Well-named podcast MP3s are a lifesaver

As podcast recommendation systems florish, we start to subscribe to a given MP3 podcast in many different ways: shared playlists, del.icio.us feeds, aggregation sites like Scouta, etc. Within the actual RSS feed, the enclosure URL (and sometimes the guid) give us a means of distinguishing uniquely between podcasts, which works even in blended feeds.

Unfortunately, that's not always enough. Lots of us non-iPodders use players that are just USB mass storage devices when plugged in, and URIs disappear once the file hits that dumb drive. (bonus for iTunes library here!) What that means is that, in addition to good RSS feed info, I need the actual media file (MP3, etc.) to be well-named. Ideally, this should be in a way that's hopefully close to unique, to keep namespace collision from occurring. At the same time, a name that is TOO long is hard to manage, so it's always a balancing act.

Things that help: showname (short), short description, timestamp (at least to day) YYYY-MM-DD rocks, as it helps in sorting. Dashes, too.

Good examples from ITconversations -- ITC.INNO-GregElin-2007.08.18.mp3 -- and G'Day world -- tpn_gdayworld_20070823_281_Twitter.mp3.

Another interesting thing to watch is filename evolution...both Jon Udell (Interviews with Innovators above), and Cameron Reilly (G'Day World) have tweaked and improved their naming conventions over time...fun to watch.

posted by Ken Kennedy at Aug 25th 2007 10:44 p.m.

Old comments (new comments via Disqus)
  1. Cameron Reilly commented 11 months, 4 weeks ago

    Hey Ken. Funnily enough, the main reason I recently started adding the title of the show into the mp3 filename was so *I* could tell what it was when I was looking at our stats reports. If a certain show suddenly has a spike in the stats, this saves me hunting down the site to recall who was on Episode #254. :-)

 
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