A day or two ago, I came across a site called Podcast Tags. After my experiences with Technorati tags, I was unimpressed to the point of having nothing to say about it. A discussion with Steven tonight gave rise to a thought or two.

The site's tagging approach works in much the same way as Technorati. In crafting a post that links to a podcast, the content creator also includes a link that includes the rel="tag" syntax. The creator then pings the Podcast Tags site, giving notice of the new content, and sometime later the content and associated tags are indexed on the Podcast Tags site.

It has potential. There's one problem I see right away. The site correctly ignores posts that do not contain enclosures. However, it has no ability (for the moment) to discern what type of enclosure is in the post (see Update). Therefore if your post has .jpg or .mov files and uses the rel="tag" attribute (as it might if you were also pinging Technorati with every post), then they will be indexing non-podcast tags as part of their database. Oops! So the onus is on the content creator to only ping Podcast Tags when there's a new podcast in the feed. While this is possible, it's inconvenient and unrealisitic. So that's something to be worked out.

But solutions like these need to be encouraged and explored as we examine ways to provide ongoing access to syndicated media content. And it forces us to examine larger questions of how we can effectively index audio and video content. Is creator-generated metadata a realistic possibility? Not sure. Can we bring user-generated tagging (folksonomies!) into this process? I'm inclined to say yes. Is this a space into which we information professionals need to be asserting ourselves? Absolutely.

Update: I got a nice email from Mack over at Podcast Tags who pointed out that, although at first they did not have the ability to distinguish between media file types inside of enclosures, that is no longer true. Therefore the issue I pointed out above with selective, manual pinging is a non-factor. That's great news for the functionality of the site.