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I would hope that most people reading this blog by now are familiar with podcasting - if not how to go about it oneself, then with the whole concept of it. You might even know how to subscribe to one in iTunes… What I want to demonstrate in this post is how the social bookmarking site del.icio.us can be used to ‘homework-cast’ files to students. Read on…

The stimulus for this post came from a (fairly old) post entitled del.icio.us + enclosures = x-casting on a blog that I came across when I was trying to figure out how to ‘podcast’ zip files, etc. I’ll quote the short post in full:

This post over at the del.icio.us blog says:

Bookmarked items in del.icio.us that end in one of a number of filetypes will now automatically get some system tags added. You can use these just like normal tags. RSS feeds that have one of those system tags added will automatically become a rss-with-enclosures file.

So now you can generate a podcast from a del.icio.us feed of entries tagged with, say, system:filetype:mp3. Or, to get a podcast of all del.icio.us audio entries, get this: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:media:audio. You can video-cast, picture-cast, pdf-cast, etc, etc. del.icio.us beocmes the enabler to “cast� bloody anything.

Brilliant!

And would you believe it, it gets even better! Say you wanted me to listen to a cool podcast. Instead of emailing me a link or whathaveyou, you could just tag it (something agreed upon) so I could then subscribe to that tagfeed–and voila! Podcasts you tag are automagically on myPod next time I sync up. Share podcasts via feeds, cutting out all the time-wasting communications middlemen.

So all you need to do is to sign up to a separate del.icio.us account - or even just tag things for school with an appropriate label. People can then subscribe to the feed and receive the media files automatically soon after you post them!

The problem is that this is an idea slightly ahead of its time. Although iTunes allows you to subscribe to feeds created in del.icio.us in this way, it only supports audio and video. NetNewsWire apparently supports all type of enclosures, but it’s not free.

Anyway, check out the post on the del.icio.us blog about this and let me know if you have any success. I’d appreciate it if someone could let me know of a free program that supports all different kinds of enclosures. That would be fantastic. Some people are already appcasting, so the whole process can’t be that difficult…

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