Sean Alexander

Steve Lacey puts out an idea for creating a standard format for Podcast show notes. I think this is a fine idea. Besides offering a simpler way to archive show notes and cross-reference based on contextual tagging, I can see real-world applications for this in the Media Player space. Show notes are small- imagine if the notes were “stuffed” into the header of an MP3 or WMA file. Media Players and Portable Music Players could read this data and present while you’re listening to the broadcast. Add support for a simple mark-in and mark-out tags, and you have a searchable index of audio segments so you can jump directly to that segment you wanted to hear earlier. Imagine if on your portable media player you could jump directly back to the last “chapter” of a podcast, just like a DVD you turned off last night? It’s not full bookmarking, but its a rough approximate and good enough for most.

Of course, there are still some problems with this idea such as if you’re licensing ASCAP music for example. According to the ASCAP non-interactive license 5.0, “Examples of non-interactive music uses that qualify for Release 5.0 include…Radio broadcasts or pod-casts that do not offer a play-list, program guide, and do not make advance lists of the songs contained in the programs available prior to their transmission.”

I’m not a lawyer but the net-net I’m hearing is that you’d need to omit the show notes in order to be eligible under ASCAP’s license. If you have more details on this, feel free to share. Otherwise it sounds like you’d need pay to play but there are still a number of reasons to do this.

So is support for Show notes support the next thing for Audio Tag Editors? I don’t know. But I think it’s something worth discussing.

RSS: Steve Lacey

(BTW: I HATE summer colds 🙁 )