Producing Participatory Media
Week 4 - February 11

Topics:

  • RSS
  • Audio Blogging
  • Podcasting
  • Video Blogging
    •

    RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary

    RSS is an XML based content syndication format. It became popular due to the possibilities that it opened up in the blogging world. Currently it is in wide use throughout news sites, blogs and other regularly updated web based content sites. It has begun to replace email newsletters as it is on-demand and not susceptible to spam. There are a wide variety of RSS readers or News aggregators for a myriad of devices and plenty of add on services.

  • Mac OS X News Aggregators/Readers
  • Windows News Aggregators/Readers
  • Online News Aggregators


    • A couple of feeds:
  • Producing Participatory Media Class Blog Feed
  • Shawn's Little Output Feed
  • Unmediated.org Feed
  • 4th Floor

    • or:

  • Syndic8.com: Search, Browse or otherwise find RSS feeds

    • You can usually find feeds by looking for a text like this: "Syndicate this site (XML)" or an image link that looks like:

    RSS has a couple of versions in general use: .91, .92 and 2.0.
    All RSS version are composed of a channel <channel> with multiple <item> tags.
    RSS versions less than .92 are good for standard news and website syndication (ie. text) but things get really interesting (for our purposes) with version .92
    .92 allows for <enclosure> tags. Enclosures allow for the inclusion of media elements.
    A Sample: <enclosure url="http://hostname.com/path/to/media.mp3" length="12216320" type="audio/mpeg" />

    MT-Enclosures: Movable Type Plugin to add enclosures to your feed.

    For more information:

  • RSS - Wikipedia
  • RSS Specifications
  • RSS at Harvard (specifications)
  • Media RSS Syndication and "Media RSS" Specification Version .9 (DRAFT)
  • My Wiki: ParsingXML - RSS with Perl
  • My Wiki: ParsingWithProcessing - RSS with Processing


    • Audio Blogging

    Simply put, Audio Blogging is the act of putting home made audio files up on a blog.

    Putting audio on your blog opens up the possibility of people leaving comments and possibiliity of trackbacks which are the cornerstones of the loose social networks that blogs enable.

    While the internet itself has done a great deal to enable everyone with the ability to publish to anyone, it hasn't been until recently that the bandwidth has been available to support rich media publishing and consumption. Blogs with their ease of use in publishing text opened the floodgates and one of the first things to come through in the new world of many-to-many media creation is audio.

    More:

  • NPR: Audio Blogs: Online Diarists Sound Off
  • audible frequency: 20 Hz to 20 kHz
  • Idle Words: An Audioblogging Manifesto
  • Joi Ito's Web: audiomashupblogging
  • Unmediated: audiomashupblogging


    • In order to create an audio blog, you simply need to enable the listening of an audio file from your blog. You can utilize the same embedded player functionality that you utilized last week. Many audio bloggers don't even go that far and simply link to an MP3 audio file which enjoys almost universal support. Of course there are a thousand ways to go about putting audio on a web page and many more players and production techniques that can be utilized.

    Production Tools:

  • Audacity and LAME
  • Any other video or audio editor that can save a file in a compressed form (AAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, RA, WMA) including QuickTime Pro, Real Producer, QuickTime Broadcaster, FinalCut Pro, iMovie, SoundForge and on and on..
  • Jeremy Allaire: How does Audio Blogger work? Description of a Flash based Audio Blogging production tool.
  • Audioblog.com and Audioblogger Phone based audio blogging service
  • brainwagon >> HOWTO: Produce Your Own AudioBlog


    • PodCasting

    Term is a blend of iPod and broadcasting. Thanks to enclosures in RSS, audio blogs (or any other audio delivered via RSS) are automatically downloaded to your computer through the use of a special aggregator. The term and concept of podcasting was originally developed by Dave Winer and Adam Curry (of MTV fame) and has quickly exploded due to the ubiquitous nature of portable digital music devices (iPod) coinsiding with the growth of broadband to the home.

    More information, what is it and how it came about:

  • TheTwoWayWeb.Com: Payloads for RSS nice explaination of the concept behind delivering media via RSS.
  • The RSS Enclosure Exposure
  • What is podcasting?
  • Wikipedia: Podcasting
  • New Media Musings: Podcasting as citizens media
  • Podcating 101 video (goofy but informative)


    • Podcast aggregators

  • dopplerradio Windows
  • iPodder cross platform (Mac, Windows and Linux), open source, support for BitTorrent enclosures.
  • Podcast Software: Podcast Alley
  • iPodder Software


    • Get some podcasts:

  • iPodder.org: Directory of Podcasts
  • Last 100 Podcasts
  • PodcastAlley.com -- Podcast Directory
  • On The Media and On The Media - Podcasting


    • Video Blogging

    Just like audio blogging is the posting of audio to your blog, video blogging is the posting of video.
    Just like PodCasting has taken off, video blogging aggregators are starting to pop-up.

    Video Blogs

  • videoblog::vog 2.0 - Read the VOGMA: A Manifesto
  • Rocketboom
  • Momentshowing
  • Ryanne's Video Blog


    • Video Blog Feeds

  • mefeedia vlogger directory: videobloggers
  • del.icio.us / tag / antfeeds


    • Video Blog Aggregators

  • mefeedia: video blog browser
  • ANT | Not TV
  • Videora BitTorrent RSS Reader ... ?


    • Other Resources

  • Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive (Open Source Movies) (Create Account)
  • Creative Commons Publisher
  • Video Blogging Yahoo Group
  • Me-TV.org: Video Blogging Wiki - Great information resource
  • Vloggercon 05: Conference Sessions Online
  • Our Media
  • vBlog Central
  • Yahoo Video Search