The simplest podcast API ever
Monday, February 18, 2008 by Dave Winer.
A new service from BlogTalkRadio... 
Call their special phone number: 646-200-0000. It records the call. When you're done it creates an RSS 2.0 feed with an enclosure that's an MP3 of the call.
The address of the feed is a function of the phone number you called from. I just called in a podcast from my Nokia N95, which they added to this feed:
http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/8583429663
That's all there is to it! No registration. They have a web page for it, but it's completely unnecessary.
It's the new application of RSS that I wrote about on Saturday. It's brilliant because of it's so simple.
Some people think innovation in technology is about how hard it is to implement, or how long it took, or how complex it is, or convoluted. They see innovation as wizardry. I see it differently. I'm impressed by the ratio of functionality to complexity. I like that number to be as big as possible, because the less complex it is, the fewer moving parts, the less likely it is to break, and the easier it will be for others to build on the idea.
Hats off to the BTR guys, they've come up with something truly useful that's also very simple.
Could it be simpler? I don't see how. 
| Recent stories: |
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Dave Winer 
My most recent trivia on Twitter.
