Photofeed: image podcasting
18 Aug 2005As I said in a previous blog post: it’s not logical that there is no picture podcasting yet, while the content, the devices and the technology are all there. That’s why I decided to lend the ‘loosely coupled’ movement a hand.
I introduce the concept of a Photofeed (an RSS 2.0 feed with image enclosures – the picture counterpart of a podcast feed) and also features a service to display photofeeds in any web site: Photoroll.
(Update: especially for the visitors from scripting.com)
What’s so great about a photofeed? Well, since there is an image URL specified separately and attached to each feed item, a photofeed consumer application can ‘do stuff’ with that image. So you could display the image in whatever layout you want on your site (that’s my Photoroll), you could have a photofeed screensaver, print them, make sepia thumbnails, save them to your iPod photo or PDA, …
Who already delivers photofeeds? For now, there’s Fotothing, Pixagogo and Flickr, but I hope soon other photo sharing sites will follow. They have one for each of their tags/labels, so you can have an ever changing feed of ‘sunset’ images and use it for whatever you want. If you want to make your own photofeed, consider using the Feedburner SmartCast for images, which they kindly developed upon my request (doing a ‘Hackathon‘: great idea!).
What is my purpose with this? Well, I want to introduce the concept so people start playing with it and come up with new and untought-of applications. Do you have the “Hey, I could use this to …” feeling? An original hack that does funky stuff with a photofeed? An idea for a way to add ‘fitting’ pictures to an existing text-only RSS feed? Geo-photo-feeds? Some social-software remix project? Let me know, leave a comment here or on the Photofeed Blog. Just picture it!
Inspiration and support came from people who are maybe not aware of it:Eric from Feedburner, Alan from Feed2JS, Lucas from Webjay and Erwin from DopplerRadio.
