Marc's Voice: Where's the meta data? What's wrong with Podcasting. "I wanna know who's on the recording, what are the subjects and topics of the discussion, where particular juicy quotes reside and most of all the length and Creative Commons license info on the audio. All of this meta data should be accompanying the Podcast yet we're still in hack mode no sorry, nothing."

No need to be sorry Marc! Every single Podcast that goes out is chock full of metadata, all you have to do is look for it - and get on the cases of the iPodder guys, server vendors and everyone else to start making it more accessible for people like you. No hacks necessary - perhaps some hacking, but its right there for you to take a gander at.

The metadata I'm talking about is enabled  by a format called ID3v2 - a description format that's almost as old as MP3 itself. It allows a publisher to describe their audio in a zillion different ways, include transcript, binary objects (like album art) and so on...at some point, I fully expect all the major aggregators and weblogging tools to start reading this stuff and exposing it to the end user.

And almost as if to prove my point - check out the tagline for the ID3v2 website