Launch a New Category

The world of podcasting is expanding rapidly, and new categories are continuously being added to the public directories. These categories are maintained by individuals just like you, and you can propose and maintain categories for topics that interest you.

When the Internet first started, one of the biggest problems people faced was finding new pages. O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator was the first directory of web pages, a concept that was later refined by Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/). These directories contained a set of categories and subcategories with web site links at each level. It broke the Web wide open for people.

Podcasting has grown so fast, in part because of the immediate availability of the list of all the podcasts through use of an OPML directory. OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It’s an XML syntax for a nested hierarchy of outline elements. In the case of podcasting, it’s used for links to the podcast feeds.

Here is an excerpt from the OPML that is maintained for Australian podcasts:

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
	<!-- OPML generated by Radio UserLand v8.0.8 on Sun, 09 Jan 2005 11:52:09
	GMT --> 

	<opml version="1.1"> 
		<head>
			<title>Australia.opml</title>
			<dateCreated>Sun, 14 Nov 2004 11:41:36 GMT</dateCreated>
			<dateModified>Sun, 09 Jan 2005 11:52:09 GMT</dateModified>
			<ownerName>Podcast Australia</ownerName>
			<ownerEmail>toby@podcast.com.au</ownerEmail> <expansionState></expansionState> ...

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