It looks like Apple is taking legal action against sites using the term “podcast” in their domain name. They started by requesting from PodcastReady.com to stop using the term “POD”.

Don’t get me wrong. I own a MacBookPro, a Mac mini, 2 older iMacs, 2 Macs, an iPod 4G and an iPod nano; I’m a big fan of Apple’s products. Plus I work at an advertising agency; I know the value of “the brand”. And actually, this is what Apple is jeopardazing, the value of their iPod brand.

We all agree that iPod is Apple’s trademark. A trademark with huge value. But we, consumers, have embraced the product, and created “podcasting”. We didn’t have to call it podcasting, we could have called anything: audiofeed, audiocasting, netcasting, anything that implies automatic delivery of audio files through an RSS “channel”. But we loved our iPods.

Apple made some smart moves and embraced the “movement”. They added podcast features in iTunes in version 4.7 (I think) and they turned iTunes+iPod into a great platform to receive and listen to podcasts. I rarely listen to plain music on my iPod, I mainly use it to listen to podcasts. Actually, I bought my first iPod to listen to podcasts! And as a podcaster myself I have been promoting the use of iPods as the best medium to listen to my shows.

What will happen now? Apple is doing a terrible mistake. They are protecting their trademark but at the same time they are turning users against a brand they loved. Not regular users. Vocal users, like podcasters, users that are trendsetters, users that have an audience.

I suggested using the term “zunecast” (MS marketing, you are sooooo slowwww in reacting), as a way to show how much value podcasters and podcasting are giving to Apple.

Apple may gain complete ownership of their trademark. But they are losing brand value. And isn’t value what a company’s looking after? This is a new era. Consumers are part of the brand. Consumers are your brand’s stake holders. Take this away from them and they will stop being YOUR consumers.

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UPDATE: It looks like Apple’s objections are related to hardware and not to podcasting services. A calmer view than mine can be found here.

A couple of days ago I wrote my ideas on consuming video podcasts. I just read this article on Church of the Customer Blog, according to which Video viewing and sharing now routine.

I have been following the podcasting phenomenon for more than a year now (actually my greek podcast has been “on-air” since Janyary 2005…) and I am quite facinated with it. Lately, I have been using applications like Democracy and FireAnt to subscribe and watch video podcasts.

These are great apps, but they are not the way to enjoy video content!

What I would like to see is some kind of set-top box for my TV, that will have an integrated podctacher. It will automaticaly download my favorite shows. It will allow me to watch them on TV, and navigate through them using my remote control. It will also allow me to tag videos and those tags will be visible on the web (through del.icio.us?) Other users will be able to subscribe to my tagged videos, and I will be able to subscribe to “the best” or “most popular” or “tagged with a certain tag” videos. I will also be able to press a button and send the video I just watched to my friends. This would be the killer app for my living room!

Why can’t KiSS Technology add this kind of features to DP558 and other models? It should be fairly easy, since it runs on Linux, has a built-in hard disk and ethernet connection…

Feedburner released their new stats “system” today. It’s much nicer for sure, but for me the most interesting new feature is tracking enclosure downloads (= podcast audio downloads are tracked now), a great feature for podcasters. Make sure you check “Item enclosure downloads” in Analyze -> StandardStats (or Analyze->TotalStatsPRO if you have PRO stats enabled).

In the meantime, I’m playing arround with FeedFlare API to create my own “flares”.

These guys really get it.

Adam Curry has been talking a lot about a new service that will soon be made pubic called “my podshow”. The idea is that through a subscription mechanism, podshow.com will be able to “report” somehow how many listeners are subscribed to each podcast. Which by itself sounds interesting. From what I’ve understood so far, podshow will be able to “cash out” this information by putting ads in podcasts.

This is where my idea of “personalized audio coupons” comes in. If podshow had a way to “attach” a personalized audio coupon with a code to each subscriber, marketeers would be able to mesure the effect of a campaign through a podcast! It is not easy, but it should not be so difficult to implement, what you basicly need is some speech syntesis software to create the small audio chunk containing the persinalized promo code and then a way to attach this chnk to the original audio file.

Well? What do you think?

I swutched again to Juice as my podcatcher. One of the coolest Juice features is its ability to syncronize your feed list with a remote OPML URL. An OPML file is actually a list (or nested lists) described in a standard way in XML. In our case, a list of RSS feeds (one for each podcast)

As far as I know, the most popular link managment tool is del.icio.us, a tool I love for its power and simplicity. del.icio.us allow you to export all your links in RSS which is cool. So, I wrote a quick and dirty PHP script that converts this RSS export to an OPML list (see at the end of this post). The script makes use of the excelent MagpieRSS rss/atom parsing library.

Now, let’s say my del.icio.us username is “vrypan2″ and I tag all podcast feeds with the tags “podcast” and “feed”. This is my del.icio.us page, and http://del.icio.us/vrypan2/podcast+feed are my podcast AND feed links.

I just edit my script and set $username=”vrypan2″ and $tag=”podcast+feed”. To make it easier for you to test it, I also installed it at http://vrypan.net/linkblog/delicious2opml.php.

Then I go to Juice -> Preferences ->Feed Manager ->OPML URL and paste the above link.

Now, whenever I add a new link to my del.icio.us account (tagged podcast and feed), Juice will add it to my feedlist!

(The idea could be extended to other applications that use lists of URLs in OPML format. I would also love to see this turn into a service…)

UPDATE: It turned out that the whole thing excited others too. Especially Les, puts down some intersting ideas, read his post Use del.icio.us to build & share Reading Lists?

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Here is the PHP script:
< ?php

$url = "http://del.icio.us/rss/$username/$tag/";
$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
// print_r($rss) ;
$items = $rss->items ;
?>
<opml version="1.1">
<head>
<title>del.icio.us list2OPML: < ?= $username ?>/< ?= $tag ?></title>
<link>http://del.icio.us/< ?= $username ?>/< ?= $tag ?></link>
<ttl>3600</ttl>
</head>
<body>
<outline text="del.icio.us 2 OPML">
< ?php
for($i=0; $i<count($items); $i++) {
echo "\t\t\t<outline title=\"{$items[$i]['title']}\" text=\"{$items[$i]['title']}\" type=\"rss\" htmlUrl=\"\" xmlUrl=\"{$items[$i]['link']}\"/> \n" ;
}
?>
</outline>
</body>
</opml>

Wow! I’ts been some time since I checked this g-metrics report on podcasting. The bottom line? On 14-Oct-2004, Google returned less than 50.000 results for “podcasting”, on 27-Dec-2005 (a bit more than a year later) 2,210,000!!!

I feel that during the last couple of months the Web is changing fast. It looks like users, developers and enterpreneurs are much more mature on what the Web means and what it is good for.

First, we tried to move all our off-line habits, business and applications to the new, exciting on-line world of the Internet. We gave our shops, our directories, our magazines, our banks a new “web-based” front end. All these services and activities could very well exist off-line and, well, they did.

But now, we are moving on. We create services and business around things that could not even exist without the Web.

We have folksonomies and it’s not a geeky thing anymore (Yahoo! investment in Flickr and del.icio.us is a good proof of this [1])

Google maps are not just on-line maps, we stick our photos, our blogs, our ads on them, and create new and exciting applications like Frappr.

Our RSS/ATOM feeds transfer audio and video (ex. podcasts) and not just the “latest headlines” -they are getting “smarter” too (see Feedburner’s Feedflare [2] and Feed for Thought).

Our blogs are becoming more than just an electronic equivelent of a diary or newspaper, they are an electronic camvas that displays information from our del.icio.us bookmarks, pingbacks and trackbaks, and they interact with the rest of the Web, creating their own “Cosmos”.

Web APIs used to be an experimental feature to “have the developers on our
side”. Not any more. We are using them to build new business models (see Alexa Web Search).

We are also getting away from the PC client. I’m not referring to the usual “mobile phone as a web client”. iPods are connected to the internet nowdays -what’s an iPod without a fast internet connection to download music or audio/video podcasts? TiVo is turning into a web-connected device. And Cisco’s aquisition of KiSS Technologies through Linksys is a good promise we should be expecting more on internet based/enhanced home entertainment…

Oh, I’m so excited!

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[1] One step closer to sexyness
[2] What I called content enrichment a year ago…

Much like I bookmark web pages I find interesting, I thought it would be nice to bookmark specific audio content, podcasts, songs, interviews I come accross. What’s more, I found that there is an easy way to transform this list of bookmarks to a podcast!

I just bookmark MP3 URLs using del.icio.us, then set up a feed using feedburner where I enabled “SmartCast” features. So, here is my “PodSelections” podcast!

.

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/PodSelections]

Visacast is one of the most interesting tools I’ve seen around for some time. It allows you to “split” an AAC file (alternative to MP3 for podcasts) to chapters. Each chapter has its own photo and URL link. iTunes allows you to jump to different sections in such a file and (I think) so does an iPod (photo or color?). Autoring is really easy, just drag’n'drop your photos, then set the time they will appear as you listen.

Awsome! I’ll let you know how it works on iPod color as soon as I get mine