(Lately I’m realizing that good companies and orgs have watchlists so a post like this one serves as an open letter to the company, unless of course, they’re not listening, which of course is their problem, a big problem.)
To TED
I love that you’re providing all of these stimulating and informative videos. Thank you for that.
But why did I just spend five minutes clicking around on ted.com, looking for a “Podcast” or “RSS” link?
I was thinking “C’mon! You MUST have a feed here somewhere!!”
Finally I decided to search the iTunes Music Store for TED… There it is! WTF? Why are you hiding your feed?
I’m so glad I found it. But you need to put a link somewhere on your site so people don’t waste their time looking for what’s not there.
Please?
-Andrew
May 7, 2008 at 4:43 am
Andrew, You are too funny. And what’s funnier is the timing of your post! We at TED just TODAY finally revised the video pages on our site to give a nice easy link to all our RSS feeds (Audio podcast, video podcast, blog). Also to our email updates.
I know, I know. Totally obvious. We’ve had RSS feeds since we first launched TEDTalks nearly two years ago, but somehow they were omitted from our site design and it took us a while to make the correction.
Thanks for your loving nudge! And again, great timing!
June Cohen
Director, TED Media
May 7, 2008 at 11:01 am
Aha!
Good job, TED, June Cohen and team!
Good job for having watchlists and for responding and for having feeds! And of course good job for making all that great content available in the first place.
May 7, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Thank you, Andrew! Much appreciated on all counts –
June 3, 2008 at 2:46 am
Funny that - I looked for a convenient video podcast feed on TED today, and could not find it. Arrived here through google though. Cheers Andrew.
June 17, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Yup, the same here… no feeds on the TED website
June 24, 2008 at 10:46 pm
June Cohen, or someone else at TED Talks,
If you’re listening, I’m still getting a decent amount of traffic from people who cannot find the TED Podcast links on your site.
I think the problem is, that there’s no link on the HomePage, as well as no RSS metadata
http://www.ted.com/index.php
It’s only after you drill down to a Category of the site that those things become available, like they are on this page:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/peering_into_space.html
As for RSS metadata, all that is needed is for you to have your webmaster add one simple line of code into your index.php page, like this (This blogging software strips out carrots and other characters so this is not exact, but your webmaster will know what I mean):
(carrot)link rel=”alternate” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”TEDTalks (Video)” /(carrot)
As for the for the trouble people are having finding the podcast (or unwillingness to look for it), maybe you guys should add a “podcast” link where it says,
Themes
Talks
Speakers
…It could also say Podcast and link to the itunes store subscribe page. Again, a simple fix for any high-school kid to perform in 3 seconds. Your iTunes URL is
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=160892972
It may be unfair to emphasize iTunes as the main way to get the podcast, but truth be told, if someone is savvy enough to know about other podcast aggregation software, they will be able to get the podcast directly from the feed in the other snippet of code you need to add. If they don’t know about RSS beyond podcasts, they probably only use iTunes anyway. At any rate, this would be an improvement over what is there now.
July 13, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I use bashpodder, which likely places me in the ranks of the “saavy.” However, it still took me about an hour to find TED’s video feed in plain old RSS.
Ready? Here it is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video
How did I find it? Well, first I had to go to the TED blog. Then from there I fiddled around until I happened to click on the link that said “Get the TED Miro Player.” This took me to Miro’s website, where down below the link to download the TED Miro Player, there was another link that said “Already have Miro? Click here to add TED podcasts.” I right clicked that in Firefox, chose “Copy Link Location,” pasted it into my text editor and extracted the URL for the actual feed within the Miro URL feed wrapper. Fortunately Miro includes the feed urls in its wrapper, unlike iTunes which gives no indication at all. So after all of that I copied the url into my bp.conf and got going.
But all this took out a good chunk of my Sunday afternoon, just to subscribe to one sodding feed. I have contacted the TED webmasters about getting a clear, easy to find RSS podcast link on their website. These videos are simply too important to be missed for some teensy usability oversight.
July 17, 2008 at 4:45 pm
The audio podcast RSS link was even harder to find
In the end I got it by substituting “audio” for “video” in the URL for the RSS feed. Duh.