A new Trolling howto. It was originally a blog post during the election. Simple idea, don't feed the troll, explained. #
If you feel you are part of the #resistance, then you must not quote-tweet Trump. His great power is that he gets so much attention when he does something. If that lessens, his power diminishes. It might be the single best thing you can do to resist.#
On Maddow last night she had a segment on the Slow Burn podcast, a series from Slate that replays Watergate in real time (I think, not entirely clear). I had heard of the podcast but wasn't that interested because I lived through Watergate, and don't have fond memories of it, reliving it doesn't sound like fun. And I have podcasts that I regularly listen to that I'm falling behind on. There's a lot of good stuff out there. But Maddow said it was a must-listen, so I set out to see if I could find a link to its RSS feed, so I could add it to the rotation at Podcatch.com. This is always much more work than it should be but I always in the end get the feed. #
So I looked. There doesn't seem to be a single page for the podcast. There is RSS metadata in some of the pages, but none of them appear to point to a feed just for this podcast. #
So I did what I often do, I posted a tweet asking if anyone else can find the feed. This is often how I get it. People like to show off, and many of the people who follow me are technically proficient. This time a friend forwarded it to the show runner, and he responded, with instructions to become a member of Slate Plus, then the feed would be apparent. Well I'm not going to do that. I just wanted to try listening to it, and maybe tell people about it on my blog if I thought it was interesting. #
Lots of confusion, as you can see in the ensuing thread. It turns out you do not have to join Slate Plus to get the feed. Rob Fahrni figured it out. "To find it I had to subscribe to it from iTunes then go to the Podcast menu and select Copy Podcast URL to find it." Oh god. Any answer that involves using iTunes is total nonstarter. I wonder if people who produce podcasts know how bad iTunes rep is with users? #
Here's an xmlviewer link to the feed. It avoids all the disgusting tricks that browsers do to try to keep you from looking at the contents of a feed. #
We still have much to do here to make this stuff usable. I'd be happy to work with the people who produce them, but honestly almost none of them seem to know how podcasting came to be or what the value is in having an open ecosystem that isn't part of a silo. Podcasting still very much is open, but we're not getting much of the benefit, because it's so damn hard to find the openness. ;-)#