As the new semester begins I have to wonder what will happen with last semester’s podcast feeds. Are subscribers expecting new content? Should we add a final message to all course feeds that says something like, “This course is now over. Thanks for listening! Be sure to check out webcast.berkeley.edu/courses for new courses this Fall”?
Of greater concern: that the podcasts don’t get updated and an aggregator deems them as podfaded, automatically removing them from the system.
It’s obviously valuable to have these feeds alive. People can then still find them, and if they subscribe they’ll at least be able to listen to selections on-demand.
I thought about redirecting the feeds in circumstances where, say, a CS61A course is over then redirect to CS61B. But I don’t want to push content on people like that.
I’ve also thought about tweaking the datestamps so the content is deemed fresh. For example, you could just leave all of the episodes in the feed, but change the date of the first one to, say, yesterday. Then keep taking the oldest one and setting it’s date to newest. So people can always get the whole thing, but they can also subscribe.
Thoughts?
