Professor Podcast
Another item from the RSS-is-plumbing department:
The Guardian reports that Apple is developing a tool set for educators that will let them record and publish their lectures as a QuickTime podcast.
The idea of “QuickTime to RSS” seems to be that profs will be insulated from the technical mojo required to record lectures, encode them as QuickTime, then build an RSS feed to podcast them. The name may cause confusion - “are we really converting movie files to XML?” - but this is another demonstration that RSS has become useful plumbing for rich content delivery.
It’s too bad they’re not doing this in Atom, because this sort of content (education, lectures, etc.) strikes me as a ripe candidate for semantic markup. Since the Semantic Web has some of its greatest champions in the academic sector, it seems like Atom support with its semantic underpinnings would be welcome indeed.
January 23rd, 2006 at 15:05
MSNBC had a related article about academic podcasting that originated in the Hartford Courant on December 28 (since archived - pay to play).
Apple already is making these moves, as evidenced by their offering of the podcasting server. And by the way, it does support the atom protocol (see “easy to manage” heading for the Apple podcast server description).
January 25th, 2006 at 15:44
Related - yesterday’s unveiling of iTunes U.