June 12, 2007
delicious Feed Enhancer - Auto-Enclosures
One of the nifty things about the Grazr feed processing widget is that it scans RSS feeds for media enclosures and embeds an appropriate player in the widget, wherever possible:
For example, if a Flash movie (.swf file) or audio file (.mp3 or .ram (Real Audio)) are available as feed item enclosures, the Grazr widget will embed an appropriate video or audio flash player (see the above Grazr widget for a demo).
What this means is that if you can easily generate a feed with enclosures, you can easily create a multimedia channel.
This is exactly what Splashcast does: it provides an environment in which you can create multimedia playlists that feed a really nifty player widget (here's an example of a crude Splashcast learning channel demo). Splashcast can also scrape the content s of an RSS feed in search of media assets, and will provide a player for those, although I don't think it (yet) acts as a player for media enclosures (which I'd suggest is something of an oversight...)
However, the approach suggested here is to use a Yahoo pipe to automatically augment an RSS feed from the delicious social bookmarking tool with appropriate media file enclosures - a feed enrichment pipe, in other words.
That is, users should be able to bookmark pages that may themselves contain embedded media resources, and then the pipe should be able to generate an enclosure link to the embedded resource from the bookmarked URL.
The reason why you'd want to bookmark the page containing the media resource rather than the resource itself is because the link to the resource is not necessarily very useful and is not the thing users are likely to naturally bookmark...
This allows you to create a social bookmarking RSS feed to act as the source of the media channel programme information, and then use Grazr to automatically embed an appropriate player for the media enclosures:
deliEnclosures - augment an RSS feed from delicious with media enclosures.
In particular, the pipe will augment bookmarked links from delicious with the following media enclosures:
- bookmarked mp3 files with an MP3 file enclosure;
- bookmarked ram (real audio) files with an ram file enclosure;
- bookmarked swf (Flash) files with a swf file enclosure;
- bookmarked youTube movie web pages with a swf video file enclosure.
- bookmarked show pages from IT Conversations with an MP3 audio file enclosure for that show.
The example Grazr player referred to above (available here) is "playing" a pipe augmented feed from del.icio.us/psychemedia/demo:feedEncl. (The pipe also works if you link straight to the RSS feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/psychemedia/demo:feedEncl.)
At the moment, the pipe is set up to consume a list of links from delicious. With only a slight modification to the top of the pipe, it could be used to augment any feed when provided with its URL and so provide a general purpose feed augmentation pipe.
The pipe is also easily extensible in the sense that if media resource URLs can be easily derived from bookmarked page URLs (as in the case of youTube movies, for example), the pipe can be extended to process these URLs and add an appropriate media enclosure.
(Not showing IT conversations augmentation...)
Here, the pipe filters the feed on items that can be augmented with media enclosures, and then processes items that can be directly augmented with an enclosure pointing straight to the bookmarked resource by simply copying the bookmarked URLs (like bookmarked links to MP3 files) straight to the enclosure. The next stage performs more complex mappings, in this case rewriting bookmarked youTube movie pages to the appropriate youTube movie file URL.
Unfortunately, SlideShare is not so well behaved in the way it formulates the URLs for the Flash movie associated with uploaded slideshows - an effectively arbitrary number is appended to file information contained within the URL of bookmarkable pages associated with each SlideShow. For example, the slideshow at http://www.slideshare.net/psychemedia/social-bookmarking-sort-of/ is published via the Flash movie at https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?doc=social-bookmarking-sort-of-12110. The identifier 12110 is effectively unique, and can only be identified by scraping the resource web page.
If you know of other media sites - like youTube - that afford a mapping from a usefully bookmarkable(?) URL to a media resource URL. let me know and I'l add them to the pipe...
See also: YouTube Playlist RSS Feeds With Video Enclosures (Grazring YouTube Favourites Playlists Redux)
Posted by ajh59 at June 12, 2007 12:58 AM