BlogBridge Podcasting?

There's a site called IT Conversations that has a collection of interviews, recorded on mp3s with some very interesting people. Also included are lectures, debates and panels. It is an excellent site, I recommend it.

For a while now, I've been, manually , downloading those onto my PC and transferring them to my iPod for listening while I work out. Very useful and very manual.

It turns out that there's a new term floating around, PodCasting , that describes the 21st century version of what I've been doing. Conceptually, you pick the interviews you are interested in from a list, and they get automatically get downloaded to your iPod. Here is a good introduction to PodCasting.

From a technical viewpoint what's interesting is that people are using RSS and enclosures to integrate this into the world of Blogs. That is, there are some rss feeds, which are all enclosures, which are specifically designed to be handled by a special kind of reader that presents a list to the user, let's them pick the recordings they want and then in background, download them to the pc and then onto the attached iPod.

This will be aBlogBridge feature in the not too distant future.

Here's how it will work. There will be a kind of Channel called a PodCaster Channel. It will be similar to a blog or other feed channel, with two exceptions.

1. The article list will be formatted a little bit different and in particular will provide for a checkbox with each article.

2. There will be a background process which will initiate the background download and transfer to the iPod.

(Of course, with the requisite setup, config and customization stuff.) I think it will be quite useful!