New Syndication Challenges | What Are Syndication Feeds

For being a simple concept, syndication feeds have generated a great deal of intense interest surrounding in the last few years. One reason is the introduction of podcasting. Though beyond the scope of this article, it's worth your time to provide a quick overview of podcasting, and how you can get started in this if you're interested.

Podcasting is making an individual recording in the nature of a radio broadcast, and then posting this recording in your weblog. When you include the link in your weblog to the file (usually in MP3 format), most tools will generate an enclosure statement in the feed for the item.

Other tools that are capable of playing the podcast will read through the syndication feed and pull out the enclosed sound file, storing it for playback. One popular playback device is the Apple iPod, hence the name podcasting.

(For more on getting set up as a podcaster, see the Endgadget tutorial at engadget.com/entry/5843952395227141/, the About.com how-to at radio.about. com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a.htm, and other tutorials at Wikipedia's podcast page, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting.)

Podcasting started out slow enough, and then exploded when some major players became interested in the concept. Soon, radio and television networks were providing podcasts of some or even all of their shows. Some popular amateur podcasters took on a star quality comparable to well-known radio personalities. What caused a major explosion, though, was when Apple turned its corporate eye to the phenomenon.

In 2005, Apple announced support for podcasts in iTunes, and provided the ability for anyone to register their podcasts with the iTunes central server. Now, not only could you find podcasts through sites such as audio.weblogs.com and ipodder.org, you could also search for new 'casts using iTunes.

The iTunes rollout wasn't without some controversy. For instance, Apple only supported one syndication feed format: RSS 2.0. This choice was particularly controversial because there is confusion about how many enclosures RSS 2.0 supportsit's not specified in the RSS 2.0 specification. So, if you have a podcast linked in your weblog post (and they are linked, just like web pages), and you have a second in the same post, some tools will create two enclosures, while others will only create one for the first they find.

Other controversial aspects of Apple's adoption of syndication feeds and podcasts are the company's use of XML and other technical issues, but it is the enclosure issue that is most likely to impact you. To be safe, include only one audio file in any post to ensure your feed validates and is safely accessible.

(For more on Apple and podcasting see www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/, phobos.apple.com/static/iTunesRSS.html, and www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/.)

Another major boost to the use of RSS happened when Microsoft announced its support for RSS in its upcoming operating system, code-named Vista; and the highly anticipated and long-delayed new release of Internet Explorer, IE 7.0. With RSS incorporation into Outlook, Office, and other Microsoft applications, we're sure to see even more of this rather simple, but popular XML.

Though Microsoft supports Atom, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 in its browser, it will only support RSS 2.0 in its tools and operating system. This did create some discussion, because as you'll find out, people can get passionate about what syndication feeds they support.