Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Dave Jacobs is getting a new (donated) kidney on Friday, Murphy-willing. 

CBS: "When a fellow panelist mentioned that bloggers had had a big impact on the reporting on Election Day, Williams waved that point away by quipping that the self-styled journalists are 'on an equal footing with someone in a bathroom with a modem.'" 

Kottke: "I've been contacted by a lawyer representing Sony and they have asked me to remove the audio clip." 

NPR segment on Jeopardy god Ken Jennings. 

Brent Simmons on the virtues of XML-RPC. 

An update on the car buying experience. 

Scoble explains the slow process of Windows bug fixes.  

NY Times tech columnist David Pogue has something resembling a weblog, with permalinks and an RSS feed. His FAQ also says that the archive of the Circuits section of the Times is now open to all and free.  

Marc gets off the cross 

Marc Canter responded to my crucifix post, with a list of metadata he'd like to see included with podcasts. It's interesting that some of the data he asks for is already defined by the RSS 2.0 spec.

For example, "What is the podcast about?" can be handled by the description element, that's actually been in RSS since 0.91. What keywords could be associated? That's the category element. When was the podcast recorded? That could be pubDate (but maybe he wants them to be separate dates, in which case we'd have to go to a namespace, not a problem). What are categories? Hmmm, maybe I misuderstood keywords. What's the diff betw categories and keywords? Isn't keyword just a simple case of category? (Please don't yell at me.)

The only two that clearly require new elements are: "Who is on the podcast?" (There can only be one author element per item, but podcasts can and often do have more than one.) And length (which may be hard to get from the operating systems, although it clearly would be valuable; there's no RSS element that corresponds to length).

Another place we can and will go for metadata for podcasts is the ID3 information that's carried along in MP3s. No reason you should have to download the MP3 enclosure to get that info.

Here's a screen shot of the ID3 info for a Morning Coffee Notes podcast.