Blogging Roller

Podcasting originated as a feature of RSS, but as the world moves to the new standard Atom format, podcasters will too. Atom can support podcasting through the <link> element. As is the case with RSS 2.0 based podcasts, you can only have one podcast per entry. But, with Atom you can have a different representation for each language and for each content-type. For example, if you want to make a podcast available in both English and German and in both MP3 and WMV formats, you can do it by adding links like those below to the entries in your feed:

   <link href=”http://example.com/podcasts/show001-usenglish.mpg” 
       hreflang=”en-US” length=”21472922” type=”audio/mpg” />

   <link href=”http://example.com/podcasts/show001-usenglish.wmv” 
       hreflang=”en-US” length=”23889921” type=”audio/wmv” />

   <link href=”http://example.com/podcasts/show001-german.mp3” 
       hreflang=”de-DE” length=”20032879” type=”audio/mpg” />

   <link href=”http://example.com/podcasts/show001-german.wmv” 
       hreflang=”de-DE” length=”19907766” type=”audio/wmv” />

Disclaimer: Atom is a work in progress (but nearly complete). This is based on Atom format draft 08. Atom experts: did I get something wrong in the above example?