And what about the Aggregator Vendors?
Shouldn’t they be supporting media feeds by now?
Shouldn’t their products and services sense a media enclosure and render the audio or video properly or do something special with the photos or imagery?
Following up to yesterday’s post on “where’s the meta-data” - RSS created an ecosystem where both content creators and aggregator vendors worked hand in hand to provide a compelling solution. This open standard gave birth to a whole new way of reading, researching, monitoring, collaborating, thinking, etc.
But now we (finally) have media in the mix.
It’s really nice to see the world acccept video and even put a price on it - $1.6B.
This is why we created ourmedia.org in the first place - to help promulgate open standards in this arena. Well that effort failed. Then along came Media RSS and I was amazed that Yahoo was willing to put in the resources to get it up and running.
But why hasn’t - NewsGator or Bloglines - started supporting these media enabled feeds? Why hasn’t some new hotshot aggregator play come along - that does everything a ‘news (read: TEXT) reader does, but also elegantly for media - as well?
Well I bet a major reason is that we haven’t coalesced around standardizing HOW we embed media into feeds.
Lord knows That microformats does NOT take on this problem.
So what does? Can Media RSS do what we need it to do?
I myself would like to see a format called XSPF brought to bear on this problem. We need XSPF to be a playlist format - for not just Audio - but ALL media - even sldieshows.
Then we need a clear way (Lucas and Ian - are you listening? Greg Reinacker - Rich Levandov?) to embed XSPF playlists into feeds - and then we’re ready to rock. At THIS point I thInk these feeds need to be BOTH RSS and Atom - IMHO.
Anyway - once we’ve made time-based playlists a part of the venacular - we can THEN put pressure on the marketplace - and on aggregator vendors to include media as part of the mix.
Some of you might have noticed I’ve been out of the loop recently on these matters. That’s cause we’ve been busy putting these ideas into practice.
So YES we’ll be supporting every dam feed format their is, every microformat there is, and XSPF once we can get to it (read: lack of resources and time.) We have some exciting new things coming - so we are still working towwards this idealistic world of the future, while trying to stay pragmatic and relevant on the short term.
You can’t always rely upon ‘the community’ to get things done. It has been our experience that commercially run companies - for profit - are needed to get many of these ’standards’ going. Afterall - as we all say - it’s the marketplace that defines the standard - not ‘the community’ per se.
Where the marketplace and community are one - is a great thing - but I shouldn’t have to tell you that a bunch of early adopters, who (in the old days) used to propagate Slashdot and nowadays read and ‘dig’ - allot - are not necesarily a ‘marketplace’.
The trick is to combine the altruistic aspects of your idealism with good old fashioned business models, services for hire and product available for purchase.
October 25th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
NewsRiver, the aggregator built into the OPML Editor, has great support for media enclosures. I use it every day to get my podcasts. I like it because it’s far more transparent than iTunes, totally under my control. And I know how to tweak it (of course, i wrote it) but since its open source, anyone else can too. The problem of course isn’t that there are no products that do this, it’s that people aren’t looking for them. Or maybe you could do a better job of promoting it, if so, please do!
BTW, for historic purposes, Radio had enclosure support in 2001, five years ago, long before most of the products you talk about existed.
October 25th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
[…] Marc Canter asks about support by aggregator developers of media formats in RSS feeds. […]
October 25th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
BTW, Marc — I think we’ll find that quite a few aggregator developers do podcatching. I know NetNewsWire does, for example.
October 25th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
http://mefeedia.com/ does media aggregation. Still beta, but great to find videoblogs and podcasts. But I agree. What’s Bloglines waiting for? They embed mp3’s and Flash enclosures now, but nothing more so far.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Marc, Microformats says ‘use rel=”enclosure”‘.
http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-enclosure
If you need more info than that, lets talk about it:
http://microformats.org/wiki/media-info
October 25th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Marc (& Dave),
Speaking as a user here (mostly, though I do more than occasionally also design software), I consume media in a few different ways - and as of yet I have not found a single RSS reader (online or offline) that works for all of my needs - so instead I’m stuck with a bunch of only partially useful solutions.
- for audio content (i.e. podcasts) I want them to be organized, only downloaded ONCE, added to my media player in a logical manner (i.e. in separate playlists for each feed, with all of the metadata from the producer of the content preserved), and managed in a way that I can control from WITHIN the media player (i.e. I can rate them within a media tool and have something automagically happen to them later - such as having them deleted and removed from my media player)
- for video content - I typically watch this on my screen, I want my RSS reader to ALWAYS tell me when a feed contains multimedia content - even if it is an embedded YouTube video, ideally it wouldn’t require me to go to the original site but would allow me to play it from within the feed reader immediately (I’m also very much of the camp that I prefer FULL feeds - or at the very least would like to visually tell easily and quickly when a given item is NOT a full feed - currently more than half the time I do not realize that the feed is not complete since people use very different practices when publishing non-full feeds
- for text feeds though it is very tricky I want my RSS reader to preserve as much as possible the format of the original post. Furthermore, I want to ALWAYS be able to tell WHO published a given element (I’m not a huge fan of a “river of news” format because it can be very hard to keep track of which feed published which).
I want to be able to easily mark certain posts to be kept (possibly ever cached somewhere for me) and I would prefer that the feed reader have a good set of tools for keeping track of which posts I have actually read (Google Reader does this fairly well though I’m still mostly using Bloglines).
Of course I also would like all my various feed consuming tools to be able to talk with each other - even to the point of perhaps tracking feeds I have read/not read in a smart manner (for example I might want to have a tool that automatically fetches all my podcast subscriptions and adds them to my media player, while in another tool I see those SAME feeds but instead of redownloading the media content, I merely read the posts - best case being with some indication that I have already downloaded the media content.
For video content it might also be good to be able to set up channels of my favorites and watch them back to back - i.e. “I’d like to catch up on Rocketboom” or “Ask a Ninja” or “The ScobleShow” etc.
and finally, having just added a Mac to my mix along with my PC, I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I have a podcatcher than helps me keep the two machines in sync (this may take a lot as Apple restricts my mp3 player from being fully functional against multiple machines - I have an older shuffle). Bloglines or Google Reader are both valid approaches for cross-platform RSS reading - though they are by no means perfect.
Shannon
October 25th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
[…] Kevin Marks has quickly pointed out that there IS an on-going effort to define a micrformat for media - so that folks can ‘describe’ a media item in a page. […]
October 25th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
It seems like a lot of feed producers are starting to get with the program and have begun including some of the more popular media (and micro) formats in their feeds. I noticed google’s feed from picassa web (http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/rssUser?uname=nott.pera) has this:
Why include one format when you can have three? Since rss is extendable, it would be nice if aggregators shared the same flexibility.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Hey Marc,
The detour in the community began when a subset of the community yelled “$$ finish line $$” and pointed all attention in the newly forming ecosystem toward the Apple/IPod/ITunes deadend.
But that hasn’t stop me from writing my own media web app that works for me and I’m sure will work for others.
Check out my cast media browser “Cast Browser” @ www.castbrowser.com …. let me know what you think.
The design of my castbrowser is pretty simple … support all the xml media feed types (RSS, ATOM OPML, etc.) of the day and the new ones as they come along … and support the rendering of all feed embedded media objects right in the web page.
The web page is the only place I want to consume my media and I willing to bet the ranch even with the popularity of the IPod it is the place most today watch the “New Media evolution” and the place where the majority will particaipate in the “New Media Revolution” when the “Always On Web” gets here.
… and dude when you planning your next NYC party?
October 26th, 2006 at 6:00 am
The closest I’ve seen to an elegant media aggregator is Streampad - http://www.streampad.com . It only does audio now, but makes it simple to add a feed, be it RSS, XSPF, M3U or even HTML.
October 26th, 2006 at 6:04 am
For what it’s worth, Google Reader handles audio enclosures, video enclosures and Media RSS for video:
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2006/04/stay-tuned-its-video-in-google-reader.html
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer
October 26th, 2006 at 7:24 am
What Kevin really means is they’re reinventing RSS, again. Sighhhhh.
October 26th, 2006 at 11:28 am
Marc, I agree with you that the big roadblock is that we haven’t standardized on how to embed media into feeds. We also haven’t standardized on the user experience, but perhaps that’s just a sign of healthy competition in the aggregator space.
IMO, Media RSS is the best format, especially since it’s already used in video feeds from Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Microsoft. Flickr also uses Media RSS in their tag feeds.
FeedDemon has supported a subset of Media RSS for quite a while now, and NewsGator’s API recently started supporting it, too. Here’s a screenshot which shows how FeedDemon handles Media RSS in YouTube feeds:
http://www.bradsoft.com/typepad/post-img/youtube3.png
This is in addition to FeedDemon’s podcatching features, which sync enclosures with your iPod or WMP device.
October 26th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
[…] And finally Shannon Clark always seems to have allot to say. […]