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What Tools Exist for User Published Content?
wbav asks: "Recently there's been a trend to user published content. A couple of examples of this trend include Wikis, Podcasting, Blogs, and the resulting RSS Feeds. Last night I was asked if any other similar technologies exist. As I did not have a good response, that is my question to the slashdot community. Are there any other similar technologies which deal with user publishing that I have not mentioned?"
If you mean purely online, you missed photo streams (aka: blogging with pictures), video blogging and game publishing - not to mention the completely obvious (and so last-decade) free web sites. For simply distributing content, there's always BitTorrent and - my favorite underexploited - "magnet://" style links which can point to content on Peer 2 Peer networks.
On the live front, there's also the whole webcam thing which gave rise to the camwhore movement. Shoutcast type things for "internet broadcasting" your own radio station. You can also creat your own internet television station if you want.
The very latest cutting edge variant on this is peer to peer streaming video, often refered to as CoolStreaming. There's maybe a 2 to 5 minute delay in the stream as it takes a little while to patch together the video before it's decodable. While so far it's popularity seems to be limited to China (where it's used to pirate / rebroadcast regular TV channels), the main advantage is that you should be able to establish your own streaming P2P television channel with an almost unlimited number of viewers - from your existing broadband internet connection.
And finally, where the online world meets the offline, physical items are designed and sold online in virtual stores, then physically published and shipped on demand. Like Cafe Press for stuff with logos - and Lulu for things like books and CDs.
I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning lulu. You upload, they sell & distribute. Damn simple way to get all the "long tail" content out there.
Here is a typical example of the content I'm talking about. It's a great film but the distribution is so far out of the scope of the creator that it just isn't worth investing in a personalized eStore, advertising etc.
Yes. It's an offset of podcasting, commonly referred to as 'videocasting' or 'video podcast'.
iTunes already supports it. (well, it's just using RSS to link to video files, not audio files, which was all podcasting really was)
There are rumors that here may be updates to the iPod to allow it to play video, although I'd suspect at a major hit to battery life.
(and well, more cycles on the batteries -> faster battery failure, which wouldn't be a good thing)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.