Feedburner introduces SmartCast

I'm using Feedburner for months now and haven't noticed a single glitch. That's a good omen for their latest innovation: SmartCast. By introducing SmartCast, Feedburner again stays ahead of the curve. It enables any feed publisher (RSS 1.0 and Atom included!) to create Podcasts: "If a publisher isn't able to create a feed that has the enclosure element, they can use our service and we'll turn it into a feed with the appropriate enclosure elements. We do it by first converting the feed to RSS 2.0 if it's not already, then looking at the 'link' of each item and determining if it's a rich media type (by performing a HEAD request on the resource) such as an mp3 or a torrent. If it is, we create an 'add an enclosure' element using the information we determined from the HEAD request."

In addition, they created a "groupcast" tag at del.icio.us. You can assign a media link to the "groupcast" tag, then subscribe to its Feedburner feed and you're in the podcasting loop. They are also considering a premium service that will distribute the load for the enclosure-based feeds. No details on that yet.