All this chat about RSS is making me think back to when I first found out about it & how excited I was. I assumed everybody would have a blog and read others via RSS.
In 2005 I started a podcast with my class of 10 year olds. They had great fun and, I believe learned a lot. Not having a much of an understanding of how to do this I wrote and updated the RSS feed by hand. I then had a php file that used the feed to create the webpage. I had very little understanding of php (still do not) but it worked.
I remember, in 2006, being at an educational conference in Edinburgh. I ended up talking to the keynote speaker on a bus on the way to drinks. He asked me where I thought the technology might be going. I explained my idea that an iPod or similar device could allow audio comments, this would somehow be uploaded, somewhere, they would become linked in some sort of sub element of the episode in the RSS feed with a time stamp. When you listened to the podcast there would be a wee audio alert when you got to a comment. You could press a button on your iPod if you wanted to pause the episode and listen to the comment.
Podcasting was then a much smaller and simpler thing. I did not imagine we would have podcast that were commercial with millions of listeners.
John, nice to see you here! 👍