What is Digg?12 Comments
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's an interesting idea. Few issues with it though...
- If the email account was known, then there's nothing to stop anybody else from inserting their own stuff into your "feed" by simply emailing it to your gmail account. This could be worked around with a clever combination of labels and/or filters though.
- GMail's built-in RSS feeds, at the moment, require a password to access them. So anybody getting your feed (if it was direct through GMail) has your account password.
- GMail's feed doesn't convert attachments to enclosures, so using their RSS feed is a dead end anyway.
- Making a POP3 to RSS converter would be possible, however you still need to a) Host that RSS somewhere and b) Provide enclosures which allow your listeners to get the content, which they can't do if you leave it on the GMail account. So the bandwidth problem isn't solved there.
If you want to make an RSS feed for your own account which supports enclosures, thus letting people send you audio to listen to via a podcast client, then that would be possible, but given the setup of GMail, it's the only real useful thing you could do with this idea.
Oh, and regarding your Coral Cache comment... Coral Cache links are blocked by most corporate networks nowadays, as it's a proxy server, basically. Same reason lots of web translator pages are blocked. So using Coral for your enclosures means that a lot of your audience cannot access your content, at least not from their work computers. - celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thanks for the comment. I'd like to begin by saying that GMail already supports RSS feeds (without attachments unfortunately) and that if used incorrectly can indeed be a security vunerability, see here: http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20050514WarningaboutCheckingGmailRSSonBloglines.html
However, what I was suggesting was locally hosted, user created RSS feed based off of SSL POP access to a GMail account. Where's the security vunerability there if that RSS feed is never posted online? - celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Donwilson- thanks for your comment. Thats the beauty of this, it's not meant to be posted online- its a feed of YOUR GMail that you can plug into iTunes or any other podcatcher and automatically get mp3s sent to your GMail account added to your mp3 player.
A corollary to that is you could post this feed online and let other people subscribe to your GMail inbox, but that's not the point of the story. - G-RaZoR, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is more of a notification rather then a podcast client.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What's the point if the feed is never posted online?
- celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0211 diggs and still no solution :( I'll finish mine eventually but c'mon y'all if you want to help then this is what we've got:
Solution 1) Email files to GmailFS users with the subject of GMAILFS: foofilename.mp3 [foosize;a;1] and the podcasts will automatically be available on everyone's gmail drives. GmailFS download: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
Solution 2) Use Gmail POP access plus a script that converts POP mail to RSS like this one: http://wiki.wonko.com/software/mailfeed/ or this one http://www.eightlinks.com/features/000485.html - celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0G-RaZoR: Thanks for your comment- the Google supplied GMail feed does not support attachments, so you are right in that respect. BUT I'm suggesting a POP3 to RSS translation. I'm working on one right now based off of this script: http://www.eightlinks.com/features/000485.html and plan on updating my article and posting in the comments about it.
It was my hope that we'd get a discussion going on this and someone would come forward with a script to do this before I finished mine :) We'll see! - celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Otto, thanks for the comments!
First through 3rd points, agreed with :)
Point four a) With regards to users subscribing to their own GMail feeds, my thought would be that the RSS would basically be hosted locally.
Point four b) Right, except in the case of distributing podcasts through GMail- if listeners were subscribed to their GMail accounts and you sent an email to 100 listener's GMail accounts, your bandwidth is just for uploading the podcast one time. It's like a podcast e-newsletter. Whatever program/script we develop to do this would need to separate different incoming podcasts somehow.
Point five- ahh hahhh, but thats exactly the point :) Once you have hundreds of people doing that, you could potentially just gmail them all your podcast, and therefore, as I said, bandwidth is just the cost of you uploading your podcast once to GMail, google takes care of the rest.
Point six- this is true, as I mentioned if port 8090 is blocked then you have a problem. But Coral will be moving to port 80 eventually and as a podcaster I haven't gotten a single complaint from anyone not being able to access my podcast. Though maybe its because I use the little known alternative coral url, http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net:8090 :P - timlopez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1hi yeah, thats kinda a lame story cause if gmail supports RSS then whats stoping anyone from accessing anyones e-mail? Which also means that if that feature is setup as an "on/off" feature, someone could hack it and hack into my account. There are simple methods of podcasting, you just need to look into it more.
- sleepless, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If bandwidth is a problem that needs to be solved, I wonder how long will it be before people start uploading podcasts to the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php)?
- celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0UPDATE: Mix in a little GMailFS ( http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm ) and if you email out a podcast with the subject of GMAILFS: foofilename.mp3 [foosize;a;1] then GMailFS users will automatically download the file to their GMail Drive
Now its just a matter of dumping these files automatically into an mp3 player. Perhaps a script to generate an RSS feed off of the files in the GMail Drive? It doesn't have to be RSS neccesarily either here, but most podcatchers understand RSS enclosures so it'd be an easier way to interface them.
If someone wrote a program that did all of this using GMailFS or equivalent perhaps they should call it Poodcatcher :P - celerityfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Googling for a solution led me to a page where someone had clearly already thought of this idea back in FEBRUARY: http://mastuvu.typepad.com/monuments/2005/02/podcasting_and_.html
Interestingly enough it was as I was working on getting the Mailfeed PHP script to work with GMail that led me to them: http://wiki.wonko.com/software/mailfeed/
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