For the longest time my feed was a crappy RSS 1.0 non enclosure feed.  This means that if you we’re subscribing to my feed in FireAnt it wouldn’t work.  But now thanks to Michael my feed is now RSS 2.0 with enclosures mofos!

For those of you who have no clue what the hell I’m talking about here’s a little breakdown.  This is  how I think about RSS and Enclosures.

Think of each of my posts on my blog as an email.  Now let’s say you wanted to receive an email every time I post something with the full post in it.  This is sort of how RSS works.  Instead of an email program like Outlook or Apple Mail you use an RSS reader/aggregator and instead of receiving emails from people you receive new posts from people’s blogs.

What this allows you do to is aggregate all of the news/blogs/sites into one place (your RSS reader) that automatically tells you if there is a new article or a new post.  What does this mean?  Well, it means that you don’t even have to go to a single individual website or news source to see if there is new information published.

To take this one step further, lets say I regularly send out emails with videos as attachments, which just happens to be the same thing as posting videos on my blog in this weakass analogy.  With enclosures (attachments) you can regularly download media files automatically the same way as
you’d have your email program check your email automatically.  Enclosures are to RSS feeds as attachments are to emails.  Check this glossary if you’re still not pickin up what I’m puttin down.  If you’re smokin what I’m rollin please proceed…

So you’re like who cares?  Nobody is posting video online, only huge nerds are into that shit!  Well that’s not really true anymore.  Just check out this list of feeds at mefeedia.  Quite a few people doing this now.  You can copy and paste the links from the little orange RSS 2.0 buttons into a player like FireAnt and enjoy the content that automatically flows down the pipe to your screen.

If you don’t find video blogging and podcasting fascinating or you think the content is too amateur, you need to watch and listen to this great video by Jay Dedman.  (35 MB .mov)  He suggests that if people think video blogging or podcasting is too amateur, or too boring,  it’s because people just aren’t ready for it yet. 

I totally agree with that.  I think most people are so familiar with traditional forms of one way/top down media that they’re entirely comfortable being passive about their media consumption.  In fact  most folks just don’t have the ability or the tools to understand Video Blogging or Podcasting yet.  Many people are going to make themselves feel better by being down on something they don’t understand as opposed to embracing it.  It’s just easier for them that way.  Just give them some time, they’ll come around!  Other people have already embraced it and are showing unbelievable creativity and innovation which inspires me.

According to Jay in this video:

"When you’re so busy consuming and watching you forget that you can translate the world for us.  And the great thing about this (video blogging) is that it’s free.

I mean people who hate video blogs or that complain that they’re amateur or that they don’t make any sense or they’re boring, I mean these are like the people they talk about in jails, that when you let them go free they don’t wanna go free you know, they’ve been institutionalized.   You find every reason possible why you shouldn’t be allowed to be free you know.  So the cage door is now wide open and they’re arguing no I need to stay in here because of all these different reasons, you know.

I mean like here in America, because I’m American I mean the TV networks got the airwaves for free.  The cable networks got to lay their cables down in each individual city for not much money either and they basically owned the towns they laid their cables in.  Maybe this is something we can have.  Cause we all know now it’s limitless.  We could all be posting these videos, we could all be translating the world for each other.

Like Josh Kinberg told me; there is no mainstream in America, and its true if you think about it you know.  We’re all diffrent people, and this idea that there is some kind of mainstream is ridiculous.  The only reason why this idea is propagated here in America is to make there is a clear market for the things that need to be sold.  Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be some sort of economic treatise but, it’s why video blogs are great because we can now show that we all have our own take on our own worlds and show our relationships with other people."

I concur Jay, I concur.

All I wanted to say is my feed is now FireAnt ready and I ended up with all that.

The Google Portal?  The drag and drop of the categories is pretty neat.