Meet My New Podcatcher, del.icio.us

Josh Dura pointed to some news on the new multimedia/enclosure support that’s been added to del.icio.us. Since then, I’ve been blinking rapidly with the possibilities of this. Perhaps I should explain myself.

Until now, there were two problems, in two different domains:

• Podcasts are generally discovered by talent or theme, not topic.

  That comment will raise hairs on many necks, but it’s something I believe to be true. For newcomers to podcasting, they generally start at a directory or with a directed search as guided by an “insider”. The challenge for newcomers, as has been covered many times before, is that to tell if you like someone requires a good deal of work (finding shows on the right theme, downloading and listening to determine the fit, etc.). However, we’ve also got lots of shows that are situated around streams of consciousness or broader themes (generalization again).

  What has been missing, largely due to the huge effort required the prepare detailed show notes and the lack of available indexing tools (podscope.com aside), is the ability to determine what a show covers. Some may consider this to be a suitable challenge, however I there are many, many use cases where random banter won’t cut it.

• Audio could be tagged, but not downloaded easily

  Since our podcasts and other forms of web multimedia live, well, on the web, they all theoretically have a unique URL. This is where del.icio.us comes into play. People are tagging URLs all the time inside this service and their recent round of funding will surely deliver greater reliability and new features.

  The disconnect, though some creatives have worked around them, was that the links to the audio were not presented in a format that made it possible for Podcatching clients to download them - we could see the smoke, but not the fire.

So here we are today, and things are very different. Now, del.icio.us has added enclosure tags to their generated RSS feeds. This will provide us all with a unique ability to reach people who were:

• Not looking for podcasts, but could benefit from them
• Looking for more granularity, but unable to find it

All we need to do now, really, is start to register our podcasts with del.icio.us and provide tags that are relevant to the conversation had. Now we're getting topical views of the podcasting space. What's best is that all the "traditional" arguments for tagging as a whole come with it, and then some:

• Quick and easy to designate, as compared to writing show notes with time stamps, etc.
• Human-mediated (for the time being) provides that key human filter that helps us determine what's appropriate (note, I'm not commenting on quality in any manner).
• Reputation-enabled by default since I can choose to let people I "trust" to recommend the topics for specific podcasts. Now I'm choosing editorial talent.

Personally, I am most excited since the SparkCasting system has been doing this all along. Every show has been about a specific topic and there are internally tags associated with each.

In summary: very cool indeed