iMixes for Education

Not too long ago I blogged about a great research briefing on how social preference was going to change the way people decided on and purchased songs in the eWorld. Tonight while chatting with Chris Millet, I started wondering how an iMix would work as a digital reading/watching/listening list ... I think it is time to add a new question to the list.

New question to think about ... can/do iMixes work in an iTunes U space? Are they exposed as links just like songs and podcasts? Would be great if it worked that way ... I tried creating an iMix with video, podcasts, and a PDF file from the iTunes Podcast Directory and I got the message below:

Not promising, for now. If I could quickly create a playlist that turn into an iMix that can be easily linked in an iTunes U space I could do quite a bit. I did try exposing a URL from one of my iMixes and it seemed to work. See for yourself. At the end of the day, this could be a feature that could make this space even more promising.

Comments

[Brad]

I have pondered software that would make it easy to compile podcast episodes into a single feed, so someone could subscribe to "podcasts that brad thinks are worthy of your time" and get one episode from here, and one episode from there, etc...

You could do something like this with delicious, by linking directly to the audio file. Although some people don't consider it polite to link directly to someone else's audio file.

It almost seems like the podcatching app would need a way for the user to add a post to their meta-repodcast feed.

[Cole Camplese]

That's an interesting thought. It would be nice if I could go to a page, add my favorite five feeds and have them aggregated into one feed. Sort of like a Podcasting listening list. I might bang on that later today.

[Brad]

I am thinking more like being able to collect a series of podacast episodes from various feeds into one feed. Maybe just one particular episode is of interest. An rss where each item element would be an item from a different feed.