announce: audvidsyn, a mailing list for audio and video syndication

Related link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/audvidsyn/

A new mailing list for practical conversations about syndication of audio
and video. A place for publishers and consumers to coordinate. RSS 2.0
enclosures are central. RSS and Atom are directly relevant. Playlists may
be relevant.

The home page of the list is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/audvidsyn/.

My motivation in starting this group is to bring together scattered conversations, because I have been seeing people talking in separate
forums who I felt needed to be introduced. Work on RSS 2.0 enclosures is
the immediate business, but I have a strong sense that the work will
expand across all syndication-related formats and software.

Why

The impetus to create this list came from this conversation on the
videoblogging@yahoogroups list:

There is a Moveable Type plugin called MT-RelEnclosures under
development. This plugin, when it is ready, will automatically add
enclosure elements to a feed. It will do this by scraping the HTML
for links to video and/or audio. Andreas Haugstrup, who is a hacker
interested in videoblogging, started working on the blogger's end of
things. His goal was to make it possible for the blogger to signal
which linked items to enclose or not. The approach he took was to add
rel="..." attributes to links.

This opens a can of worms. I was particularly
reminded of Kevin Marks' and Tantek Celik's interest in semantic XHTML to express things in HTML that you would normally say in XML.

Over in another community, the podcasters are working on metadata.
One metadata development is work on filenames, to make them more
useful. Another development is issues related to ID3 tags for
podcasts. I took from this that people working on metadata and the
podcasters should be introduced.

Over in another community, the Atom people are discussing whether to
discuss Atom enclosures.

Over in another community, I received an email about using XSPF as a
feed format for audio and/or video.

All together, my feeling is that developers of different parts of this
puzzle are sometimes in situations where they need to coordinate, and
a mailing list with members of the different groups is called for.

Thoughts?