October 25, 2004
Announcing SmartCast™
As the enthusiasm about Podcasting has grown in recent weeks, so has our enthusiasm for more generally managing RSS enclosures (we don't get out much). In the past couple weeks, we have received numerous emails asking if we could begin to provide services that would enable Podcasting for folks that can't currently cast, pod or otherwise. Problem solved. SmartCast™ enables any feed publisher to create Podcasts, whether you generate Atom feeds or RSS 1.0 feeds. Maybe you've got an RSS 2.0 feed but no ability to create hooks into enclosure elements? No problem.
If we've already lost you, and you know nothing about these podcasts or enclosures, there's a FAQ at the bottom of this announcement that will fill in the blanks for you. For everybody else, here are three great uses for SmartCast (two requested and one we made up!):
Blogger users. Blogger currently provides Atom feeds. If you're a Blogger publisher and you want to create a podcast, create items that point to your audio file (mp3s or torrents or whatever) in the link element, and then use our service. SmartCast will do what's necessary to make this feed podcast-able!
TypePad basic users or anybody without the ability to create hooks into enclosures. If you create a blog entry whose link is a rich media type, you can run your feed through our SmartCast service and we'll transform it for you. Our version of your feed will now work with new clients like Doppler and iPodder that understand and download enclosures.
GroupCasting! A simple but very fun concept. What if you could create a community podcasting network? Sites like del.icio.us enable community bookmarking (in which you assign your own tags to a link and share these links with everybody else). Del.icio.us currently only provides RSS 1.0 feeds, but a fabulous thing you can do with del.icio.us is get a feed of all links with a certain tag. So, to get things started, we decided to create the tag "groupcast" over at del.icio.us. Anybody can assign an audio link the "groupcast" tag. We then created http://feeds.feedburner.com/groupcast, which is a podcast enabled version of the del.icio.us feed. Voila, groupcasting. This is a really cool and simple way to create a collaborative broadcasting environment. Obviously, you don't need to use the "groupcast" tag, you can create your own tag names with friends or the broader community, then burn those feeds through us, publicize those feeds, and you've created your own group broadcasting environment. Simple and powerful.
While podcasting is certainly all the rage right now, note that SmartCast is not confined to podcasts. Our service provides the same capabilities for any rich media. Whatever may come of "podcasts", we think the broad use of RSS enclosures is a trend, not a fad. SmartCast allows anybody with a feed to create enclosures that can be managed by specialized rich media feed clients. This initial emergence of specialized feed clients is just the tip of the iceberg. As more and varied endpoint uses for RSS/Atom feeds continue to pop-up, FeedBurner will continue to provide general purposes tools for publishers, allowing everybody to join in the fun.
FAQ.
1. What is podcasting?
Technically, a podcast is just a feed that uses the RSS 2.0-specific "enclosure" element on a digital media item. This element has a link, a content length, and a content type. The idea is that some enclosure-sensitive client can see this element and start downloading the content in the background. iPodder is a currently popular example of this type of client. There is currently no analogy in RSS 1.0 or Atom, so podcasting was strictly an RSS 2.0 affair until today. SmartCast allows everybody to jump in the pool.
2. What does SmartCast technically do?
If a publisher isn't able to create a feed that has the enclosure element, they can use our service and we'll turn it into feed with the appropriate enclosure elements. We do it by first converting the feed to RSS 2.0 if it's not already, then looking at the <link> of each item and determining if it's a rich media type (by performing a HEAD request on the resource) such as an mp3 or a torrent. If it is, we create and add an enclosure element using the information we determined from the HEAD request.
3. Does feedburner provide services to create the audio files or provide any storage for these files?
No. We only provide services for existing feeds of existing content. We manage, enhance and transform feeds, and that's all we do. Ok, sometimes we bake cookies.
4. What about the bandwidth problem?
While we think the rss bandwidth problem has been a bit overblown, it's certainly the case that the podcasting bandwidth problem will be very real in the near term. We are considering a premium service that will distribute the load for enclosure-based feeds. There is no release date scheduled for this service, and it may be pre-empted by other services or partner work we need to wrap up. Watch this space.
5. You lost me way back at Podcast. Why are these things called Podcasts?
There's a good introduction to the term here at the Wikipedia.
5a. What's a wikipedia?
This is getting a bit too recursive. Please move along.
6. I have a Blogger blog or a TypePad blog or something else, and I want to create a Podcast but don�t really get what I need to do. Help?
We have provided detailed descriptions of what you'll need to do as part of the SmartCast service setup process within FeedBurner.
7. Anything else you�d like to say?
Yes, a big thank you to Peter Forret for the "podcast for Blogger users" idea. Peter also helped bounce some design ideas around and ran through a final test in Doppler, iPodder and jPodder. Thanks, Peter!
Comments
Outstanding! Thank you, can't wait to dig in.
Great job. Again Feedburner is ahead of the curve.
Keep us updated about your work on the
load distribution service for enclosure-based feeds.
Jean Scholtes
------------------------------
Podcasting Avenue
http://podcasters.blogspot.com
Cool! Now all that's required is some additional help to enable people to use BitTorrent a little more easily to alleviate the real impending bandwidth problem that's going to happen when people are choking down big files all the time from feeds.
ourmedia will host your podcasts for free -- providing free bandwidth and eternal storage -- on the Internet Archive's servers.
email me.
brilliant... now i just need a decent web connection to use this type of thing!
and anyone interested in posting video...theres a group of us coming together.
http://videoblogging.info
Simply amazing what you guys have done with feedburner. I really like the "PodcastFriendly" theme, smartcast and groupcast concepts.
I have been trying to figure out a solution to my problem of trying to aggregate every legal podcast for several weeks, without having to roll my own RSS, when I finally got around to reading your post on announcing SmartCast.
Anyway, I utilized "groupcast" as a model to build my Blawgcast.com aggregated feed. I just wanted to thank you for saving me countless hours of rolling my own.
-Kevin Heller
--
http://techlawadvisor.com
http://blawgcast.com
This is great!
What happends if, in our blog/podcast, we link to rich media we don't want included as an RSS enclosure (e.g. we want links to our MP3s enclosed in RSS, but not links we include that point to someone else's MP3s)?
5a. What's a wikipedia?
This is getting a bit too recursive. Please move along.
Here, let me help you : "Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia". How hard is that?
FAQ's are not a place for snarky "humor".
Fred
OK. So what does burning the feed with you get me? I have mp3s up on my site www.emerge.typepad.com/generations . Feed Demon automatically downloads the files. It seems like Doppler does also. So once I burn the feed where do I put that URL. I have the mp3 url in my post but where do I put the feedburner burned feed URL?
OK. So what does burning the feed with you get me? I have mp3s up on my site www.emerge.typepad.com/generations . Feed Demon automatically downloads the files. It seems like Doppler does also. So once I burn the feed where do I put that URL. I have the mp3 url in my post but where do I put the feedburner burned feed URL?
Hi -
What you get by running your feed through FeedBurner:
* detailed picture of how many subscribers you have. Just counting hits to the XML file isn't accurate, won't tell you how many "listeners" you actually have. We apply a ton of analytics to the feed requests to figure out how many people are subscribed to your feed.
* support for Yahoo! Media RSS. By running your feed through FeedBurner, your MP3s are immediately indexed by Yahoo!'s media search engine - increasing awareness of your content.
* through an upcoming feature (check our site tomorrow), your feed will be more easily discoverable by podcast directories - increasing your podcast's reach.
There are other advantages, but those are a few of the reasons that the majority of podcast feeds are run through us.
As to your last question, you asked what you would do with the feed once you burned it. The FeedBurner feed would serve as a replacement for your existing feed - you'd want to provide a way for existing subscribers to be redirected to your FeedBurner feed. See the details here: http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=17 for more on how to do this.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Rick
----
Rick Klau
VP, Business Development
FeedBurner - http://www.feedburner.com
rickk@feedburner.com
AIM/Y!/Skype: RickKlau
office: 312.442.9490
cell: 630.362.8911
Why is that this whole thing is run and explained by geeks? Whatever happened to Apple providing tools for the rest of us. I have a lot of content I want to podcast, but after about 7 freakin hours of scouring Google, I still can not find a basic step-by-step procedure to "podcast". I have an audio file on my server. Great. NOW WHAT? And don't tell me to stop shouting, this is insanely frustrating. I am not a geek, nor do I ever want to be one. Why has no one written an app to take total care of this whole thing. Come on geeks, get your act together.
I kind of agree with Shane. Even Apple which usually has really great explanations and help just kind of leaves you hanging. This site is better but I still don't know what to do with these files!
The WordPress blog site has some useful information:
WordPress PodCasting
Here's another informative link:
PodCast 411
(first post here, hopefully my imbedded html created working html links above).
WEll, I've got my MP3 file. I've put it on www.OurMedia.org. I've got the feed from them. I've put details of the feed on several places including podcast.net and feedburner.com. It's been a week and my podcast still does not show up in Doppler, iPodder or iTunes. How do I point the feed so it shows up in these programs?
How do you get Feedburner to recognize an MPEG4 (filename.m4a) as an enclosure in a feed converted from a blogger.com blog?
We've tried putting the URL in the file as a text link, and then tried putting it in Blogger's headline link field. No joy with either one.
Feedburner does put all the iTunes-specific code in the RSS feed, but there's no enclosure element.
Thanks for any help...
Bob in Knoxville
PS It's not my Radio Userland blog that's the problem -- it's this friend's new one:
http://markharmon.blogspot.com/
Ok, sounds great!
Have a few questions though:
1. I do not have my own domain name, what do I do?
2. What software do I need?
3. How much does this cost, is feed burner free?
Thanks,
Terrell
I have to ask some of the same questions as Terrell.
2. What software do I need?
3. How much does this cost, is feed burner free?
Can I get a list of the directories that FeedBurner will submit my podcast to?
