Feed Specs

Niall Kennedy recently posted a handy quick-list of links on his weblog to a variety of feed-related specifications. Check it out. There might be more specs out there than you think. Unfortunately - or not, depending on your point of view.

Skypecasting: Podcasting With The Skype VoIP Client

For those of you who love the Skype VoIP client software and want to record audio conversations, you have to currently resort to third-party software. Audio recording is not yet a built-in feature in Skype. There are actually a number of ways to do record, however, ranging from using pure software to throw some hardware (microphones, recorders, mixers) into the mix.

Whichever method you choose, they're both great for making podcasts. Think Vitamin has a tutorial on Skypecasting. Digital Inspiration, where I found the Think Vitamin link, has a list of options for Skypecasting.

Google GData Feed Format

I don't know how I missed this, but Google has a new content syndication format out. Their new GData format blends Atom and RSS formats, and the Atom publishing protocol.

My initial reaction was that this is a bad move. They should work to extend Atom (since RSS 2.0 is fixed and RSS 3.0 seems to be a mostly solo project) instead of coming up with yet another syndication format. No wonder they don't have their Alerts available in RSS (or Atom).

However, after browsing through some of the documentation, I see that their intent was to have a two-way data format for their services. You can output data from Google's numerous web service APIs in GData format, then reuse that data elsewhere. It's a convenient transport format.

I'll have to read the specs over again more thoroughly, and maybe provide a detailed comparison at some point in the future.