South by Southwest 2006 Interactive Panels Podcast

SXSW has begun posting panel podcasts from the 2006 interactive festival. Unfortunately, similar to the Carson Workshops Summit podcast, they aren’t really producing a podcast. Instead, they are offering audio files that can be downloaded. As Jeremy Keith pointed out, a podcast is an XML file, not an audio format. The SXSW podcast page does contains an XML file, but that file doesn’t include enclosures—special XML elements that let your podcatching software (such as iTunes) know which files to download. So, following Jeremy’s lead, I have produced a real podcast for the SXSW 2006 Interactive panels. I’m no programmer though, so I’m rolling this one by hand, but I will try to keep it as up to date as possible.

Grab the SXSW 2006 Interactive Panels Podcast

Update: Aaron Haley, a member of the SXSW I/A Podcast Team, has informed me that they are now distributing a true podcast feed.

12 Mar 2006 |

6 Comments

  1. Thanks for the XML file!

    This could be automated with a web service that parses existing RSS feeds or HTML pages and makes a real podcast feed with the enclosure tag. Maybe this could be a small web site idea for someone with extra time?

    Posted by topfunky on March 13th, 2006

  2. You’re welcome.

    I had thought about your suggestions and I don’t imagine it would be too difficult to do, but I figured it would probably take me longer to figure it out than to just do it by hand.

    If I get a chance, I may look into it, but this should work for now.

    Posted by Jason Landry on March 13th, 2006

  3. Thanks for doing this… I’m enjoying the SXSW Interactive Panel podcasts now and have even blogged about my favorite one. Can you guess which one takes the cake?

    Posted by Kevin on March 15th, 2006

  4. Hi Jason, thanks for this, listening to them while I type :-)

    Posted by Stuart Maynard-Keene on March 17th, 2006

  5. Thanks for the idea of using feedburner to parse the enclosures for our Podcast page. Our RSS system doesn’t handle enclosures easily out of our content management system. We’ve got a feedburner page set up and are working with the folks at apple to get it on itunes. We didn’t think it would be a huge problem and didn’t want to force people to download that much data. :-) We underestimated the number of people who would want it.

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/sxsw/

    -aaron
    SXSW I/A Podcast Team

    Posted by aaron on March 17th, 2006

  6. No worries Aaron - allowing visitors to download audio files from the festival is an excellent gesture of good will and we really appreciate it.

    I figure this is a learning experience for SXSW 2007 and I image (expect) we’ll see full enclosures for all audio and video next year. By that time, you can bet that even more users will want it.

    Posted by Jason Landry on March 17th, 2006

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