Ben,

I can forgive the cheesy music track on clip #2 thanks to the lovely British accents, which I could listen to all day long.

Listening to these podcasts helped me realize how surreal audio is when disembodied from contextualizing information. Without a title, credits, a description, keywords, text, graphics, video, or other visual clues as to the origins and purpose of the podcast, it is almost meaningless.

How do you distribute these pieces while controlling the context? That is, in distributing video (which has the same problems when separated from context), I am always struggling to make sure the contextual tags ride along with the images. It's very easy for audio or video to get separated from descriptive texts such as credits and copyright notice. Do you have any tricks for tagging your podcasts you could share with us?

STEVE O'KEEFE

Steve,

We use the ID3v2 metatag data that's part of the mp3 file to tag our podcasts. These tags then appear on your mp3/laptop when you play our podcasts so you know a) who made it b) what the series is called c) what the series is about and d) what the episode is about. We also provide descriptive data of our podcasts - what's on the episode, who's on the recording, who they are, etc - on landing pages we create on ibm.com so you know what you're listening to if you consume them from our website.

The internal tool has the same functionality.

We've been tagging our QuickTime videos in Final Cut, but the tags do not survive the process of podcasting into iTunes. We have to add the tags back from inside iTunes. Same thing with Google Video -- the tags disappear when we upload.

MP3 tagging is much more advanced than video tagging. Thanks for the notes on process.

STEVE