Library clips

What actually is the email inbox?

It can be the latest private correspondence, news, questions, announcements, conversations, document collaboration, tasks, notifications etc…

This is a lot of different types of content coming into the one stream, where it’s hard to sort out priority, and also hard to organise what you’ve done, what the status is on what your doing, and where to find what your working on.

My post, Instead of sending an email…, poses that a better way is to receive this content in context
eg. IM for quick questions, forums for discussion, blogs for know-how and communications, wikis for collaboration, RSS for notifications, etc…

Now you have various places to go to do your work…email can be used for one-to-one private correspondence and for invite links
eg. you are invited to collaborate on this wiki, here is the link

Instead of getting an email about project status, a new forum topic, I check my RSS Reader where I subscribe to blogs and forums.

This has split my email inbox stream into various other services, and most of the time I can reply or take part within these other services.

And of course this content is in the open for all to benefit from, for conversation to evolve the content, and I can discover people, connect and learn.

Email stress is something that is relevant to everyone, but what are people doing about it besides re-appropriating content elsewhere as I have suggested above?

There are lots of ways to be productive to keep your inbox down, but this is still putting up with the firehose problem, you are just putting up with the problem by implementing a nifty method to deal with it. Why should you have to deal with it, why not treat the cause?

A comment I left on one of my blog posts, referncing Jack Vinson, is that the real issue is the “input problem”. Email is just a tool, it’s the way we are using it, that’s stressing us. What has to happen is a policy, rule, social norm on group behaviour using emails. If you tell Bill to use a blog or IM sometimes instead of email, then you don’t need to solve your inbox problem as Bill is doing it for you, by re-purposing the content in the first place.

We don’t use RSS Readers at my work, we are using email to subscribe to blogs and forums. This is OK as you can post replies and comments from within your email, you can even post a forum topic and blog post via email…people like this.
We are in the open, having conversations, discovering people, creating serendipity, which is doing the right thing as we are leveraging the social capital, creating a corporate memory, creating conditions for emergence, etc…
We are starting to collaborate with wikis.
NOTE: this is not enterprise wide, we are in pilot mode

Even though I still have the problem of all this stuff (notifications) coming into my inbox, at least it doesn’t live in my inbox, at least I’m not actioning stuff as a new email. Once I read the email I delete it, as I know where the content lives.

One other benefit I forsee is that when people get the hang of blogs, I won’t be pushed so much stuff anymore, I can choose to subscribe by email. We already have an issue with a flooded inbox with stuff that’s relevant, last thing I want is occupational spam.

Another option over the RSS Reader subscription model is to have profiles and be able to network by subscribing to people:
- your profile
- what your subscriptions are doing

Luis Suarez’s email detox posts and podcasts (and another) are a perfect example of this re-purposing email for both personal well being and social benefit.

One thing that stuck in my mind is when Luis said he was sick of answering the same question all the time.
- he would rather answer a question once in a community forum or blog post where it is visible, and allow people to search or be pointed to it
- if the question was asked in public perhaps others could see it and answer it if Luis was unavailable, or didn’t know the amswer himself

This is similar to our support database where people log calls…if I can’t answer a call or I’m absent at least someone else can see it in the cue.
When people email a call, I have been instructed to ask them to log the call, please.

Luis is proposing this concept to any sort of question, just search the blogs or forums, if no luck then choose a forum to ask the question, or ask your network.

He is also doing what I do with support calls that are emailed to me, he is letting people know that what they just emailed him could of been done by IM, or a forum topic, or a blog post, or a wiki, etc…and he is letting them know by using this social tool to deliver the message.

Since our community pilot I have been doing the same.
Everytime I get an email that is an announcement I remind that person that they could have blogged it.
Everytime I get an email that is a question or discussion query I remind that person that they could have posted a forum topic.
Everytime I get an email that requires a more synchronous feel I ring that person or answer using IM.
Everytime I get and email that asks to collaborate on something I inform that person that we can use a wiki.

My intention is that once all community leaders discipline their members, they will hopefully re-habitualise (is that a word?) people into using the right tool for the right job.

Another thing that came across is that “email detox” is a great selling term to get people social online. Email stress affects everyone, and a process/program to help with that is a great disguise for getting social tools adopted. It will soon be realised that email detox is just a by product of social tools, and the real benefit is being connected.

What if you want to annouce something and some people you want to reach don’t subscribe to the blog?

Firstly if it’s a team blog, perhaps you could subscribe the group email to the blog.
But sometimes a team announcement may affect another party, in a past post I suggested that if you can post a blog my email, just include these other people in the address bar as well.
The end of the email can contain a link to the blog homepage so these people are aware that the content is archived, and not siloed.

How do I share links with people?

If I want to share a link with a friend that is not private correspondence, how do I do it?
- and what if she doesn’t subscribe to my bookmarks, or what if I haven’t bookmarked this link anyway, but I just want to tell them about it

This is what I like about the Facebook comment wall…I can share a link with one person, but it’s public.
- others can see it when they visit that page
- others will be aware of this via their News feed.

What about if I want to share a link or an email someone sent me, with three other people?

I wonder what Luis does for this type of communication.

Wiki idea

I’m thinking perhaps we should do something similar to Andrew McAfee’s latest post with example scenarios of when a social tool would be beneficial.

Perhaps we can create a wiki for re-purposing email examples:
- blog
- forum
- wiki
- IM
- tasks

And also have wikipages for each wikipage above, example:
Blog
- status
- announcement
- news
- etc…

I have started going through my current inbox and am filing emails in re-purposing folders.

I’m finding that I don’t know where to file some emails…maybe we can have a wikipage for emails that we don’t know how they could be re-purposed. This is especially happening with task type emails.

If a task is to request the team to sign off on the latest server upgrade testing, then a blog post is OK.

But what if the task is just for me to carry out something on my own and report back…I guess this is where something like the Activities module of Lotus Connections is the right social tool.

In some cases a task request may be a question to me and cc:’d to two people in another team. In this case the requestee has perhaps spoken to these two people and has said I’ll email John and cc: you.
I really think that on-the-fly forums are essential, as not all work is done within a team or community. Sometimes you are cross-collaborating so you want to have a quick task and discussion space quickly set-up rather than resort to email.
Or maybe the task could be a wikipage and the comments can be used for discussion.

I’ll perhaps do a follow-up post with some examples of the type of content we could include in a “re-purposing email wiki”

Related

Wiki for gathering a list, and the need for comments and notifications
Blogs can solve cross-departmental communication silos
Email is not the centre of my universe!
Email needs to know it’s place
Enterprise email and blog processes

James Dellow (ChiefTech) is interviewed by Matt Moore (Engineers without Fears) on a podcast all about Enterprise RSS…good listening.

One thing I disagree with is the terminology, an email broadcast was referred to as “pull”, and RSS as “push”.

To me email is “push”, as I can push (send) you an email and you have no choice, it just ends up in your inbox.

Whereas RSS is “pull”, as I publish and people can subscribe to it and “pull” it down to read.
Technically once you are subscribed new posts are, I suppose, pushed to you…it’s not like I have to pull each post everytime. But at least you have control, you can decide to disable the subscription.

The podcast wasn’t just about RSS, there was a lot to take away in relation to enterprise 2.0 in general.

One quote I liked was something like…social software doesn’t have to be used socially.

This really hones into a post I published on knowledge visibility, and how collaboration is different than emergence.

Blogs and wikis can substitute email and Document Management Systems for certain types of processes and communications.

A blog can be used to broadcast news, announcements, project status…
A wiki can be used to collaborate on a document

These scenarios are not anything unusual, you still are doing the same things and tasks you normally do, only using more appropriate tools for particular types of tasks (In-the-Flow).

Using tools this way makes things easier, centralised and more visible, and comments offer people to participate for all to see…and the fact that it’s visible allows more eyes to come upon this content and perhaps add value.

So far this is not km 2.0, it’s just using social tools to replace ways of getting our tasks done.

What KM 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is mostly about is emergence, ie. people participate and contribute their know-how, whether it’s blog fragments, presence status, research bookmarks. This content may also be tagged, and from a tag cloud we can see emerging patterns.
This participation is also about transparency, allowing anyone in the enterprise to be heard, as value and innovation is not just generated by supposed experts.

The most valuable part to knowledge workers is that publishings and conversations are taking place online, and you can tune into the flow.

Knowledge Management is about flow, maybe we could call it K-flow.

It’s no longer about capture and store it, and if you have a task go search the knowledgebase.

It’s about publishing fragments, and conversations, we are educated everyday with what people are saying in the Enterprise Conversation Market.

We can tap into this k-flow whenever we want to be informed, and we can also tap into it to ask questions…it’s all about people and conversations.
Sure this stuff is also archived by default for later searches, but the point is that it has flowed around the place, maybe evolved, and may come to rest, only to be resurrected and evolved again perhaps later on.

Twitter is the perfect example of flow. I subscribe to people I trust, and watch the tacit flow, I tune into what I like, I converse, stuff evolves. I can also ask questions to the sources of my flow (subscriptions/contacts) and get answers or have discussion, others, perhaps weak ties can add value or perhaps eaves drop and learn.

Twitter is about people, stuff I’m interested in comes to me, and stuff I want to know will be returned to me…you are no longer on your own, people are the filter to finding stuff and discovery.

Ross Dawson refers to research that identifies this is how people work anyway, so social tools are just encouraging and harnessing the way humans work:

“The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response.”

Two quotes I have posted before have to be mentioned again:

O’Reilly - “…it’s more important to have a shared memory than a shared workspace.”

McAfee - “…focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on the practices and output of knowledge workers.”

McAfee’s SLATES model is also mentioned in the podcast:

Search
Links
Authoring
Tags
Extensions
Signals

James Dellow uses the term “Awareness” in reference to RSS picking up signals, and I think this is what k-flow is about, we are participating, we are each others daily news…forget about knowledge management, this is a learning organisation.

A couple of weeks ago I was writing a wikipage primer on blogs for my work, and when tryng to describe that you can get email updates to new blog posts, I used the traditional subscription model as a metaphor.
James mentioned a newspaper subscription sent to your house, I used a similar description explaining email updates to new blog posts is like a magazine or journal subscription.

This is what I said:

“Blogs are different than email as you are not pushing a message to a set of people, instead you are publishing an item, making it visible to all. People may visit your blog, or decide to pull content by taking out an email subscription.
This is similar to physical magazines or journals, people publish these, and you may browse them in a shop, or you may decide to take out a subscription.”

James has taken this more granular and has mentioned that it’s a little different as you can use an RSS Reader to create your own personalised newspaper. A daily newspaper has many articles by many contributors, similarly everyday your RSS Reader can have many blog posts by many people.
The great thing is you have decided on all these sources, or you have decided on the topic content (search feeds) you want in your daily newspaper.

My post on, Web 2.0 : assemble and tune in goes further on about the new many-to-many model and the new authority model.

Lee Bryant calls this Actionable Collective Intelligence:

“From my 300+ sources, I may skim read 1000+ items every day, of which I might bookmark 10; if something really newsworthy is going on then I might write one blog post or internal analysis based on one or more of these signals. That means that as an individual, I am rigorously filtering my information inputs by amplifying the signals of 10 stories and perhaps adding my own insight and analysis to one key development in any given day. Imagine for a moment that a significant proportion of 5000 person knowledge organisation do this every day. The resulting social signals about what is important would be incredibly useful to the organisation as a whole, and would provide a far greater return for the overall investment of time and attention than unconnected reading and research. Creating this kind of flow for signals, information and insight is one of the key objectives of a social knowledge sharing strategy. KM people used to talk about the knowledge pyramid where a wide base of information is filtered to a middle tier of knowledge and then further refined into the ‘point’ of insight. Social tools give us the potential to do this in a networked environment.”

[UPDATE: I should have read the Podchains blog post properly:

“…we’ll be putting the old Podchains back up shortly at it’s new location.”]

How would you like it if this happened to you…

You find a website that allows you to bookmark websites, it’s not an ordinary social bookmark website, it’s one for podcasts.

When you see a podcast you like you bookmark the mp3 file in the URL field, the title in the title field, add some tags, and add a note (this can be used to enter the URL where you found this file).

After a year you have 100’s of great podcasts bookmarked, browse them by tag…what a great audio library.

This library also gives you some space to upload mp3 files…but you don’t use this feature, you just bookmark mp3 files.

One day you go to bookmark a new podcast and find that this service is no longer a podcast bookmark site.

First thing you say is WTF!!!!!

Where all my stuff?

Where’s my data?

All that work creating a library of my favourite podcasts is gone.

All the time I spent creating a library of my favourite podcasts is wasted.

This is what happened to me with Podchains.net.

They were a podcast bookmarks site, now they are Video Production and Distribution for the web.
Here is an announcement of their new service, pity this blog post doesn’t allow you to add a comment.

They changed their service without telling me, so now I’m at a loss.

I emailed them, but have not got a response.

I tweeted this hoping I could connect with other victims, but no response.

I want my data so I can take it elsewhere.

It’s a pity Data Portability is in its infancy, but this is one of the reasons that confirms the need to make data portable.

I at least want a way to export this data into another service, just like some social bookmarks allow you to import your bookmarks from another service.

I’ve posted about Podchains on various occassions, if anything I have promoted them, the least I want in return is to be able to import my data into another service.

My Podchains feed no longer works
http://podchains.net/feed.php?id=a54bd677ced76a515a0cefdbac3fe255

I made a Grazr from my Podchains feed, but this no longer works.

The only thing salvaged is my Ziki lifestream, which re-syndicates all my content, so I do have some stuff I collected at Podchains re-published at Ziki, thankgod for profile aggregators.
I’m not sure if this has my whole collection as I’m not sure if the Podchains RSS feed contained every item from my collection, but thankyou Ziki.

Has anyone experience this with a web 2.0 service?

After getting burnt, I’m not sure who to trust anymore!

Can I do anything about this, is it legally my data…I didn’t read the fine print?

Dave Winer is on to something new called Twittergrams, using Twitter as a presence blog that points to mp3 files, click on the mp3 file to listen to a Tweetcast…so basically Tweets are being used to notify you of presence audio bytes.

I tweeted about my ideas on this: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Firstly I posted about a service like Twitter called MySay, only the tweets aren’t text, they are audio tweets.

Another service is NowThen, where the tweets have photos, so they are more MMS rather than SMS.
Then we have Yodio which mixes it all together (audio, photo’s, video, text).

Back to audio…

1.
MySay allows you to send audio from your mobile phone to the web (audio tweets), since Twitter doesn’t allow this the option is to point to an mp3 file in your Tweet.
When people read your tweet on the web they can click the mp3 file and stream or download it, when people read your tweet on their mobile they can click on the mp3 file to stream it (not sure how you would download it on your phone…maybe you could get audio tweets as mobile email attachments or MMS)

2.
To make this easy we preferably need two things: host for audio files, and send audio files to the web from your mobile phone.

Audio byte services like MySay, jott, Evoca, Pheeder surely allow you to email or MMS an audio file from your mobile phone, have to look into this…if they do, then this covers are our requirements.

3.
Twitter would have to be able to recognise and action certain URL’s within Tweets…if I post a Tweet and include a link to a hosted mp3 file, we should be able to click on this and play it within Twitter, just like the del.icio.us playtagger…peterc doesn’t see why not, since their former service, odeo, was all about audio.

Anyway the same goes with actioning other file types, such as a video player for video files and an image viewer for image files.

4.
Just like del.icio.us, your Twitter feed could accept enclosures, so in the end you are Twittercasting or presencecasting.

How it comes together

SENDER
- you are walking home and have a thought to share, you record yourself on your phone audio feature
- you MMS or email your audio file to an audio byte host like MySay or evoca
- somehow you need this service (MySay or evoca) to SMS you the hosted URL created from your audio file
- then you SMS a tweet containing the link to your audio file

RECEIVER
- if a person you follow has posted an audio URL in their Tweet, this tweet will be MMS’d/emailed to you rather than SMS’d, and automatically have the audio URL within the Tweet converted into a file attachment

I’m not too techie on these things, but the concept is there…I’m sure it would be much easier if Twitter incorporated MySay type features, so we wouldn’t have to hack a work around.

Any suggestions?

[ADDED 5/07/07: Just noticed Twittergram is up and running, give your tweet a title and browse/upload your mp3 file, this will be stored on the Twittergram server, hit submit and it will post it as a new tweet.
Your tweet will also appear at another profile http://twitter.com/twittergram.
If you get this tweet update on your phone, you would have to click on the link and have to stream the audio file from the web…what I’d like to see is a kind of MMS update so you don’t need the mobile web to listen to the file.

Twittergram also has mobile phone posting…call a number and then it will record your voice (basically voicemail).

The Twittergram Twitter profile has enclosures, making it a micropodcast feed, to do this for your own account, you could register your Twitter feed at Feedburner and enable the podcast feature (giving it enclosures)]

I’ve been using Podchains to bookmark audio and video files (podcasts), but it’s a closed system, so I’m looking for something new.

What I want to do is simply bookmark media files, a little uploading/hosting space would be cool (just like Podchains), but it’s not essential.

I can use del.icio.us, but I’d rather just use it for regular websites, and use a more focused tool for podcasts.

I researched this topic a little in a past post, but it’s not my forte…this post is more of a Shoutout for recommendations.

Here’s a little write up of the focus of various services:

SUBSCRIBE
IonDB, Democracy, TVtonic, fireant, etc…
Web-based
mefeedia, SplashCast

HOST/SHOWS
YouTube, Vimeo, blipTV, OneMinuteWorld, OurMedia, Pluggd, Viddyou, esnips, divshare, PodShow, blubrry, SplashCast (also subscribe to media feeds, and create media mashups), blogTV, etc…

LIVE STREAM
YouTV, Ustream, Operator 11, Mogulus, Veodia, blogTV, etc…

BOOKMARK
Videobomb (from Democracy), Scouta, VodPod, dabble

NOTE: that some services like Splashcast and mefeedia, also provide a mini RSS Reader widget for your blog sidebar

A feature I’d like, similar to divshare and del.icio.us (playtagger) and others is that when I link to a media file in my blog post eg. mp3, wmv, etc…and I have the file bookmarked in my collection, it will display a player so visitors can play the file write from my blog post.

Another feature I like is a widget or linkroll for my sidebar, showing the latest media I’ve bookmarked, and being able to play it from the sidebar.

What about if I download any of these files and what do I use to store these files, this means I have 2 databases one with the files to stream, and one with the files I have downloaded.
I save these files on a desktop service like WindowMediaPlayer or a a client I got with my mp3 player.

There are also services where you can upload your collection, a bit like the HOST section in this post, an example is MediaMaster, see my at my post.

As you can see my choices are from the bookmark section:
Videobomb
Scouta
VodPod
Dabble

What are your experiences with the above?

What should I choose?

What recommendations do you have?

Are there similar bookmark services, just for audio?

Vodpod is social bookmarks for video’s, grab them from any video site and bookmark them in your vodpod, show them in a widget. Not only do you have a user space, but you can also join group pods.

I bookmark audio files in Podchains (you can bookmark any media file), but it won’t play within Podchains, you also get a widget, and space to host your own media URL’s from the media files on your PC.

Other choices are DivShare and Box.net to host files, share files and play them in widgets…but not within a social network.

With Podchains you actually bookmark the file, with Vodpod you just bookmark the web page the video box is hosted on, so you are not actually saving the media file itself.

See my post, The Podcast Listener, where at the end I link to lots of ways to download video URL’s into video files…also check out similar video social networks.

Download

Here’s an example post from the The Chris Pirillo Show, notice that you can download a YouTube clip directly from the post, it seems to use Google Video somehow, not sure how this works.

It seems you can download YouTube clips by using Democracy, this is a RSS Reader, Podcatcher, Video Player in one.
You can even use VideoBomb to download YouTube clips.

Also check out The Channel Channel, as a way to view one minute previews of Internet Video Channels, before you may wish to subscribe…also see PodcastPromos.

The other day I finally got round to loading a couple of mp3 files on my mp3 player, how awesome listening to web2.0 talk whilst hanging out the washing, on the train, waiting in lines…I’m not an official all sensory information addict till I start watching vodcasts on my device.

It’s taken me a while to become a podcast listener and I’m addicted, actually I’m frustrated as I only have dial-up, I can only download about 2 or 3 shows a night.

OK, so as a user the first thing I thought was where do I find web 2.0 related mp3 files or podcasts.

The next thing I thought was how do I manage these downloads.

Find
Many of the blogs I follow point to mp3 files all the time, so now I have to go through these blogs to find these files, but how, this search doesn’t work on Google Blog Search:

blogurl:http://www.masternewmedia.com filetype:mp3

Anyone know a way around this…maybe using Altavista audio search?

So my aim is to find audio files and to also find podcasts, here are some I found.

Search engine
Podzinger - searches in media content and also generates a podcast feed,
eg. any new audio/video that contains the word “wiki” will download those episodes/s in the podcast feed that you subscribe to in your Podcatcher or RSS Reader.
When you find episodes you like, you may feel that you could subscribe to the show itself.

So this searches in the audio content, amazing…I wonder if you can get a free transcript, I don’t think so…not for free, but best yet.

Now if this was a social network, you could then search by user tags for shows and episodes…topic searching always cuts through.

Podscope - search in full-text of video/audio, and subscribe to search podcast feed, similar to Podzinger.

Blinkx - like Podscope and Podzinger, search full-text of media, and generates a podcast feed, also play the media, even login to add to your playlist.

Podcast Alley - discover shows (not episodes or media files) by category, users can submit shows and comment and vote, not sure if you can login to save favourite shows, but you can listen to them.

PodcastReady - browse for shows and episodes and listen to them, login to manage items.

Yahoo! podcast search (refine to podcast) - keyword search, this searches in the text of the blog post pointing to the media file, it does not search in the actual audio itself.
eg. wiki

Google mp3 search - this isn’t searching in podcast feeds, this is searching HTML pages.

Also see Geek to Live: Find free music on the web.

There are lots of audio search engine’s and mp3 portals, but like some above it is cleaner to limit these to the podosphere or blogosphere, ie. searching within feeds, and even better when you can search in the audio itself.

del.icio.us filetype mp3 - this will allow you to find mp3 files people have bookmarked…also add a tag to this;
eg. http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3+wiki
http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3+podcast+blog
See more from the del.icio.us blog.

Technorati examples - Tags, Blog Directory (sorted by authority)

Social Networks
Odeo - Search for shows and episodes, listen to them and heaps of user interaction. Add podcast shows (feeds), but can’t add episodes or media files. Manage your favourite shows and episodes.
Check out show and feeds by user tags check out other users, even create podcasts
Podomatic - similar idea to Odeo.
fireANT - social network for video podcasts
Evoca : Voice comments for your blog - this is an audio snippet social network, each user and tags have podcast feeds.
mefeedia - social network for audio and video podcasts
mobilcastnetwork - social network for audio and video podcasts
[ADDED 23/03/07: blipTV - social network for video podcasts]
[ADDED 23/03/07: iondb.com - social network for audio and video podcasts]
[ADDED 26/03/07: blubrry]
[ADDED 26/03/07: Scouta]
[ADDED 27/03/07: Videobomb, vodpod]

Networks
The Podcast Network
NPR, also OnTheMedia.
Revision3 (video)
PodShow (video)
Personal Life Media (topic based - personal growth)
PodTech (video)
[ADDED 23/03/07: TVTonic (video)]
[ADDED 27/03/07: gigavox, O’Reilly.net, GruntMedia]

Books
podiobooks
audible
Librivox

Live podcasts
BlogTalkRadio

Directory
Podnova (also a Podcatcher)
iPodder (also a Podcatcher)
Podcast.net (search the directory, also by tag)
AllPodcasts
The PodLounge
Podcast Pickle
Podfeed.net
Podcasting Station
Podcasting News (also a blog), also see more blogs about podcasting podcasting tools, podblaze
Idiotvox
Podcast Shuffle
SYO Top Podcasts
[ADDED 23/03/07: Democracy]
[ADDED 26/03/07: PodcasterNews]
[ADDED 27/03/07: Ziepod, Techpodcasts, Internet Archive, The Channel Channel]

See more from the lists below.

Directory List and Gateways
Where to Submit Your Podcasts: Best Podcast Search Engines and Directories - Mini-Guide, Part 1
Podcast Tools
Podcasting Tools, check out the directory.

Reviews
The New, New Podcast Review
podcast-review (outdated)

Delivery
I’ve decided to not subscribe to podcast feeds in a Podcatcher like Podnova (which also has a directory of feeds) or Doppler as I often don’t like every show, I know you don’t have to auto-download, you can pick and choose which episodes to download.

My method is to subscribe to podcast feeds in my RSS Reader, any shows I like I bookmark the actual mp3 files into either del.icio.us or Podchains, I choose Podchains as this is a service like del.icio.us but dedicated to media.

Then I subscribe to my Podchains feed in my Podcatcher (eg. Podnova), this way ideally when I get home all the files I have bookmarked are downloaded. But in reality, because my computer is slow a Podcatcher is just a tease, so I just manually download my latest bookmarks, these are labelled “Unplayed” in Podchains.

I suppose another place where you can save your media files are in a file host like DivShare, and like del.icio.us Playtagger, you can play the file from the service, also if you include the mp3 file in your blog post, a player will be displayed so people can listen to it from within your post.
DivShare has another feature where you can upload mp3 straight into your blog post.
See some other hosts here, including blipTV and OurMedia.

The real advantage of a a file host is that if you record your own media file you can upload it to a file host, which will create your very own web URL for your media file. You can put this URL of your media file into your blog post which will be included in your feed (if your feed is set up to with enclosures).

NOTE: in del.icio.us you bookmark an existing web file, in a file host you actually host the file from your PC, ie. give it a URL, which people could then bookmark in del.icio.us.

UPDATE: MediaMaster is a hosted online music library, once your files are uploaded they cannot be downloaded for copyright reasons, so this probably doesn’t qualify for this post…others are webjay, radioblogclub (download hack), imeem, last.fm, MyStrands, pandora, Slacker, MOG, etc…

Podchains Update
Podchains is now a cross between a file host and a bookmark service
- 400MB of storage (this means you can enable a web URL for media files you have on your PC)
- feed for your account, feed for Played or Unplayed bookmarks, feeds for each tag…I wish they had a section for audio and video, but that’s OK because I’m tagging my audio files with “audio”, which generates a feed.
- a widget
- you can’t play files unlike del.icio.us and many other services
- it’s not quite a social network, when you look at a tag page you are only recommended other files, but you don’t get to see other users or tags.

Here is my Podchains feed

Video
In the directory links you will find some video casts or video blogs (vlogs), but what if you want to download video clips from services that don’t offer downloadable files, eg. YouTube.
Here are some tips, most of them from Digital Inspiration:
The Easiest Way to Save Youtube Videos: Kiss The Address Bar
Extract Still Image Sequences from Video Clips with AVCutty
Download Youtube Videos As iTunes MOV or MP3 Files Directly
When Video Files Won’t Play on Your Computer, Call Video Inspector
Zen Mix Blends Internet Video With Any Picture
Directly Download Youtube Videos with YouRipper
How to Split a Large Video File into Smaller Clips
10 Interesting Things You Can Do with YouTube or Google Videos
How to Convert a Video Podcast to Audio Only
HeyWatch
ZamZar

More
This post is more focused on the listener, but if you are into creating podcasts Portals and KM has a post on some services, also check out the links in the Directory/Gateway section.

Podlinez, a podcast directory with phone numbers next to each entry, just ring a number to listen to the latest podcast from that website on your phone…or enter the podcast URL and it will churn out a phone number.

Fonpods - audio on demand for your mobile phone, more precisely, you join the website and have your own RSS Reader for audio posts or podcasts, but instead of downloading the audio files like a Podcatcher does, you instead ring up and listen to your podcasts (no downloading and you don’t need and mp3 player, all you need is a mobile phone).

Botcasting - automated text-to-voice services - listen to feeds by turning them into podcasts.

mobilize - subscribe to audio feeds on your phone

Download podcasts straight onto your device.
Podcatcher Matrix
MobaTalk : Multimedia blog comments
Textcasting : podcast for text
podcast text
Podcast comments

Podcast is a weird name, it has really got nothing to do with iPods, all you are doing is using an advanced download manager (Podcatcher) to manage your downloads. Then you can listen to them on your PC, or then perhaps drag them to your mobile device.
The great thing about enclosed RSS feeds (Podcasts?) is that you don’t have to keep going to the website to grab the audio file and put it into your download manager, you just subscribe to the feed so the latest media files come to you.
Basically an RSS Reader, but with the additional step of downloading (even automatically) the files in the feed enclosures.

[ADDED 23/03/07:
vlogmap
freevlog]

Podchains

I posted about Podchains earlier, basically it allows you to save media files…a place to bookmark all your media files.

Now they have implemented the use of tags for each bookmark, plus now each tag has its own feed (podcast feed).
You still have your overall feed…to get a feed for a tag, just click “Filter your feed with this tag?”

I usually find out about an audio file as a link in a blog post, if I want to bookmark this audio file into Podchains I first have to click on the audio file link, then bookmark it…I wish I could instead just click on the bookmarklet from the blog post, and it would scan the blog post for media files and then insert that into the bookmark form to add to Podchains.
But what if there are numerous links to media files on a blog post, which one will go into the form, maybe it could pop up numerous forms, one for each audio file.

NOTE: what I mean by form is…a form appears when you click the bookmarklet, in order to fill in the details to add the bookmark to your account.

I’ve found that when I’m filling in the form to add a bookmark, I also include the blog post URL that listed the audio file in the description field as [Via …..], this way I remember where I found the audio file. Actually, I basically cut ‘n paste the content of the whole blog post into the description field.

Maybe there can be a field especially for the blog post URL you found the audio file from, or this could be a trackback field.

Ideally, after I listen to the audio file, I’d probably re-edit the bookmark (by the way, re-editing is a new feature) and write my own description, as I don’t usually want to fill in this field with my own content until after I’ve heard the audio.

Feedback

Social network like del.icio.us - browse all users, browse all tags, and global tagging (each bookmark can be tagged by all).

Also, perhaps like Furl, a read/unread check box, so you can keep track of which audio files you have actually listened to.

I’d also like to see global commenting, anyone can leave a comment for a bookmark (even if you haven’t saved it in your own collection).

OPML for each tag, basically this means you can import a list of your audio/video files into another application or browse them in an OPML grazer.

An OPML for your whole account would be two levels; level one are the tags (these would be OPML inclusions), and level two would be all the bookmarks in each tag.

Another type of OPML for your whole account would be just one level; listing all the feeds for each tag…this is a Podcast Reading List.

In the future I can see this as the del.icio.us for media files, an addition would be a media player like Odeo…I do like that you can play (stream) your bookmarks or subscriptions.

Odeo

Odeo is a lot different as you can not only save audio files, but you can also create a feed set (subscription list), it is also a social directory, ie. people can add feeds and tag them, you can browse feeds and tag them, you can tag audio files as well.

But I don’t think you can add audio files to the system, unlike Podchains…it seems you can only add feeds…is this correct?

Your account has a section called “subscriptions”, here you can list your subscriptions (also has an OPML Reading List), click on a subscription, and it will list the latest posts within that feed, click to play, or add a post to your “inbox” (this is where you collect your single audio files).

Your subscription list displays all posts from this feed with latest on top, all past posts are listed…there is no “mark as read feature”, so it’s not quite a fully fledged RSS Reader.
My problem is since I can’t “mark read”, how do I remember those posts I’ve read/heard.

My prefered method is to select the posts you like from your subscriptions and add them to your “inbox”.
The inbox is where you can keep individual posts, once you have listened to them, you can then delete it, if you like.
I’d like to keep them archived in the inbox, only if my inbox was like Podchains (with a read and unread box).

NOTE: You are not limited to adding a post only from your subscriptions into your inbox, you can browse in the directory for a channel and add a post to your inbox, or browse audio files and add these to your inbox.

When you look at a tag page eg. politics, it lists podcasts with this tag, and it lists audio files with this tag.

Here is an eg. podcast channel (this is what you can add to your “subscriptions”); add a post to your inbox, you can play it, add tags, discover other podcasts via the tags, add a comment, add a audio comment, email it, and add a star.

Here is an example post or audio file; play it, add to your inbox or download the file, add a comment, add a audio comment, put the audio on your website so people can play it, add tags, discover other podcasts via the tags, add a star, and email it or add to your peeps inbox (this is where friends can see in your peeps inbox).

The bottom of every page also allows you to enter a feed, as I mentioned I’m not sure if you can just add an audio file.

You can even create podcasts in Odeo.

Feedback

Issue I have is you can’t view your inbox or subscriptions by tag, and you can’t look at any other users unless they allow you to peep in their peeps inbox.

So, it is still a folksonomy because there is global tagging (lots of people tagging the same resource), but we can’t view other user accounts easily, and your tags don’t carry over into your own account.

Another problem is how do I know if I’ve listened to an audio file, I’d like it to act as an RSS Reader.
I’d like to view my subscriptions and just see the new posts, if I want to see past posts I can choose from a drop down (last hour, day, month). If I see a post I want to listen to I can play it now, download it, or add it to my inbox…or perhaps keep the post as new.
Later on I can go through my inbox, once I have listened to the post, I’d like to archive it in my inbox (and apply personal tags), this way its out of view.

Podnova

I also checked out Podnova, this isn’t a social network like Odeo (but it does have a directory of podcasts), just the same you can subscribe to podcast feeds, and save audio files…you can also stream and listen to any file.

NOTE: Podchains enables you to add audio files to the system, where Odeo and Podnova don’t allow to add outside audio files.
Odeo and Podnova enable you to add feeds to the system, you can also browse the existing feeds and add them to your account (subscriptions)…you can also choose to add the posts containing audio files from these feeds, into your inbox.
Podchains doesn’t allow you to add subscriptions (podcast feeds), it is more focused on single media files.

Back to Podnova…

It has both a web and desktop version, as mentioned in the note above, both versions allow you subscribe to feeds from the directory, or add an outside feed. It also allows gives you your own Podnova feed, this way you can add posts from your subscription feeds, or posts from feeds in the directory, straight into your personal Podnova feed (I guess it is similar to the inbox in Odeo).

The web version also has a player to listen to the audio on your PC (this is streaming), but if you want to download the audio files to your PC, just like Odeo, you have to do it manually, one by one, and wait…

That’s where the desktop version kicks in, the advantage of the desktop version is that it is a download manager.
You can view the latest posts from your subscriptions and check the ones you want to download, then come back some time later and listen to them on your PC or transfer the files to your mobile device.

Even better you can leave your PC on overnight and schedule it to check for new posts and download them, so when you jump on your PC in the morning you will see all the new audio files you have downloaded/saved onto your PC.
Keep the files you are interested in and delete the rest…transfer them to your mobile device for your own programmed radio show for your commute to work.

The desktop podcatcher version also synchs with the web version, if you are at your work PC you can save a file or subscribe to a podcast on your web version, then when you go to your home PC you launch the desktop version and it will instantly synch your desktop version to the web version.

Even if you don’t use the web version, you can still add subscriptions or save individual files to the desktop version, but you have to be on the PC that has the desktop version installed.

Generates a:

A RSS feed for your subscriptions
(be notified of the latest posts from my subscriptions)

A RSS feed with the episodes that you seperately added
(be notified of the latest posts I have added to my own Podnova feed)

An OPML Reading List of your podcast feed subscriptions

Podcatching Choices

ONE

Subscribe to podcast feeds in my regular RSS reader

- when I see a post I like I can add it to Podchains
- I will subscribe to my own Podchains feed in Podnova
- So when I launch the desktop Podnova it will list the latest audio files I added to Podchains (or if I have it scheduled to download, these audio files will be ready to transfer to my mobile device)

Only thing this method lacks is time, as I have to bookmark an audio file first in Podchains before it is in Podnova.

TWO

Subscribe to podcast feeds in my regular RSS reader

- when I see a post I like I can add it to Podnova
(actually I don’t know of a bookmarklet to do this, I tried to do it manually, and it worked, but it added it as a subscription…this also happened when I added the file instead of the post)

Anyway, if there was a bookmarklet, I hoped it would add to my own Podnova feed called “My Selected Podcasts Episodes”…same idea as having your own Podchains feed or Odeo inbox.
(So, Podnova may be similar to Odeo, in that you can only add audio files from feeds that already exist in the system)

Again this lacks time in getting fresh stuff as you have to bookmark it first…it also lacks having your files managed with tags, which is a great Podchains feature. In Podnova once you have downloaded a file you pretty much delete it (clean your cue).

THREE

Subscribe to feeds in Podnova web version (instead of my regular RSS Reader)

- when I see a post I like I can add it to my personal Podnova feed
- so when I launch the desktop Podnova it will list the latest audio files I added to Podnova web version

Even better, I don’t even have to add posts to my personal Podnova feed, I can have it scheduled to download the latest posts from my subscriptions, these audio files will be ready to transfer to my mobile device.

FOUR

Subscribe to feeds in Odeo (instead of my regular RSS Reader)

- when I see a post I like I can add it to Odeo inbox (subscribe to this inbox feed in Podnova)
or
- when I see a post I like I can add it to Podchains (subscribe to this inbox feed in Podnova)
or
- when I see a post I like I can add it to Podnova (subscribe to this inbox feed in Podnova)…but I don’t think this works, as mentioned above.

Web Podcatchers

The most economic way is to subscribe to feeds in Podnova (choice THREE), then schedule it to download the audio files from any new posts, so when you go to your computer all you have to do is transfer the files to your mobile device.

This way you don’t have to bookmark the audio files first, they are already downloaded for you…once you have listened to them, then you can bookmark them to keep in your collection.

But if you bookmark these into Podchains for your personal archive, and you subscribe to your Podchains feed in Podnova, then these same files will download again.
A solution to this would be as I mentioned earlier about the read/unread items in Podchains, you could have a separate feed for read and unread. This way you can just subscribe to your Podchains unread feed in Podnova.

The only issue with the automatic download approach is that it automatically downloads new files, and you may not like to listen to all the new files, no big deal I suppose, just delete the ones you don’t like.
This could be a problem if you subscribe to 50 feeds and each feed has a daily post. If you have the Podcatcher scheduled to download once a day, you will get 50 new posts downloaded, and it might be the case you only would like to listen to only 10 of these audio files…plus the storage room on your computer may be a problem.

Hmmm, what if Podcatchers had web versions…Podnova has a web version, but you can only enable it to download the files to your desktop version…what if the web version was a real podcatcher that downloaded the files on a host server. Same goes with Odeo, imagine you could download audio files on a hosted Odeo server.
This probably wouldn’t be cost effective for Odeo, people might subscribe to heaps of feeds, and have them auto download, and even worse they may not even listen to them, or abandon their accounts.

Scenarios

I guess there are two scenarios, it depends on how quickly you want to hear the freshest news.

Obviously subscribing to feeds in Podnova and have them automatic download for you overnight so you can listen to the freshest audio in the morning is absolutely deluxe…but as we mentioned, there is the storage issue.

(Maybe you could tell it to only download posts from a feed if it has these terms)

The other approach is to fire up your computer in the morning and choose the posts you want to download, but then you have to wait…

Regardless of these 2 scenario’s there are always audio files you find outside of your subscriptions, as you surf the web you can add these files to Podchains, and subscribe to your Podchains feed in Podnova.

(Again what about the audio files you come across in your Podnova feeds, that you want to save into your Podchains archive, then these files will pop-up again in Podnova…this is why Podchains could have an unread and a read feed, just subscribe to the unread feed in Podnova).

[ADDED: del.icio.us is similar to podchains, as you can save audio files, organise by tag, each tag has a feed with enclosures (podcast feed)…you can even stream audio files straight from del.icio.us, even streaming an audio file on your blog post via del.icio.us, just like the feature in Odeo]

Podchains is a social bookmark service especially for media files (audio/video), the great thing about it is that your user space has an RSS feed with enclosures which actually makes it a podcast feed…actually your user space is the feed itself, see mine.

I posted the other day about doing this exact thing with del.icio.us, but I like the idea of a separate system for this, basically the social indexed web for for audio/video.

See rev2’s post about Podchains, it seems to work like most bookmark services, although there is a lack of tags, this means each user can only have one podcast feed, I’d like to tag the files I collect, and have a podcast feed for each tag.

Like I said, your user space is your feed page, I’d like to see a proper user space like del.icio.us.

Also how do you see other users…where is the latest stream?

Anyway, the idea is for people to be able to subscribe to your Podchains feed in a podcatcher, this way they can be updated with the lastest audio/video in your collection, and then download the podcast feed into their mobile device.

I like rev2’s feedback:
- ability to bookmark the page the media file is on (auto-detection), instead of having to bookmark the file itself
(my addition is to perhaps be able to right-click on the file to bookmark it)
- either feeds for tags, or ability to have several channels per user
- latest stream by rating/voting, kind of like a memedigger

Some of these have been answered in a comment on the rev2 post.

[ADDED: each user actually does have a user space “dashboard”, but the URL is not unique for others to see]

TechLifeWeb has a great post on using a del.icio.us tag RSS feed to collect mp3’s and then subscribe to this tag in your podcatcher…from the post:

“With a little bit of work up front you can set it up so all you have to do is save the link to the mp3 file in your del.icio.us account and it will transfer to your mp3 player the next time you sync it to your computer.”

Use whatever tag you like to save these audio files eg. “myaudio”, but when you recall them use this URL:

http://del.icio.us/yourdelicioususername/system:filetype:mp3+myaudio

The RSS feed from this URL has enclosures, meaning it turns it on as a podcasting feed…more from the post:

“The beauty here is the when you use the system:filetype:mp3 feature of del.icio.us, the rss feed is magically converted to include the mp3 files as enclosures. This is what your podcatcher needs to be able to go out and grab those mp3 files for you.”

You’ve done all the hard work. Next time you find an mp3 file, all you have to do is save the link to del.icio.us and tag it…when your client searches for new podcasts it will look to your del.icio.us account as well and grab any new links you’ve tagged. Sync and enjoy!”

The old hack is to run your del.icio.us tag feed through Feedburner to make it podcast enabled, see del.icio.us podcasts with Feedburner.

Similar:
del.icio.us system tags