UDDI for podcasts & dynamic recommendation
A major tenet of the discussions within the
Podcast Specification Working Group is creating single-click subscription for podcasts, which at the moment still an arduous and non-automated process. (Newbie or not, copying-and-pasting a URL is quite the laborious task). It's been mentioned that perhaps autodiscovery should also be a feature common to RSS aggregators for podcasting, which I think is a great idea.
I'm considering
UDDI as a possible solution...but that of course, introduces and largely mandates the XML web services model. Would this work? Surely. Would it add unnecessary layers of complexity? Probably. Would it be cool? Undoubtedly. Would it be hard to get all podcaters to register with a centralized repository? Oh, my aching brain...
I also suggested the concept of using both of these features with dynamic podcast recommendations to clients, based on a strength of relationship to subscribed podcasts. Of course, this would require the podcast specification itself to include elements for categories to establish such relationships, but that's the next step.