Unquiet Desperation

Ray Slakinski, one of podcasting’s earliest innovators¹, has released a new content syndication specification into the wild. Called oSync, it’s goals are as follows:

• Easy/fast to parse and implement
• Make it so feeds and items are location aware
• a proper tagging system for feeds/items/attachments
• multiple attachments
• Able to be used cross-site/domain
  • Uses JSONP
• Incorporate some of the RSS extension elements that were used in common implementations

It is currently in an alpha state, but I see a lot of potential in this format. RSS is badly in need of an update — it has served us well, but the needs of developers and content providers are changing. A lightweight JSON-based information format will allow for a lot of flexibility in implementation as well as allow for ease of adoption – jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks can readily handle this format. I can see how working in this sort of format into Podiobooks 2.0 could aid in the creation of sharable widgets for displaying user data, title listings, and other data people want to include on their blogs or iPhone apps.

I’m curious to see how it develops. I’ve joined the Google Group for discussing the specification.

1. Ray created the base code for what would later become iPodderX, one of the first podcatching clients and certainly the one with the most features. I still miss it, and would give an awful lot to replace my iTunes with it.[back]