I was listening to the most recent episode of LUGRadio on the way home from work (the guys have gone on their summer break and withdrawal is beginning to set in), and they were having a discussion about podcasting, and whether it was useful, and things like that.

Podcasting, for those of you who don’t know, is a delivery method for MP3 files. You embed them within an RSS feed; what this essentially means is that people who listen to regular shows (like LUGRadio) have a little program that periodically checks the feed for new files, and when the new files appear it automatically downloads them. This is great, as it means that people can listen to a lot of shows, and the latest show is already ready for their MP3 player.

Anyway - enough of the background. If you haven’t heard of it, just Google it!

I had a brainwave. And it went something like this. The following points became clear in my mind:

• Blogs were the big thing recently (and still are)
• Blogs were helped by the adoption of RSS feeds (theres one for Jedimoose…..)
• People who read lots of blogs also use “Planet” sites, which collect similar blogs together (like the ScotLUG planet
• Internet radio was previously dominated by streaming media
• Podcasting is becoming the new way of delivering audio content

So here’s the brainwave: Why not develop a little application, probably an adaption of an exisiting podcast collector, which can be set to download not just the MP3s, but also a playlist, with times. Then, you create a planet-type site that grabs radio content together, and produces an amalgamated RSS feed, including a playlist, which is then downloaded by the software. In this way you combine a stream with RSS feeds. The idea would be that the application would download chunks of playlist and Mp3 in advance, and the cache the next set at an appropriate time. It would then store or delete as requested by the user. The idea is that you have, essentially, an ongoing radio stream, but without the overheads of having to run a stream. People could then ‘tune in’ to the stream, but what they are actually getting is asynchronous downloads of ‘podcasts’. (I had to get the ‘A’ word in there - Ajax is so popular these days.)

Anybody with me?

mrBen