Treedia – KOZ

Treedia Powers Motorola and Podcast.com Partnership

Well, finally after a few months preparation, along with the rest of the development of podcast.com I can talk about the exciting news that podcast.com, powered by the system we call the Treedia Feed Management Platform is to be partnering with Motorola on delivering podcasts to their forthcoming smartphones, including the the MOTO Z8 ‘MotoRizr’.

We will be providing Motorola with a managed set of podcast directory folders which their applications can access and navigate the structure of through the use of OPML managed by the Treedia system. The current structure of the system and soon, more information will be available at motorola.podcast.com

The Treedia system’s name derives from the simple idea that any media can be distributed via RSS feeds held together by OPML directory folder structures which were easy to grow and manipulate.

It’s a tree of media. Treedia!

Through the use of very simple OPML files utilizing the ‘include’ type attribute, the Motorola application can drill down and list the podcasts on the device.

Soon, I will be providing a more thorough explanation of just how simple if is for anyone to create a way to navigate this data and also the power of networking available to social media networks, given easy tools to manage the data in a way we all understand already as computer users – folders. Of any ‘depth’.

And let’s not forget that RSS feeds and the like don’t have to ‘simply’ deliver podcasts. Audio or video. They could just as easily deliver updates on a multitude of things. Leveraging the awesome opportunity available to us thanks to OPML inclusion, we can begin to connect and share our appreciation of and presentation of our media in ways we haven’t even though of yet.

But they will all be connected by a ‘semantic path’ and also by the ‘curator’ of the folders and directories and their FOAF file, for example. Not only that, but each user will be able to share their playlists of what they are listening to at the time in a variety of formats, including RSS, XSPF and M3U.

Through these playlist formats and the OPML data available for each user (and each folder), it makes it easy for us to create simple widget user interfaces for just about any connected media platform there is. Simple and easy.

Naturally, users will be able to subscribe to each other’s playlists and folders. See when these change and are updated. All thanks to simple XML based technology.

I’m still wrapping up some loose ends and doing some long overdue bits of clean up on the site and documentations and tutorials, but soon we should be able to open up the doors to a limited amount of people to begin with, pretty soon!

Stay tuned! Stay subscribed! Much more exciting news to come! 🙂

Also in the news is the new next-generation RAZR-2 from Motorola.

OPML Reading/Listening/Viewing ‘Lists’ and ‘Trees’ = ‘Treedia’

Posted on February 20, 2007 by kosso

Dave on Scripting News and Mike over on Techcrunch post their views of OPML used for ‘reading lists’.

This is an important discussion and one close my heart. I commented over on Dave’s (wordpress) blog , but I thought I’d add to it over here:

Re: OPML lists and ‘trees’ – etc expect some along these lines soon:

The system developed behind podcast.com enables just that, it’s just that naturally with podcast.com we are only interested in feeds with audio or video enclosures.

So, podcast.com is a ‘client’ of this larger system which will be able to support all types of ‘types’ – all supporting OPML inclusion.

I don’t think you should call them ‘lists’ – I think ‘trees’ is more descriptive. ‘Reading trees’. People can either ‘climb’ up then to find the ‘fruit’ (content) they want, or they could wait for the most popular to drop into their lap. Also through looking through ‘leaves’ (tags) they can be sure of following the right branches, as they ‘climb’ up the tree, deep and deeper into the directory/tree. (’directree’? )

OPML is the tree
FEEDS are the vines
TAGS are the leaves
ITEMS/ENCLOSURES are the fruit.

The coolest thing about OPML inclusion, is you could think of it like climbing up a tree, going along a branch, and then ‘zap’, you’re in another tree. Like magic. Painless. Rewarding.

Telepordata?

Semantics. Taxonomy. Folksonomy.

Now that’s what I call a ’social media network’

I hope to be able to let some users in to try out the system in the next 4 weeks.

Then people could create something like : http://my.podcast.com/kosso , which is my ‘listening tree’/ podcast folders/ ‘tree of sound’

One reason why I think there are more OPML ‘lists’ than ‘trees’ out there is that there are too few tools out there to effectively manage an OPML file. Your apps have been the best to date (once we got the rss attributes sorted)

I mean managing OPML folders/nodes effectively, over import/export of ‘flat’ lists. So many systems eith dont ‘do’ folders or destroy them on import/export.

Also, I think we really need to evangelise the concept of ‘OPML subscription’ .
OPML files are so often used as static files to import/export bunches of feeds. It is indeed great for backup in that sense. But I believe that ‘OPML Subscription CONNECTS’ all these trees/branches out there. When one branch changes on one tree – if there is an ‘inclusion’ (think of it like a shortcut/symbolic link to a folder) then the other will be able to reflect that if one was to climb that branch.

The trees are ALIVE! So subscribe to them! Watch them grow Feed them, prune them and ‘graft’ ‘cuttings’ to their branches.

We like to call it ‘treedia‘ 🙂

Clearly for this to work, we also need well defined standards to make sure the data out there is well-formed – or we’re screwed but let’s not make the same mistake the web browsers did, by just displaying html if it was broken or not.

I feel like doing another podcast

feeds, folksonomy, OPML, podcast.com, rss