I'm a Windows developer geek who doesn't like to talk more than absolutely necessary, so audio versions of my posts are likely not forthcoming. Yet Podcasting is cool, its suddenly THE channel you wanna be in, or at least know how to support as a developer. As an personal incentive I could break out my SuperScope C-207LP tape recorder (link to PDF) and attach accordion tunes to my posts. Or not.
Investigating this Podcast phenom from a developer's perspective, there seems to be nothing mysterious or difficult about supporting podcasting, which boils down to adding a file enclosure to an RSS 2.0 XML file (via a URL to its location) so that supporting readers will download the referenced file when scheduled or configured to do so. Thus, larger multimedia files are sitting on our local drives ready to entertain and enlighten via RSS.
The enclosure tag would look like the following, with a URL, Length, and Type
<enclosure url=”http://dbvt.com/mp3s/AccordionCool.mp3” length=”3523567” type=”audio/mpeg”/>
Here's an excerpt from a great How-To on Podcasting from engadget found near the bottom of the page, along with a number of informative comments provided by readers in the know.
RSS 2.0 allows you to have an enclosure (much like you’d send an email with an attachment), so after the feed is pulled down the file is there with no waiting (besides the download time, of course). The key premise is No More Click-Wait. Ideally, when your computer isn’t doing anything, it can be using RSS feeds to automatically download audio and video content. Anyone can do this, and there is no central authority, no spectrum to allocate, and it’s open to amateurs, just like the Internet itself. More on that here and here.