While adding more RSS feeds to my Bloglines account for the past week, a trend in weblog writing became more obvious. Namely, I've noticed that many more weblog writers are writing about RSS, tools, and related services. Or maybe I'm just coming across more people who have already been writing about RSS :) Either way, I'm glad this is happening. RSS needs it.

Bill Flitter of Pheedo links to John Gartner's article about how newspapers could increase readership using printable, nicely-formatted RSS feeds with ads. I've often been tempted to take the contents of an RSS feed and print them out so I could pencil in notes while researching. The only thing stopping me is how much paper I'd waste if I didn't format the RSS content first. But then I came across RSS2PDF, which takes a website or feed URL and generates a PDF of the feed content.

If you supply a website URL, RSS2PDF auto-discovers feeds and asks you to pick, if there's more than one. RSS2PDF also generates a "bookmark" index for each feed item. A link to the source page appears after each excerpt. The only thing I could have wished about this service is the ability to reverse the order of the items. Also, longer feeds seem to cause my browser tab (Firefox) to not display properly unless I refresh a couple of times.

Mitch Joel provides six lessons in podcasting at One Degree. He's using a piece of software called CastBlaster, which appears from the demo video to be the software equivalnt of a mixer. It allows you to mix in sound samples with direct audio recording. You can also cue up locations in longer samples and play them on demand.

CastBlaster is only in beta, but it shows promise. You can download the beta version for free or get the full version for US$50. If you intend to podcast, this is a good article to read. He also mentions something called slivercasting, which is broadcasting to a sliver of a market. Kind of like niche websites, but for podcasting.

Mitch links to his own article called Slivercasting Becomes The New Long Tail, which goes into the concept more thoroughly and provides several relevant links. The name may not catch on, though. My eyes keep seeing "silvercasting" instead of "slivercasting". A quick Googling shows that other people have the same problem, and have already started incorrectly referring to this activity as silvercasting - which should not be confused with silver casting, the act of cast an object in silver using wax molds.

Guillaume du Gardier of PR Thoughts provides 10 good reasons why a broadcaster should podcast. There are some exciting ideas in his list, but I think I like #1 best: "A good way to give a second life to a huge amount of content that would directly becomes archives." What a great idea. A digital archive of old radio shows would be a nice research base for communications students or even radio actors. And with some new experimental services that allow for text searching of audio transcripts, including audiomarks to fast forward to a segment... Well, I think you can see the applications.

I think that as podcasting and vodcasting mature, there will be lots of tools and lots of job opportunities in this new media industry. But for now, if you're looking for existing jobs in an RSS format, you might try RSS Job Feeds. From the layout of the site, there's an obvious American jobs emphasis. While they do have job categories on the lower half of the homepage, hopefully they'll expand the service to include other countries.