Podcasting content created by someone else
05 April 2007 14:15

What do you do when there is great, freely-downloadable media content out there just begging to be podcasted, but the entity creating the content doesn't create any podcasts? Well, you do like Dave Smith and podcast it yourself.

Dave has created a podcast feed, in which the enclosure links point to media files served up from the LDS Church's website for the recent General Conferences.

This makes me wonder what other kind of unique podcasts could be created by "mixing" links to various media files. There are a number of free podcast feed generation tools out there into which you could paste links to your favorite media. If memory serves, a while back on the LDSOSS mailing list it was suggested that the church generate podcasts of various content such as General Conference. The idea of timed-release of interesting content is powerful. By doing as Dave Smith has done, you could easily generate a Podcast of, for example, a daily dose of the hymns, or a daily scripture, or a weekly reading of the lesson in Teachings of the Presidents of the church, etc., etc.

From a tech/geek/coolness perspective, this is neat stuff, but what about copyright issues you might run into here? Is this akin to using img links to show other people's copyrighted photos on my own site (which I wouldn't feel comfortable with)? Would this count as 'distribution', even though the files are being served from the church's website? Or is this just adding a set of links to my site to the various mp3 files hosted on the church's server (with which I am comfortable)? Perhaps the key point is in the feed to be explicit about where the content is coming from, and who owns it.