Been spending more than usual time thinking about podcasting. 1. How do we make podcasts more blog entry like, so you browse through it, search engines can index it, etc? 2. How do we make advance the format without emposing a standard on it?
I was encoraged to listen to the engadget podcast yesterday from Kosso in a debate started by me centering around podcasting. Anyway, I was listening and the first item which centered around the fact, there podcast was actually a photo podcast and they were looking for a better way to do it. At this moment if you want to take part, you need to download this zip file and manually change the pictures when they tell you to in the podcast your listening to. Ok fair enough for now, but I was screaming SMIL while listening. Then they finally mentioned it.
Wicked Cool… before they started to rethink the idea, let me explain…
First up SMIL does not stand for simple markup something! Its Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language.
Getting a smil player on the portable players and everyone agreeing would be a problem? I always thought a MMS client was a SMIL player? Please for the love of all things decent in this world do not use Flash. And please no not powerpoint! For now yes, human interaction maybe one way of doing it but there was a good comment on blog about how to do it using a ipod and itunes.
See the fact your breaking down the mp3 into single objects is a good start. Some would scream blue murder, but joining them up together again could be easily done if you use playlists like pls or m3u for now. Hey why cant the podcast software join up the mp3's? even if using filenames which link them together?
Anyhow I'm thinking about two things, putting smil inside of RSS or changing the enclosure element to support structure. I much prefer the first one using smil with xml namespaces. So I'm going to show you how it could look. Please note, i'm doing alot of things in this example. I'm showing how you can play not only content which is downloaded but also content if your connected. And of course how to play audio with pictures in a large sequence. Check out the Engadget Podcast with SMIL2.0 enclosures
