Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies®

Chapter 27. Validating Your RSS Feed

In This Practice

• Recalling that a podcast isn't a podcast without an RSS feed

• Deconstructing and reconstructing your feed

• Watching out for pitfalls

If you've come this far down the road to becoming an expert podcaster, you should have an understanding of what an RSS feed is and what it does for you. Should you be looking at those three letters for the first time and wonder, “What have I gotten myself into?” — well, we need to talk. Podcasting is not podcasting without an RSS feed. Recording an audio or video file and posting it on a Web site is not the same thing as podcasting. It's the “casting” part that's important to this conversation.

When you watch your DVD set of The Sopranos, you aren't watching a television broadcast. When you listen to the CD collection “I Heard It on NPR” in your car or at home, you aren't listening to a radio broadcast. Granted, the material — or content — in both might be the same as was available in a previous broadcast form, but you've skipped the “casting” part and are using a different medium to consume the content.

Why is this distinction important? Because The Sopranos would not have become the popular show that it is without the audience that the show reached from its broadcast. DVD sales are just icing on the cake. Incredibly profitable and expensive icing, but icing nonetheless. The same holds true for NPR. In order to make a collection titled “I Heard It on NPR,” someone had to hear the content first as a broadcast ...