by Jason Snell
SoundCloud shuts down podcasts temporarily
Over the weekend, SoundCloud turned off RSS feeds for all its hosted podcasts for a while.
I have no ill will toward SoundCloud, but they have never seemed to see podcasting as anything but a way to capture users and draw them in to their own ecosystem. Podcasting is a side business for SoundCloud, and linking to episodes of podcasts hosted by SoundCloud is usually a gigantic pain, because SoundCloud tries very hard to suppress file URLs. I don’t know whether they do it because they don’t get how podcasting works, or because they do get how podcasting works and want to try to break that approach so that people are driven to SoundCloud.
In any event, I don’t recommend that podcasters use SoundCloud. There are better options, including Libsyn and Podbean, that do the job much better than the podcasting features that are grafted onto SoundCloud.