Gadgetopia

Payloads for RSS: A long time ago (in Internet time), there was a short-lived start-up called LoadTV. You installed the LoadTV viewer, subscribed to some channels which had content you wanted to see, and it downloaded full-motion video in the background all day long.

The best part was that whatever a new clip was completed, John O’Hurley’s voice would say “Yo-o-o-u are loaded!” (it sounds better if you know that O’Hurley played J. Peterman on Seinfeld — there, now say it again and laugh).

Adam Curry of MTV and now blogging fame has come up with an idea involving the enclosure tag for RSS. The enclosure tag allows you to “enclose” a file in your RSS feed, be it video or audio or whatever. Using this, people could subscribe to a media feed, and it will download these huge files unattended all night long (as RSS is wont to do anyway) and in the morning, you have big, full-screen video.

Dave Winer has predicted its first use: pay-per-view porn.