| bOing bOing has an article here about people creating podcasts from the MP3s put out by a US public service broadcaster. Two things of note. - Creating web links to people's content is good. But creating a podcast of links to other people's rich media content is a bit mean, no matter how much benefit is added. and the reason is - We still don't have a good answer to the podcast hosting bandwidth problem. And it's made worse because RSS feeds often get left in an RSS reader long after you've stopped reading them. And with a podcast, the reader will download all those enclosures regardless of whether they get used. So we have an NPR station generously providing Mp3s of it's content. People turn these into a podcast. Subscribers then download loads of copies and don't listen to them. And the NPR station's bandwidth bill goes through the roof. One possible solution to this is real integration of BitTorrent into podcast aware RSS readers. This was obvious from when Podcasting hit the headlines. But it feels like we're still waiting for all the pieces to get put in place. And not least is a user friendly system that can take all the pain out of posting a new entry with it's enclosure that automatically and painlessly creates and seeds the associated torrent. |
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[ 22-Jun-06 8:46am ] [ RSS
, podcast , bittorrent ] 