Bloglines podcasting
Published April 26th, 2005 in General, RSSBloglines offers support for podcasting now, which is pretty interesting: I’ve always wondered how a web based reader would go about incorporating enclosures.
But unless I’m missing something, I think Bloglines is going about it the wrong way. From my understanding, when you subscribe to podcast feed in Bloglines, the mp3 file is downloaded to the Bloglines servers, and then when you want to listen to it, you have to download it again to your computer. That just seems foolish to me. What’s the point of taking the file and moving it to the Bloglines server, just to have me download it again when I want to hear it.
I thought the whole idea of podcasting was that you didn’t have to sit and wait for a download, you just subscribe to a feed and the music (or show, whatever) shows up on your iPod. If the Bloglines services automatically transferred the file to your mp3 player when it finished fetching it, that would make sense, but as it stands this just seems like a waste to me.
Am I missing some information, or is Bloglines just shifting files around and calling it podcasting support?
Update: It looks like there are some applications out there which, in conjunction with Bloglines, will automatically fetch the enclosure file and put in on your computer. Newsgator Web edition does what I think is the most sensible thing, it just shows a link to the file.
what Bloglines is doing doesn’t seem helpful for users, but it sure is helpful for content creators. This takes away some of the load of serving audio files on your own server.
I’ve been playing with maintaining a database of podcasts, and for some reason linkrot is turning out to be a really serious problem. Plus timeouts when referencing the initial file. Flip side there are copyright issues to downloading all those MP3s and making them available in a public directory. The trade offs.
Hmm… I wonder why that is. Are people changing the podcast feed urls, or are the files just disappearing. Hashim, as for the bandwidth issue, I guess it makes more sense for the podcast producer (that is, only if Bloglines caches the file and doesn’t download it again for each subscriber).
Makes me wonder if there isn’t an application out there that is more directly suited for caching podcasts and distributing them – like bittorrent for RSS enclosures.
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