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About a week and a half ago I stumbled onto AKMA's brilliant idea to create an audio-book version of Lawrence Lessig's new book " Free Culture ". Bloggers quickly signed up to the collaborative by claiming chapters to read in the posting's comments. I arrived a bit late to the party, so I didn't get to read a chapter, although there is plenty of room for alternative voices and reads, but that's for later. I'm a big believer in audio books and 'read' this way frequently. I just finished Dan Brown's ' The DaVinci Code ' in about 2 week's time of travelling to my morning radio show whilst listeing in the car. I use my iPod and the iTrip , a snap-on fm-transmitter, so I can enjoy the reading on my car's stereo. It's also much safer. I listen to lots of stuff on my iPod besides music and audio books. There are interviews and archives of old radio shows. There's even an audio bible . Downloading these files and getting them onto my iPod was a tedious task. Clicking and waiting for hundreds of megabytes to be transferred just doesn't cut the mustard. Not at least, from a broadcaster's perspective. I believe there is a market for subscription based audio and video. As long as it requires no intervention from the user other than clicking the play button for instantaneous playback. That's where rss enclosures come in. The concept results in a subscribable service that delivers new content to your news aggregator. Additional 'glue' gets it onto the desired playback system automatically. This is how I receive a new verse from the bible every day on my iPod. It's always there for me in the morning when I take my iPod from it's dock. No intervention required on my part. The same process can be created with video files that are sent to a TiVo. Today I created an rss feed for the Free Culture audio-book project. Subscribing to it with an enclosure aware aggregator will download all the files you need to assemble the audio book. A logical followup to this project would be more multiple reader audio books. These could be delivered in one go as with the Free Culture feed, or they could be by subscription, where a new chapter is delivered daily. Regardless of your reading pace, the content will always be there when you are ready for it, not the other way around. Ofcourse non of this would have been possible without Lessig's gracious Creative Commons license . This brings me to the Project Gutenberg . A collaborative project that catalogues the texts of books that are old enough to qualify as a part of the public domain . Most are 100 years old, but there are many extremely recognizable titles and authors . Many are classics that can still be enjoyed by new audiences today, as they have for decades. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Tom Swift series , which i read a a kid, are now in the public domain. The Free Culture audio-book experiment showed me how quickly and efficiently this type of content can be produced, I am certain the model can be replicated with content from Project Gutenberg and hope to discuss this concept with others at BloggerCon II . |
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operation iraqi convertible |
Andrew Cochran interviewed Dave Winer last year at a conference. A lot of the conversation is about "rss", specifically
enclosures
. Fun to see this 22 meg file had already downloaded and was sitting there waiting for me in my iPod when I awoke.
Marcus wrote a
script
for me last year that takes an rss enclosure that ends with .mp3 and automagically adds it to a special iPod playlist once it's been downloaded.
I've also been testing
Andrew's
BitTorrent glue. Works as advertised! |
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journey to mars |
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are they crooked? |
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european anthem |
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exnodes for sale |
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I just noticed the "Radio Userland" has a problem with long filenames when downloading enclosures. It looks like the downloads occur, but can't be written to the designated enclosures folder. This results in RU attempting to [re]download massive numbers of files each time you restart. Has anyone else encountered this? |
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more video for your rss aggregator |
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Yesterday dave added a 35Mb quicktime video to his rss feed that automagically popped up ready to play on my machine this morning. I will pay anyone who is willing to set up a similar rss feed with daily enclosures of Letterman and/or Leno's tv show for my private viewing pleasure. If you have a TiVo, it probably can be a completely automated process, including my paypal payment to you. |
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What is Enclosure Extractor ? |
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RSS2iPod |
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Radio UserLand Update : The RSS enclosures prefs page now includes a setting for choosing where to save downloaded enclosures. |
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The syncPod channel has bene updated with a new mp3. This feed is intended to stimulate the development of "rss" enclosure applications. Subscribe 
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Sjoerd experiences rss enclosures and offers alternatives. |
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I'm longing for "rss" enclosures in "manila". Chris Lydon is posting some great inerviews , his syndicated feed would be perfect for developers to use to help integrate enclosures into their aggregators. Once you use an aggregator that knows what to do with enclosures, you'll never want to look back! Your aggregator shows a new media-file is available and when you click the link, the file plays instantaneously. No waiting, since your aggregator downloaded the file prior to announcing it ,in order to deliver an awesome time-shift experience. |
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johnny cashes in 
Johnny Cash
passed away
yesterday at 71. I scanned my iTunes library and have one of my favourite man in black songs blasting away this morning. The uncensored version of
Boy named Sue
is attached to this post as an enclosure. |
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dutch 747 captain |
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I'm even more excited about the thought I had earlier. After downloading the zip file I loaded Christopher Lydon's interviews into my ipod. Bing . This is powerful stuff, now the dots need to be connected. I'm looking for an application (or glue for several existing apps) that will parse an rss feed for enclosures and load them into a new playlist on my [docked] ipod. Update : Shrook can export rss feeds to my ipod. No support for enclosures..yet. |
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happy sunday tune |
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Essay : Email is dead, long live email!
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Vincent Outlaw is working on blogging NPR with audio enclosures. |
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matrixXP 
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Café Gerinka is using konspire to post an audioblog [ subscribe ] |
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