done by on the catching front, particularly for podcasts. I just don't think I've used a client that was beautifully easy to use. Itunes is a pain for it frankly. Amarok does some things better (and is my choice now I'm all Linux), but I still find it too quirky sometimes.

    In a perfect world, I want something that can draw all my podcasts from one list (that I can maintain online), I want it to be able to track what I've listened to, that lets me add a new podcast as easily as I can add a feed to Google Reader, and that lets me sync it all to my mobile device. Actually I think I want Google Reader (or something like it) for maintaining my podcasts.
  • Ben · 1 year ago
    Madly enough, the Zune client is quite an amazing podcatcher.
    It has per-feed options for how many shows to retain, and also whether to keep them on the device once they have been played.
  • crafterofcode · 1 year ago
    Very nice! Not enough to convince me to buy a Zune (I'm too happy with my iPod touch), but pretty sweet nonetheless. At least it gives iTunes something to catch up with (I'd really like per-feed options; the global setting in iTunes bites).
  • Dave · 1 year ago
    Ben, that would be good if being marked as a podcast didn't make the file less usable on the Zune, ie not playlistable and requiring silly extra navigation to get from file to file. Not being able to continuously play podcasts really bites. If they just treated them the same as music on the player, I'd use it. Oh, and the Zune client can't import OPML so someone like me would have to add 150 feeds one at a time. Pretty much a deal breaker for any new tool if it doesn't import OPML.
  • Ben · 1 year ago
    I hadn't figured on the lack of OPML, but yes that is nasty. Have you had a look in the back end to see how it handles it (I imagine via the obfuscated windows media database stuff).

    And yes to your comment about the way podcasts are treated separately. I like that they are separated from the rest of my library (so they don't play on global shuffle), but hate that I can't playlist them.
  • chadmalik · 1 year ago
    OK so what type of RSS user wants to publish AND subscribe? maybe all of them?
  • dave · 1 year ago
    I do. Always have.

    And starting in 2002, my software worked both sides.

    Only recently have others been doing this, notably Google Reader.

    Just like all good computers are also development systems, all good aggregators should also be blogging tools.
  • hardaway · 1 year ago
    Caveat: I don't know what I'm talking about. But...I get Flickr feeds through my Flock browser. How does that work? I also get other media feeds that way. Is that RSS? Also, what about Chumby? Is a widget ;ole a feed? A variant of a feed? Since I know nothing a scripting or programming, I'm giving you the user's POV.
  • dave · 1 year ago
    Some of what Chumby does is RSS. I don't use Flock, so I don't know what its doing. Of course the users' point of view is very important (and on-topic), but -- tech stuff is very much on-topic on Scripting News, it's a blog by a techie (me).
  • williamt · 1 year ago
    I have nothing really to say really.
    Just wanted to test out this commenting system (sorry).

    You can use torrents for legal matters you know... but of course that would be stupid ;)
  • Niek Hockx · 1 year ago
    Dave, this is a funny post. You already knew what "enclosures" in an RSS feed could do for time-shifted file delivery, when you first came up with the idea. When Adam Curry was still only focused on delivering audio, you already took it a step further and created a system which practically took care of... well, any kinda file. It's just too bad that hardly anyone at the time recognized what you really did.