Maybe I'm brilliant?
Maybe it’s not brilliant but it seems to make sense to me that podcasters might want to use a unified way of filling out the ID tags in their files. This would help for organizing podcasts in iTunes or whatever other software or hardware we might use for listening. This would be especially useful if you use your media software to organize the physical files. I've included a list of suggested fields for podcasters to fill.
Album/Show title - This should be the name of the show. That way the listener can look up a show by the name of the show in the same place all the time.
Artist/Performer/etc. - This should be the name of the podcaster. So all of your files get stored in the correct folder/directory whatever.
Title/songname/etc. - This should simply be the date of recording. Let me explain why. Lot's of people listen to these shows on portable media players. Often times the title of the file gets cut off because of space deficiency on the screen. When I see DSC-2004... It doesn't help me at all. If I saw 12-30-04 or 30-12-04 I'd know it was today's show and I'm listening to the right thing. Otherwise I have to search through a bunch of DSC-2004s or DNDS2004s. Get what I mean?
[Update 1-5-2005... Today I realized why the year should come first... Now I'm updating the files in iTunes. All of them... Crap.]
Genre - Always Podcast. Find all your podcasts in one place. There are still so many podcasts that either have genre blank or listed as Speech or comedy or some other crap.
I think you might see where I'm headed with this. If everyone used the same convention for filling out ID3 tags then the XML files that can be created from the files could easily be used for a whole bunch of different applications including the P2P network I spoke about in my last e-mail.