Treedia Powers Motorola and Podcast.com Partnership

Well, finally after a few months preparation, along with the rest of the development of podcast.com I can talk about the exciting news that podcast.com, powered by the system we call the Treedia Feed Management Platform is to be partnering with Motorola on delivering podcasts to their forthcoming smartphones, including the the MOTO Z8 ‘MotoRizr’.

We will be providing Motorola with a managed set of podcast directory folders which their applications can access and navigate the structure of through the use of OPML managed by the Treedia system. The current structure of the system and soon, more information will be available at motorola.podcast.com

The Treedia system’s name derives from the simple idea that any media can be distributed via RSS feeds held together by OPML directory folder structures which were easy to grow and manipulate.

It’s a tree of media. Treedia!

Through the use of very simple OPML files utilizing the ‘include’ type attribute, the Motorola application can drill down and list the podcasts on the device.

Soon, I will be providing a more thorough explanation of just how simple if is for anyone to create a way to navigate this data and also the power of networking available to social media networks, given easy tools to manage the data in a way we all understand already as computer users – folders. Of any ‘depth’.

And let’s not forget that RSS feeds and the like don’t have to ‘simply’ deliver podcasts. Audio or video. They could just as easily deliver updates on a multitude of things. Leveraging the awesome opportunity available to us thanks to OPML inclusion, we can begin to connect and share our appreciation of and presentation of our media in ways we haven’t even though of yet.

But they will all be connected by a ‘semantic path’ and also by the ‘curator’ of the folders and directories and their FOAF file, for example. Not only that, but each user will be able to share their playlists of what they are listening to at the time in a variety of formats, including RSS, XSPF and M3U.

Through these playlist formats and the OPML data available for each user (and each folder), it makes it easy for us to create simple widget user interfaces for just about any connected media platform there is. Simple and easy.

Naturally, users will be able to subscribe to each other’s playlists and folders. See when these change and are updated. All thanks to simple XML based technology.

I’m still wrapping up some loose ends and doing some long overdue bits of clean up on the site and documentations and tutorials, but soon we should be able to open up the doors to a limited amount of people to begin with, pretty soon!

Stay tuned! Stay subscribed! Much more exciting news to come! 🙂

Also in the news is the new next-generation RAZR-2 from Motorola.

K95 #1 : My New Nokia N95 is a Podcasting device!

OK. Here’s the first in a series of tests using my brand-spanking new Nokia N95 ‘pocket computer’ (phone)

K95 cast 1 test [noklog]

This was sooo easy!

1. Record (up to 1 hour) using built-in Voice Recorder.
2. Upload via web browser and WiFi.
3. Enter details in form.
4. Done!

The built-in voice recorder records in WAV format when set to high quality. The noklog system optionally converts that to mp3 and updates the entry and the RSS feed.

Now, that’s what I call portable media. 😉

Just you wait until I get a GPS fix on this baby!

If Dave Winer had a daughter…

.. would she be an Heiressess?

*boom tish*!

The Power of RSS and linkage

Here’s a little factoid for ya. This is what happens to your blog stats when you find a phone with an RSS button on it and Dave Winer links to it over on Scripting News. Impressive 😉 And gratifying.

Talking of Dave, he wrote a very poignant post today about the longevity of his content, his blog, his life’s work over on Scripting News. I had the pleasure of listening to Charlie Nesson a couple of times. Brilliant, thoughtful and inspiring.

Yesterday, I paid up another year for my server. That can’t happen forever for everyone. Hopefully one day I’ll host all at home as part of my connectivity package. Hosting aside, there’s much scripting going on around the place. I have old demos which won’t work unless I kick a cron job off again. So much dynamic content would not work without editing a config file, for example.

The Samsung ‘Feed Phone’

I have to say – that post about the RSS-buttoned phone below is now officially the most popular post on my WordPress blog EVER. Previously, it was a post about Saddam being hanged.

So it’s official – RSS is more popular than Saddam! Hurrah!

Also, I think it’s funny when people say ‘I cant confirm this’, or ‘this could be a fake’ – I promise you this is not a fake.

I think this was one of the most important things I saw at 3GSM. This was also not the only phone I saw which had a an RSS application – but it was the only one with a dedicated button.

And no – I didn’t see any ‘My Atom’ apps. Or buttons with ‘Atom’ on it.

The only trouble I did see though, was a slight lack of knowledge about what to do with enclosures. And representing podcast.com, I have offered our assistance

The Well-Formed Web?

With well formed data, there’s no reason why not. 😉

Now, can we please work out the right way to *do* OPML please?

Basically:

If you want to point to a WEBSITE: use type=link and url=http://your.web.site.com

If you want to point to an RSS feed use type=rss and xmlUrl=htt://www.your.rss.feed.com/rss.xml

If you want to point to MORE OPML use type=include and url=http://www.you.opml.file.com/hoopla.opml

OK. So, you could argue that there might be better ways of doing/specifying it.
And what about htmlUrl, opmlUrl, atomUrl, foafUrl, rdfUrl, type=rdf, type=atom, type=application/pdf or whatever… I don’t know. Just DOCUMENT how you do it.

But what I do know is the sooner we agree and what is the right way to ‘do it’ – the better. 😀

IMHO.

Hey! Is my OPML Icon out of date?? :p

Yay! Validated by C-NET News!

Ha! Wow! Just as I was looking for a bunch of RSS feeds from C-NET to play with, I came across their page listing their feeds and saw they were also linking to an OPML feed of feeds too! The ‘validated’ button they’re using is one I created at Dave’s request, a while ago, when he knocked together the validator (beta) for OPML.org!

Heheh! Kewl.

PS: Attn CNET – there’s an error in your OPML – so, it’s not quite ‘valid’ 😉 You have an ‘xmlUrl’ pointing to a web page for downloads.com – tsk tsk – naughty naughty 😉 If you want to point to a website, use ‘htmlUrl’, Thanks. The validator doesn’t go to check to see if your ‘xmlUrl’ is indeed an XML file.

Official Second Life blog picks up RSS NewsScreens and blogHUD!

So, there I was last night,hanging around on the ‘RSS Platform’ in Nooribeom, watching the fearsome news of the ‘Real World’ fly by, when none other than Hamlet Au, the ’embedded journalist’ in Second Life (though not at Linden Lab any more) on New World Notes dropped by to check out the BBC NewsScreens I set up here. There’s a CNN one nearby too, by the way – next to the ‘River of News’ 🙂 The screens read a list of feeds and loop through them, 10 stories at a time.
The good thing about the BBC News ones are the feed content has specific limits in the text entries. I happen to know that this is due to the journalists having to write stories which can run across many platforms. They have strict limits to the amount of characters for the headline and description text. This increases their value. On platforms with different text and size/resolution constraints, Flash is excellent at dealing with this, as you can embed fonts and that it is a ‘vector-based’ format, meaning you can stretch it any way you like and you will not lose resolution. At any size, if you do it right.

Second Life and the LSL scripting language presents many opportunities for an old skool web hack createc like myself. I frequently tell people that SL makes me feel as excited as I did when I first saw the web over 10 years ago. 😉 And no, it wasn’t for all the adult content (though be aware that most technology developed for the adult industry ends up revolutionising the mainstream in some way) it was for the ability to communicate with other people all around the world. Connect them. Network with them. And even meet them sometimes. (I’m still great friends with a couple in New Jersey who were the first people I met through the internet 12 years ago, through a mutual appreciation of the band ‘The Stone Roses‘. I met my partner online too. 8 years ago!)

With easy tools to publish content, media, whatever you want to call it, along with easy ways do consume, organise, filter and rate it it, there you have it. Bingo moment. Democratisation of media. Open mashable consumption by an constantly evolving , iterative audience.

I heart feeds. 😉 Thanks Dave.

Want to build an ‘OPML Tree’?

BBC News : RSS NewsReader : Secondlife : 2


Another demo of something I have been meaning to try for ages. After dusting off some old actionscript skills from back in the flash5 days, I was able to get a screen reading RSS feeds. WooHoo!!!! Animated!

BBC News : RSS NewsReader : Secondlife :Koz

Here’s a demo of something I have been meaning to try for ages. After dusting off some old actionscript skills from back in the flash5 days, I was able to get a screen reading RSS feeds. Yay to that!!