What does podcasting have to do with RSS? This is one of the questions that came up in several sessions earlier this week at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference. It seems fairly common for people to use the term “RSS” in reference to text feeds (i.e. feeds without enclosures), and they don’t automatically connect RSS with podcasting.

So I thought it would be helpful to provide an extended explanation of why, when I talk about the importance of RSS, I talk about podcasting. Some of the reasons were provided at the conference; others go beyond what we had time to cover.

1. A key appeal of RSS 2.0 is the enclosure element, which supports podcasting. Previous versions of RSS did not offer this feature.

2. A podcast isn’t a podcast unless there is an accompanying RSS 2.0 (or Atom) feed. Anything else is just a file (mp3, etc.) sitting on a server.

3. The experience of locating and managing enclosureless RSS 2.0 feeds is similar to that of locating and managing feeds with enclosures. It just happens that most of us use different tools for each.

4. As aggregators converge into a single hybrid type that allows you to manage any kind of feed (iPodderX is one such tool), feeds will no longer need to be distinguished as “text” or “audio” or “video.” Publishers of feeds (feed pubs) will be able to offer feeds that contain a mixture of, say, text and audio. (There’s nothing in the RSS spec that precludes this.) A user will be able to tell the aggregator whether or not to download enclosures that happen to appear in the feed, probably on a feed-by-feed basis. If there’s an enclosure in the feed, the aggregator will know what to do with it. It will be simpler for me, the feed consumer, because I won’t need to go to the effort to subscribe to podcast feeds and text feeds separately.

5. In the future, it will be simpler, and perhaps more effective in some cases, for feed pubs to provide a feed that contains a mix of media types, where one complements the other. Think of the way you blog. If you are including audio in your blog, why be forced to feed it out-of-line as a separate feed from the feed that contains your text posts? We are in a mode where text feeds and audio feeds are kept separate, but this mode coming to an end. I can see reasons why a feed pub might want to keep text and audio feeds separate, but I think this will be the exception.

6. A syndication strategy should consider the variety of syndication options available (text, links, audio, video, etc.) rather than limiting itself to one or another.