embedding data into podcasts

As a teacher, I’d love to have lectures podcasted and have the ability to embed Word or Keynote docs or hyperlinks somehow as well! I know album art and links to the iTMS are what will pay for some of this, but why not add capacity and watch a new market emerge?!

During his WWDC Keynote, Steve Jobs demoed the podcasting capabilities of the upcoming version of iTunes and displayed a “New Music Tuesdays” podcast setup by Apple. What made this one particularly interesting is that album artwork changed during the podcast to display the currently playing track. They’ve apparently extended their album art metadata to support multiple images that each span a very specific portion of the file. It’s certainly a very interesting case of what can potentially be done.

However, I’m not so sure that embedding a Keynote presentation into an audio file is the best idea – it definitely seems to be taking the wrong approach. Podcasting aside, an excellent language called SMIL exists to create multimedia presentations consisting of multiple types of embedded media files, and since Quicktime already plays nice it would seem that iTunes could play the files without much work. One could certainly enclose a SMIL file into an RSS feed, but I don’t know if it would integrate as easily as existing podcasts; it would certainly be interesting to find out.