09.27.05
Wikis and Podcasts
I’ve been playing around with the wiki show notes site that I setup for the Daily Source Code. I haven’t really used wikis that much in the past, except as a casual reader of wikipedia and the like. It actually works pretty well for the podcast comments/shownotes format, although there are some big shortcomings.
I don’t think the wiki community has given a lot of thought to putting structured information into wikis. I’m sure that’s on purpose, as a wiki is a bit of a free-for-all by design. Nevertheless with podcasting shownotes it would be convenient to automatically generate an RSS feed for the podcast based on the up-to-date shownotes.
I have some ideas about how that could be implemented. At first I was thinking of writing an extension for MediaWiki. There is some support in MediaWiki for RSS feeds of new pages and I don’t think it would be too hard to extend that to generate a podcast-compliant RSS feed with enclosures. The problem is that since wikis are open to editing, it would also be pretty easy to hijack that feed. Not ideal. So I have another idea. What I think is a better idea. So I’m going to start working on that and we’ll see what happens.
Stay tuned for updates.
Tags: Podcasting, Wiki, MediaWiki
