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One last post from me as everyone's probably getting bored by iTunesU by now. But right back to Les's original post that sparked the discussion... >Why would anyone want to do that? Isn't it a much better idea to put material on YouTube and use the whole web/web2 infrastructure? I should have said, look at this, we are: http://www.youtube.com/uniwarwick Hey look, slow poetry! http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=61839DE6E493A46D Thank goodness for reusable content. Cheers, David. -----Original Message----- From: Repositories discussion list on behalf of Davies, David Sent: Thu 06-Aug-09 17:13 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Web 2.0 vs iTunes U ? > But it's entirely feasible to build a third-party client that can at least get as far as browsing the content within iTunes. It's even easier than that Graham. iTunesU is simply an RSS aggregator with a fancy presentation layer. Here, have one of Warwick's iTunesU for free (it's all free anyway, that's one of the reasons we're doing it): http://podcastbrowser.warwick.ac.uk/public/collection_feed/1 This URL is fed directly to iTunesU to populate our page on slow poetry by Prof David Morley. When it's rendered along with with their pretty page layout it looks like the attached itunesu.png. But take the same URL and add it to your own feed reader bypassing iTunesU altogether and it looks like the attached googlereader.png. Same content, different presentation. We even render our own iTunesU podcasts within our own web publishing system, how crazy is that! See attached warwickintranet.png. And all within a web architectural framework :) So, to recap, iTunesU content is discoverable by Google - should you want to, but as we've seen there are easier ways of discovering the same content, it doesn't generate new URLs for the underlying content, is based upon a principle of reusable content, Apple doesn't claim exclusivity for published content so is not being evil, and it fits within the accepted definition of web architecture. Perhaps we should simply accept that some people just don't like it. Maybe because they don't understand what it is or why an institution would want to use it, or they just have a gut feeling there's something funny about it. And that's just fine. Cheers, David. -----Original Message----- From: Repositories discussion list on behalf of Graham Triggs Sent: Thu 06-Aug-09 16:38 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Web 2.0 vs iTunes U ? >In this context, I guess what I'm calling 'the Web' is the things that >conform to the Web Architecture (sorry, I haven't thought about this >very hard I must admit - but that seems like a reasonable response): > >http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ > >Does iTunes conform to the Web Architecture? Off the top of my head I >can't answer that. I'm doubtful that it does but I'd be willing to be >told otherwise. So, if you look for iTunes U content on Google, you come up with links similar to this (Carnegie Mellon's home page): itms://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/cmu.edu Now, the itms protocol is a bit foreign to those used to http, but if you do change it from itms:// to http:// and load it in your browser, then you get a html page back that says it's connecting you (and then launches iTunes - by loading the itms:// URI above!). Interesting in itself, but more so when you look at some notes regarding the iTMS protocol: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/itms4all/ What does iTunes do when it's loading something identified by the itms protocol? Sending a normal HTTP request to port 80 of the server. A regular GET of the path, including specifying the HTTP/1.1 protocol. Although iTunes itself doesn't receive/render that html page you saw in the browser. The server is doing content negotiation based on the User-Agent - if you install the 'Modify Headers' extension into Firefox then add a filter on User-Agent and get it to send: iTunes/6.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5) suddenly you get back an XML document, which describes the interface page you see in iTunes. iTunes doesn't use HTML, but there is nothing that says a URI has to return HTML - and iTunes itself is clearly building on Web Architecture. Whether it's a bad thing that it's not more immediately accessible is a matter of opinion. But it's entirely feasible to build a third-party client that can at least get as far as browsing the content within iTunes. G