Podcasting and the RSS Revolution

Some time ago I came across a project Adam Curry had developed utilizing RSS Enclosures. At the time, I had only vaguely heard about them and was intrigued by the potential applications for this aspect of the specification.

Last night, I got a tip from Judith Meskill regarding a How-To on Engadget that described a process called Podcasting. As they define it:

To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.

Doc Searls may have said it best: “PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”

To be honest, I don't own an iPod so the notion of PODcasting has little use to me. However, I am still intrigued by the other applications of this. It seems, and I know of at least one service, that peer-to-peer (social) networking systems could be utilizing this in the not to near future for things like file sharing. On the same note, though a weaker case, is the automatic synchronization of digital photo albums.

Of course, the ugly ghost of RSS security comes to haunt us again. This will be less and less of an issues and standalone applications merge RSS-reading functionality into their offerings and the widespread notion of RSS as a "public syndication" method gives way to thousands of private, dynamic streams blooming.