Flash enclosure experiment -- anybody up for testing? 

I'm kind of excited about this. My podcast is a game, right? Players listen to a passage from a novel. Then, if they want to submit an answer they have to go to the trouble of opening a browser and typing in the URL. (Regular players probably have the form bookmarked). So I've been trying to think of ways to make the audio and and text components more integrated.

Here's what I'm trying. I would send a Flash file like this as the feed's enclosure, rather than an MP3 file. All from the Flash window you can play the audio, and click on links to the answer submission form and the message board where players get hints. The .swf file is no larger than the .mp3 file I usually enclose.

I edited the RSS feed by hand, and just left the type attribute alone for the moment because I wasn't sure what to change it to. [enclosure url="http://www.whosaid.org/flashexp/p86.swf" length="106900" type="audio/mpeg"/]

This is what I've tried, and what I still need to do:

- I learned that it works spectacularly well with FireAnt, which is made for video enclosures, and opened the Flash file right within the application. Is that cool or what?

- It does work with Bloglines, where the enclosure is just a link. Bloglines doesn't care what kind of file the enclosure is. I'd imagine most browser-based aggregators work this way too?

- I found out that it doesn't work with Juice (formerly ipodder), but that was predictable. Juice tried to open the Flash file in iTunes because that's all Juice has ever been intended to do.

Things I still need to read and do and figure out:

- Read about other efforts to enclose file types other than audio and video. Why hasn't there been more done to exploit the enclosure element anyway? I heard of a few stray plans a while back by online learning types to deliver multimedia stuff via RSS. They call it learncasting. Seems like Flash would be a natural for that.

- Find a better player with a slider. I like those buttons, though. They look like they belong in a game show.

- Test on other aggregators -- if you'd like to help, I'd be grateful. Just grab the feed, see what your aggregator does or doesn't do with it and tell me. amybellinger AT gmail . com

- Figure out which file type to use. I don't know if audio/mpeg is going through because it's ignored by most aggregators or what.

- Think about how much trouble this might be. No more than 400 people ever listen to any given audio file, so I have to measure out how much time I put in on my podcast. I'd probably want to offer it as a second, alternative feed, because some players will prefer to listen to my podcast along with and in the same application they use to consume the podcasts they listen to. On the other hand it might be worth developing for other quiz or trivia podcasts.

- See if Loudblog, the LAMP app I use to do some of my podcast chores including generating the RSS feed, will choke if I try to make it hande a different sort of enclosure, maybe with some tweaks. I know for sure I would get weary of editing the feed by hand.

Speaking of enclosures with different file types... 

I noticed when I installed the new version of Juice that it supports new file extensions. I can't find it again, but I think they were something like .pcast and .podcast? Also new protocols or maybe psuedoprotocols -- is there such a thing or am I making it up? pcast:// and another one.

Later: Found the changes page on SourceForge. It doesn't really spell it out but infers that the new extensions are related to one-click subscription mechanisms. Whose, I wonder? I don't try to keep up with all the various methods being developed to make subscribing easier -- subbing to blogs and news sites or to podcasts. And I'm not sure I believe that many of them are making things any easier for newbies. When they see so many different methods available, I wonder if they're not more confused.

Also found that pcast:// apparently is an iTunes thing. Possibly Mac only.