DoIt (my Dad always loved that acronym for the Division of Information Technology) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Go, Badgers!) has a cool site about podcasting with how tos and whys for educators.

noticed on a discussion list ages ago

RSS4Lib features Netherlands-based Feed XS, a tool which allows people to create the content for RSS feeds, to publish something directly as a feed. It’s a way of making a feed without using some software platform, like blog software, to do it.

Why publish just a feed? Well, I learned about a year ago about people in some countries where blogging or having certain kinds of Web sites isn’t safe who use feeds to distribute their thoughts. There’s content that might be great for a feed, but not necessarily content people want on a Web site. It’s a way to create a feed for a static Web site that doesn’t offer a feed.

The radio show Car Talk now offers its puzzler and new columns via RSS.

(Yes, the typo is intentional. I’m trying hard to be funny.)

Thomas Gale adds podcasts to some of their resources.

Jenny reports that They Might Be Giants, a really cool, rockin’ band often featuring an accordion, offers a podcast: http://www.tmbg.com/_media/_pod/podcast….. A podcast probably isn’t such a big stretch for them because they’ve been doing something similar to a podcast with different technology for years: Dial a Song. They put a song as the outgoing message on an answering machine. Someone calling in can listen to it. The phone number is: 718-387-6962. It’s also available through the Dial a Song Web site.

Oddly, I have to report that their first podcast may not be completely work safe. I didn’t expect that from them because they’re usually quite work safe. Listen to it on your way home instead.

Oh, geez, Nova’s podcasting, too. And the ResourceShelf shares a link to some podcast interviews with librarians and information professionals.

I’m going to have to take another road trip soon …

On ZDNet, Phil Wainewright speculates on what’s next with feeds. Are people tired of using aggregators? Is creating one big feed of many feeds the latest important trend? (Is that really as new as the post claims when several aggregators have been doing that for a while?) Is publishing other source’s feeds on our Web sites the next major area of growth?

noticed on beSpacific

The November/December EDUCAUSE Review takes a look at podcasting in academic environments.

Congrats to Ken Varnum for the ResourceShelf highlighting his blog, RSS4Lib.

beSpacific highlights this pdf whitepaper about the current state of the use of RSS. It includes data on the demographics of feed consumers as well as what kind of content they receive.

(The paper might be using RSS in the broad sense, meaning that it might also include information about other kinds of XML feeds, not just RSS. I prefer to use "RSS" for RSS and “XML feeds” when I’m talking about RSS and Atom.)

(PS–Because of the way Manila works, when I put “RSS” in quotation marks, not the HTML quote code I usually use, it automatically links the abbreviation to the RSS 2.0 weblog: http://clem.law.harvard.edu/spot/2005/11/01/wikis-with-feeds/

Okay, so, sometimes I just plain forget things and leave important stuff out of my presentations. I realized during tonight’s walk that I failed to put anything about wikis into my feeds presentation in Wisconsin. I’ll figure out how to work them in for the next round this Friday.

One example is Wikinews. They use FeedBurner to generate a feed of their content. Some wiki software has feeds built in. Some wikis use feeds to enable users to track changes, too.