I keep hearing cheerleading on how big podcasting is getting, but I'm sure not seeing it in my subscriptions. In RSS, podcasts would be announced via enclosures. The draft Atom 1.0 spec has support for the same kind of thing (and heck - BottomFeeder already supports it :) ).

But let's take a look at my feeds and items. Here's a small script I ran against my 291 subscriptions:

| allEnclosures allAudioOrVideo |
rejectBlock := [:matchString :url | ('*', matchString, '*') match: url].
allEnclosures := RSS.Enclosure allInstances.
allAudioOrVideo := allEnclosures collect: [:each | each url].
allAudioOrVideo := allAudioOrVideo reject: [:each |
	(rejectBlock value: '.png' value: each) | 
	(rejectBlock value: '.jpg' value: each) | 
	(rejectBlock value: '.gif' value: each)].
^allAudioOrVideo

So what did that give me? A collection of 14 video and audio enclosures. At the very least, the feeds I subscribe to don't advertise podcasts as enclosures very often. Heck, Dave Winer, who's a huge proponent of the genre, almost never uses Enclosures - he just slaps a link to podcasts he's done straight into his items. So are people finding podcasts the same way they find other web content - just by stumbling on it? Is it simply the case that most blog client tools don't support Enclosure definitions? BottomLine does, although that support is specific to the Silt server (I can't see a general way of supporting client side enclosure definition in any of the APIs out there).

Oh, and another small aside here - see that Smalltalk script up there? That was run from a workspace in the runtime. Smalltalk is just cool that way.