Where’s the meta data? What’s wrong with Podcasting.
Lots of people have been prodding me into reviving “the Marc Canter Show” - which I did – just as the Web was born in ‘94-’96.
I stoped because the video I was shotting wasn’t making it out onto the web, or shall I say “I had no intention of spending millions of dollars narrowcasting my video blogging.”
Lately I’ve also been getting flack for not using coolio Video Conferencing systems – like FlashMeeting – and in general abandoning my multimedia roots.
Well I’ve also had this burning, bubbling feeling in my stomach that something was desperately wrong with Podcasting – and I think I know what that is.
Where’s the meta-data?
Most of my frustration over the state of RSS subscriptions has been around the lack of standards for new kinds of micro-content. It’s shame that we lose the structures of events, reviews and listings – inside of an RSS feed. We know how to solve this technical challenge, but it’s about standards and people working together – that the work is needed.
So along come Podcasting and once again – we’re hacking our way through the future, rather than architecting the right thing.
In Dave Winer’s explanation of “How blogging tools should support enclosures” – he never even once alludes to the fact that maybe you’d want to know something ABOUT this here audio enclosure. Sure there’s the RSSS title and traditional tag info, but I wanna know who’s on the recording, what are the subjects and topics of the discussion, where particular juicy quotes reside and most of all the length and Creative Commons license info on the audio.
All of this meta data should be accompanying the Podcast – yet we’re still in hack mode – no sorry, nothing.
So I totally love the direction of Podcasting but I pray to the LORD of Technology – please oh Lord, please give us structure.
Please oh LORD (after winning one for the gipper and electing Kerry – our 2nd catholic President) – please oh LORD, now that you’ve taken care of your Irish brethren – will you PLEASE give us some coolio schemas (and shared APIs while you’re at it) for Podcasting?
I mean – how hard can it be to collect all these podcasts and store them somewhere and index them via the structured data that accompanies them and…….
Oh right – there is no accompanying data. Ouch.