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A cloud-enabled podcast feed

Monday, September 28, 2009 by Dave Winer.

In the early days of podcasting, in January 2001, we got the bootstrap started with a feed of Grateful Dead songs. Every day or so I added a song to the feed, in case anyone was interested in writing an application that grabbed audio enclosures from feeds. I needed something to test with because Radio UserLand, which we were working on at the time, had the capability. 

It took a few years for podcasting to catch on, but having that example feed made a difference. You have to start somewhere.  

Now in 2009 we're trying to bootstrap a network of realtime feeds, and it's going pretty well so far. Podcasts are implemented with RSS too, and while we have excellent examples of realtime photo feeds, we don't yet have a realtime feed with audio.  

So a week or so ago I started exploring options, and thought I'd use the Grateful Dead again, until JY suggested using a fast-updating audio feed from the Internet Archive. I took one look and realized this was it. It took a bit of a coding to check it periodically to see if it has updated, add a cloud element and notify one of my cloud servers. Now it's done.  

http://static.newsriver.org/archiveOrg/podcastRss.xml  

So if you're working on podcatching software give it a try. 

Since River2 is a podcatcher, it automatically works with this feed.