posted on Sep, 12 2005 @ 07:20 AM
Thanks for the comments.
Getting this into gear has been a rather tough drill on the tech side, certainly one of the hardest things attempted on ATS... not so much from the
technology of allowing uploads and aggregating them into an RSS feed, but from the aspect of how to make these part of the community.
And I'm blown away at how quickly members jumped in... and especially jumped in with quality content.
Two weeks after turning on the feature, I never expected more than 20 podcasts... because I figured we could change and add things as the service
evolved. But, in those two weeks we have 104 podcast submissions from members! Amazing... but it does make it a bit harder to improve things with so
many submissions :p
I'm particularly jazzed about PODthreads. There's a lot of serious efforts to create services that enable easy podcast publishing (Sirius Radio's
POD Show for example), but they all cost cash and none of them have anything liek PODthreads... collaborative discussions via podcast. If we ever can
get the PTS PODcast debates kicked off, you'll begin to see the true potential of podcast threads.
Also... the best way to really experience these is to subscribe to the RSS feed in a reader or iTunes. It's just too cool to turn on your iPod (or
other less cool mp3 player) and notice a new ATS podcast already downloaded and waiting for you. (Or just sitting on your hard drive if you don't
have a portable player).
New features coming soon:
Lists of PODcasts sorted by podcasters on
the PODcast page.
Members will be able to define custom "cover art" and feed descriptions for their personal member-specific feed. This way, if you register your feed
with iTunes, you'll have your own unique description and cover art.