My Huffduffer UX tag bundle

I love Huffduffer for one reason. It lets me find podcast episodes that suit my precise interests and subscribe to them as a single podcast.

My Huffduffer tag bundle is a podcast of all the UX, IA, IxD and typography episodes from the whole of Huffduffer. Try it yourself! You may need to add it to iTunes manually as it’s an RSS feed not an iTunes-ready podcast…

Huffduffer 101

Huffduffer works like this.

People find audio they like on the web (music, talks, episodes etc)
They add the audio URL to Huffduffer and tag it
Huffduffer makes a podcast out of everything they add

These podcasts are then available to anyone to subscribe to via iTunes.

Follow people

So, for example, I can subscribe to creator Jeremy Keith’s Huffduffer because I like the things that he likes. I can also bundle several people into a collective to create a super-podcast from everyone involved. Hidden gems in here include:

This, on its own, is an amazing way to make the experience of finding podcasts more exciting and rewarding. But it’s not the whole story.

Subscribe to tags (sort of)

Every piece of audio in Huffduffer gets tagged, and each tag has its own podcast. So, for example, you can subscribe to all episodes tagged with UX. Great podcasts in here include:

This is really powerful.

But is also where it falls down a little. I don’t want to subscribe to each tag individually - too many subscriptions in iTunes, too many duplicate episodes in each tag. The perfect solution would be to create a bundle of tags, just like you can create a collective from a bundle of people.

My not-so-perfect solution

Once I thought about a tag bundle I just couldn’t let it go. So I used Yahoo Pipes to create a single RSS podcast for all the tags I like. It includes everything tagged with UX, IA, IxD, user experience, information architecture, interaction design and typography. Here’s a sample of what it throws up:

Now I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have found those on my own! The RSS is publicbly available if you’re interested:

Subscribe to my Huffduffer tag bundle (no longer available as Yahoo! Pipes shut down)

I’ve been listening to it for a few weeks now and I love how varied it is. I’ve found loads of stuff that I just would never have found on my own. It’s pretty much become my go-to podcast.

Update 18/01/11: Would you believe it? Within a week of this post Jeremy Keith explained how this functionality is built into Huffduffer. So you don’t have to use my over-complicated Yahoo Pipes nonsense - instead you can just use a single Huffduffer URL. This is next-level URL design in action…