Post Crash Feeds/Podcasts

No, not financial crash, computer crash.

I have an old backup of many of my podcasts and feeds. Remember feeds are RSS/Atom/XML feeds that allow you to download updates automatically. There is no way to follow them all with just a web browser. You will never remember what you have read and have not read.

The software that controls the list of feeds is called an aggregater . That is, it brings different materials together and mixes them together in to something useful. In this case, information. They are required for the following of dozens of blogs. Podcast software does the same thing for podcasts. Some software does both. It is the same XML structure, one points to a web page and the other points to an MP3 or other sound file.

I've found it quite liberating loosing most everything and having to go from memory. I know of three podcast off the top of my head that I do not bother with right now. It shakes the list and lets the chafe fall out. I really hope I have no more crashes.

With podcasts I went from memory mostly. That and a few peaks at what was left on my thumb drive for ideas. With blogs. I started with memory. I realized I had no idea what several of my favourite blogs were called. I went to one that I knew I liked called Belmont Club and went down their list or blogroll checking for names. I ended up adding nearly every blog on the list. The thing to do from here might be to go down all their blogrolls, but I'm far too lazy for that. I'll try these for a while and work my way out from here. That is how I got started in the first place. Except, I think I started at Little Green Footballs' blogroll.

Those sites I seeded from are conservative political blogs. I also get things like regular news feeds and geek blogs like Geekology and Slashdot. Then come my friend's blogs. Unfortunately, most of my friends use MySpace which only about half the blogs work with aggregator software that I have tried. Still need to figure that one out.

Google

There is already iTunes. iTunes works for podcasts so well that the name podcasts come from the iPod for which iTunes exists. Apple wrote the book and software on the subject. Podcasts existed before iTunes. They were just not called podcasts. They were called things like "audio archives" and such. Not nearly as sexy as iTunes or podcasts.

There are a hundred different software names out there for blog aggregation. There are several for podcast downloading because not every one has an iPod or iTunes. Some people are broke or have different players and thus use different software packages.

Then come the online aggregators. There must be twenty for blogs.Some of them seem to work with podcasts. I don't know I haven't looked in to it much. After my recent crash, I'm using Google Reader for my blogs and news feeds. I'm still using gpodder for my podcasting. It's free. So is Google Reader.

Now I'm using Blogger (part of Google) for my blog, gmail for my email, Google Docs for online documents and Google Reader for aggregation needs. Why do the words "eggs" and "basket" pop in to my head? Well, I suppose I could use all Microsoft products to do the same thing including my operating system.