Wow! Those Canadians sure do! Alot! Eh!

Have a look over at canada.podcast.com and see what I was able to create pretty easily with my test account.

I want to get these tools on your hands and on your screens (and in your pockets) ASAP!

Hopefully, that won’t take too long.

I was at Gnomedex over Canada Day, and it was great to meet so many of you Canadians there. You sure do know how to celebrate your country! We Brits don’t do much else than wave at the Queen, whenever they wheel her past

I noticed that the OPML created for the Canada Podcasts out there has alot of easy to fix mistakes (and a few custom tags, which is fine). Maybe Bob Goyeche (listed as the author) would like to drop me a line, so we can sort it all out properly.

Try entering the URL for that OPML into an early OPML manager I created – then hit load. It all looks fine, until you realise that the OPML thinks each link to a feed is a ‘link’ to more OPML and not the type ‘RSS’ with xmlUrl to the feed, as it should be.

Here’s an audio message I made a while ago about this.

The ‘DaveSite‘ which Mr. Winer points to is not all that useful as it stands – this is because it is simply linking to the RSS xml feeds and displaying those. That upsets lots of people, who don’t know what they are looking at. Not only that, but David seems to insist on linking to OPML AND RSS with the same icon. Bad idea imho. Sure it is XML, but that orange button has meant ‘RSS’ for so many, for so long – it’s confusing to link to OPML with (even though is is just XML). I always wandered if he had promoted an orange icon saying ‘RSS’, maybe people wouldn’t be so confused about RSS and ‘feeds’ as they are now. (Almost) EVERYONE adopted the old orange button – now they use a generic ‘feed’ icon.

I will have a bash at cleaning up that Canadian OPML and trying a test import.

UPDATE: I fixed the Canada OPML to comply with the spec – though I left the custin tags in there.

You can find it here : http://podcast.com/opml/canada_fixed.opml

See the comments in the OPML for what I did.

Now it works perfectly, as people will expect. Try entering the new URL into my OPML manager – now you can RSS feeds! Yes!! (It is also in the drop down list on that Flash app)

Dave Winer points out one of the core reasons we have built (and continue to build) podcast.com in the way we have – forming a solid content data foundation, with easy tools – then slapping that data into a great UI, for the web, mobiles and desktop. Heads up, Scoble!
‘Community Directories’ (made by real, passionate people) are exactly what you will have available at podcast.com, all with lots of lovely open OPML and RSS for you to consume and manipulate using the gorgeously easy tools we are building here for you. And IMHO, much nicer OPML management than some applications I have seen out there from the self-declared OPML centres of the Universe out there.

Soon, you will be able to log in to podcast.com, create an account – get a super hot url for your podcast directory and fill her up!

The power of OPML inclusion will make it very easy to connect many different users’ podcast directories together to form an infinite growth of trees of directories, mashed up any way you like.

Update : Dave Winer is not allowing me to comment on his Blog Annexe – shame. My posts seem to disappear. Not totally unexpected, as he does not like me at all – but not what I would expect from Mister ‘Open and Transparent’ – The posts were relevant too – maybe this trackback will work, to his daily comment area.

Yesterday I gave the blogHUD a little facelift, which was cool and bizarre that I should meet Cory Ondrejka at Cory Doctorow’s leaving do last night (in ‘MeatSpace – that’s the ‘real world’, folks ).

Cory Ondrejka is one of the ‘gods’ of Second Life [VP of Product Development at Linden Lab] – He also wrote a version of RoadRash! – Here’s a podcast from ITConversations with Cory talking at Accelerating Change 2004.

Very much looking forward to continue that a conversation we were all having in the cab!

Also, congratulations to Yoz and co. and his brand new baby! Cory Doctorow said the baby was ‘firing Cute-ons!’ heheh.

I thought I’d show you where that feed came from that Dave Winer pointed to yesterday (since there was no link to the site )

Over on podcast.com, you will see many folders in the podcast directory you see there. One of the icons is a green feed icon : clicking it will display all the latest feeds (like a ‘NewsRiver’ for podcasts) The RSS feed icon link that appear there is the subscription link you need to stay updated to all feeds within that folder.

For the BBC podcast feeds though, we have set up a subdomain, pointing directly at the / Podcasts / News & Media / BBC folder.

This can be visited at http://bbc.podcast.com

From that subdomain page, you can also view the freshest feed by clicking the ‘freshest feeds’ button on the left menu. Again, the feed subscription link will appear there for you. For the BBC it is http://feeds.podcast.com/2417 and eventually we’ll make that easier my having bbc.podcast.com/fresh/feed or something.

Soon we will have some cool things for you to embed wherever you like, so you can keep updated and also see all the cool things you can easily put together using the feeds and data we have for you at podcast.com

Nice to see the fresh podcast feeds from the BBC are working nicely for Mistah Winah!

A fresh feed can be generated of all the latest podcasts in all the feeds in any folder.

NOW – don’t forget folks – the directory you currently see at podcast.com is MY user account. Here is a different test account [ koz.podcast.com ]
SOON – you’ll be able to build your own podcast.com

All that data you manage there can be imported and exported to your tool of choice. We just hope we can make the discovery journey easier for you.