Oklahoma Christian University hosts several student blogs. Among them is a blog called “Chase & Chase,” which is authored by a couple of freshmen at the university. But this is no ordinary blog: it’s a video blog. What’s a video blog, you ask? It’s a blog that has video clips instead of text posts. This seems like a great way to help prospective students learn about freshman year at OCU. There are videos on topics ranging from freshman soccer matches, to the new furniture in the dorm lobby, to Chase’s prom date.

I have one little suggestion. I can’t subscribe to this video blog using a video aggregator. While the blog offers an RSS feed, the feed doesn’t contain enclosures, which are necessary for subscription to video blogs (and, for that matter, podcasts). Even if they did offer enclosures, the videos are only offered as streaming media, which wouldn’t give my video aggregator a file to latch onto and download.

This situation is easily remedied, in a way that will still take advantage of the streaming server for those who want to watch the video from within a browser.

1. Create a .mov or .wmv version of the video clips.
2. Point to the .mov or .wmv from the enclosure tag in the RSS feed.

If there isn’t an easy way to create an enclosure tag with the software you’re using, set up a free Feedburner account and simply place the link to the .mov or .wmv in your blog post (make sure those file extensions are present), and Feedburner will automatially create a feed with enclosures for you. Then provide the Feedburner feed URL as a link from your blog, and label it so that people know it’s the one that includes the enclosures.

Putting these things in place will help open this excellent resource to the world of RSS video subscribers.

Thanks to Bob Robertson-Boyd for bringing this blog to my attention.