Now with podcasting!
So, the long-awaited iTunes 4.9 was released this week. It’s another sign that RSS and podcasting are all grown up now. It’s another blow against “old media”, which I think is a great thing. Of course, this has its downsides, too. Apple hasn’t done much to acknowledge the people who actually did all the heavy lifting. If the iTunes Music Store were your first exposure to podcasting, you might think it was all brought to you by Apple, ESPN, ABC, and Adam Curry. (This is not a jab at Adam. It’s a jab at the people who think he is the first and last word in podcasting.)
And that funky RSS extension spec. Ugh. First of all, why did Apple choose to publish it as a PDF? Last time I checked, it was pretty easy to use HTML to make black and white documents with unreasonably small fonts. Google was able to do it. Either way, be sure to bring your microscope.
Sam Ruby, one of the authors of the FeedValidator, asks:
What happens when the authors of the FeedValidator can’t decipher a specification?
What about the average developer? Ideally, they try to start a conversation with the spec’s author(s) to try to get some clarification or suggest improvements. The problem is that Apple has no developer blogs. No wiki for the spec. Nothing that would indicate that they’re interested in working with the developers in the trenches. I hate to say it, but there are some people at Microsoft who are doing this much better than Apple. They came to Gnomedex to speak with people about what they were doing. After taking their lumps, they set up a wiki and proposed a change to their spec. Yes, Microsoft is still Borg, but there is progress being made. (I don’t want to go too far with my praise for Microsoft, however. They are trying to buy the company formerly known as Gator, after all.)
In the absence of being able to communicate with the spec’s authors, what can developers do? Some will choose to ignore the spec. Others will do the best they can to implement it and hope things work out. I’ll probably end up falling into the latter group. The marketing types are very excited about podcasting these days. Of course, things don’t always work out how you want them to. We implemented Yahoo’s Media RSS module on a couple of our sites several months ago. To date, we have seen zero results from this effort. As far as we can tell, we have implemented the spec correctly. There is no validator. Yahoo’s bot reads our feeds every day. But our videos never show up in their video search, even if you search for our company’s name. I spoke with someone from Yahoo about this at Gnomedex. We’re definitely not the only ones who are having problems. So now you have my business card, Yahoo. This is a test.
