Evan’s Podcasting site roundup feedback

Evan Williams, founder of Pyra – which became Blogger.com and head honcho of Odeo has got some Alexa results of podcasting sites out there and provides some feedback.

Good job. Nice to see Libsyn pumping away at the top. I really like those guys.

So, I’m not surprised to see the results for podcast.com πŸ˜‰

We opened up the doors of the site back at the end of May, as an ‘alpha’, based on some of the early foundation technology we’re building, simply because we couldn’t bare to look at the old horrible greenish page that used to be there any more πŸ˜‰ The feedback we’ve had has been positive.

Since then, we been going like the clappers, not sleeping much, slowly but surely bringing together a whole load of features you haven’t seen yet. The list of subscriptions in the directory there are basically *mine*. As in my user account. There’s two actually – a user called kosso curates the canada.podcast.com directory and the secondlife.podcast.com directory (they’re actually folders within koz.podcast.com). Soon you’ll be able to create your own version of the site and have access to a load of tools and info to get you going in podcasting, whether it’s as a listener or a podcaster. We have publishing tools too – and some pretty nifty urls and data for you to play with. Some original content too! (I can’t wait to let you in on all that πŸ˜‰ )

I often use the analogy of the book industry to describe what we’re up to:

To start, we want to help people find books they want to read and let the author know what they think. Moving along, we want to help people build bookshelves to put all these books on. Then give people the tools to build whole libraries – and connect them together.

Back the other way, we naturally want to help people publish books. And help promote their hard work. Then back, we want to help teach people how to write a book and provide nice and easy tools to do so. Even further back to the core, we also want to help people make paper and ink and even research new types of paper and ink, which might make a book easier to read or understand and hopefully more popular!.

As the people running the generic domain, we intend to DO THE RIGHT THING. What else would you do with the generic domain? I left the BBC to work on this, as I’m incredibly passionate about podcasting having fiddled with building tools and systems since it started. Becoming a podcaster (but not as frequently as I would like – that’s why I’m builfing tools πŸ˜‰ ). Meeting the likes of Dave Winer and Adam Curry last year was a real motivator. Still is. Respec’.
I really didn’t want the site to end up squatted or parked or simply wasted. I’m on a mission (from pod). ‘With great domains comes great responsibility’. We have some interesting things coming up soon which might perk up your ears πŸ˜‰

I’ve just got back from Boston after a great time with the rest of the boys – making sure we’re all on the same playlist and getting the new hands on deck up to speed with the system, ethos and roadmap for the whole place. It’s been very reassuring.

We still have alot to do to get the site open as a public beta, where people will be able to join up and have a go at using the tools we’re putting together. It won’t all come at once. We intend to listen to what you think and iterate. We think it’s going to be an exciting resource for anyone interested in podcasting.

It’s going to be a few more weeks, but now we can all see the next checkpoint. There is no finish line πŸ˜‰

Community Podcast Directories

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! πŸ˜‰
‘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!

  Check out BBC.podcast.com, CNN.podcast.com – or NPR.podcast.com – these took seconds to set 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.

Fresh Podcast Feeds at Podcast.com

New icons and feeds for the directories at podcast.com

You should see a new icon over on the directories at podcast.com – it’s a green feed icon. We chose green, as it feels ‘FRESH’.

When you click a green feed icon next to a directory folder, the site will load up all the most recent entries to all of the podcasts within that folder. Here is a permalink to one of the fresh feed pages

Also, the results displayed by these icons and the ‘freshest feeds’ menu button on the left, provide you with an RSS feed link which you can use in your favourite aggregator to subscribe the latest podcasts automatically.

Eg: Here is the RSS feed for the latest podcasts from the BBC

Eg: Here is the RSS feed for the latest podcasts from NPR

Eg: Here is the RSS feed for the latest podcasts from CNN

 

Ah, the beauty of distributing content via XML. We love it!

There will be some more very cool new additions to the site coming very soon and we’re working around the clock and the globe to get the doors opened up for you here, so you can start building ‘your own podcast.com’.

Keep an eye on the development blog at podcast.comΒ 

Gnomedex 6.0 OPML list of attendees

I was asking Chris Pirillo today if there was an OPML list of the attendees and their RSS feed for this year’s impending geekfest in Seattle, Gnomedex6.0. He pointed me to a few feeds created by a service at Blogrolling.com

One of these feeds was RSS 0.92 and seems to be used to supply the website link and rss feed url, using the description for the RSS.

So, I knocked up a quick PHP script which takes that RSS 0.92 feed and converts it, in the best way I can figure out, to OPML.

And hey, I’m even giving you the PHP source code I actually used to do it. VIEW THE SOURCE, LUKE!

Don’t say I never give you anything πŸ˜‰

UPDATE: Heh. I just saw a hit on the file from a familiar IP address and the ‘User Agent’ – Frontier/9.0.1 (WinNT) – that can only be one person I know πŸ˜‰

No prizes for guessing where this OPML is about to show up ? πŸ˜‰ Ahh – there it is!

http://sndirectory.worldoutline.com/Gnomedexers/