I was listening to the Rebooting the news podcast this evening in my hotel room when a thought struck me. It wasn't the show itself that inspired me, (although I'm sure one of it's hosts does that frequently, and perhaps in this case subliminally) it was the connections that enabled me to listen to the show that fired me up.

I was listening on my iPhone, with the Dropbox app. You can play media right from the app, it continues playing if it's in the background and you can 'scrub' forward or backward, even if the file hasn't loaded fully. Certainly enough functionality for podcast listening.

I was accessing the app from a Dropbox folder that is shared with a computer running the River2 news aggregator, part of the EC2 for Poets project. It knows to download podcast files from feeds I'm subscribed to and drop them into the 'podcast' folder I set up in my Dropbox.

Another awesome use of Dropbox, but also inspiration for some brainstorming.

Why not 'subscribe' directly to a podcast dropbox? When the producer of the show drops a new episode into the box, it automagically appears ready to play on all my dropbox enabled devices.

Of course I want shownotes and art and an index of the show, so why wouldn't this podcast folder also contain an rss file that links to the file in the dropbox?

This way I can run the whole process of parsing a feed and accessing the file locally, after the files are already on my devices.

I'm unsure of the real benefits, but somehting about it just feels worth trying.

Some brainstorming:

Wide distribution of both the content and the rss creates multiple archives of my 'stuff' that are ready to be replicated/mirrored by anyone who is sharing my folder.

Audience members can set up their own 'repeaters' by publishing the rss and files from a structure already in place.

Even if dropbox were to 'go away', as cloud services tend to do from time to time, there would be thousands of copies of my show ready to replicate.

Great for wikileakers!

It simplifies the process a 'private' or 'by invite only' publication through the dropbox invites and sharing process.

Another related thought is using dropbox to bootstrap the World Outline of linked OPML files.

2/7/11; 11:27:36 PM by AC I gave the aforementioned a try, I'm calling it my 'small world outline' and it worked. The rendered results are like peering into Alice's looking glass....

2/7/11; 11:36:32 PM by AC Here's another version of a rendering using the optimal widget

 2/7/2011; 10:56:25 PM.   .