For Squidward: Setting up Auto-Discovery of Podcasts By Keyword

My friend Squidward really loves podcasts. In fact he loves podcasts so much he bought an iPod Shuffle for the exclusive purpose of getting and listening to podcasts.

I was helping him set it up when he said, "I don't mind looking for podcasts now, but how do I set it up so I get running information about new podcasts that mention things I'm interested in?"

I didn't have a good answer then, but after a few hours of insomnia I do, and since actually doing something useful beats staring at the ceiling ten times out of ten, here's to you, Squidward: how to set-up autodiscovery of new podcasts (and podcast episodes!) by keyword.

You'll need an RSS feed reader.

1. Go to several podcast directories and pick up their RSS feeds for their latest podcast listings. For the sake of this article I'm picking up both feeds that show the latest podcast episodes AND feeds that list the latest podcast shows. Here are several to get you started:

http://www.ipodder.org/xml/rss.xml
http://www.podcastdirectory.com/xml/last100.xml
http://www.blogdigger.com/media/rss.jsp?q=podcast&media=audio&sortby=date (searches Blogdigger for audio containing the word "podcast", sorts by date)
http://www.getapodcast.com/rss/newpodcasts.xml
http://audio.weblogs.com/rss100.xml
http://podcastalley.com/PodcastAlley10Newest.xml

2. Drop by Del.Icio.Us and make yourself an RSS feed of the latest Del additions containing the tag podcast. It'll look like this:

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/podcast

3. Take all these URLs and put them on one line with a space in between each one:

http://www.ipodder.org/xml/rss.xml http://www.podcastdirectory.com/xml/last100.xml http://www.getapodcast.com/rss/newpodcasts.xml http://audio.weblogs.com/rss100.xml

etc.

4. Open up Feedshake ( http://www.feedshake.com ). Choose regular user. Take your giant line of podcast RSS feeds and paste it into the "RSS Feeds to Work On Box." Click Continue.

(When I was experimenting with this FeedShake choked on the Blogdigger feed, so you may want to skip that one.)

5. On the next page, choose Just Add, Don't Sort as your first option, and for the filtering item choose a word you're interested in. Squidward might be interested in, say, whales, so he'd enter the word whales in the filter box.

6. Click Finish.

7. Repeat steps 4 through 6 for every keyword in which you're interested. Try to avoid "top-level" keywords like news and business. Location and language names are good.

You (and Squidward) now have a set of RSS feeds that will do keyword filtering to find podcasts and podcast episodes. And they'll update automatically. Dump 'em in your feed reader of choice and go to town.

Squidward has a problem! He says, "It's nice that I know about them NOW, but maybe I don't want to subscribe to them now. How will I go back and find all these interesting podcasts later?"

It's a good thing I like you and I can't sleep, Squidward.

Okay, take the keyword discovery feeds you just generated. Go to FeedCatch at http://feedcatch.feedshake.com/ . Enter each feed and leave the options at 0 and 0. For each URL, FeedCatch will generate an ongoing, self-building RSS feed of podcasts and podcast episodes that match your keyword of interest. When you're ready to explore more podcasts, just dip into this giant feed and browse around for a while.

One thing that jumped out at me as I was doing this: there are way too many resource directories that don't offer RSS feeds. Does anyone know of a Web page monitor that dumps page changes to an RSS feed? I know it would be awkward, but if I were filtering a raw data dump with keywords like this it wouldn't matter if it wasn't nicely formatted.

Cheers Squidward. Enjoy.

Posted to Internet-Technology-Podcasting | TrackBack