First off - http://www.podmap.org is now operational!
It looks really great! Where's the quick description of what it is? It seriously needs a title. Without that, people will come to the site and not really know what they're seeing.
Done! I might add an FAQ page later (possibly at the bottom-right).
All in all it's a wonderful job. It would be cool to see it on it's own site. However, if it gets big, you should realize that there will be A LOT of double posts, errors, and people posting nonsense. It might be a good idea if you come up with some sort of approval system like the one in place at podcastalley.
Definitely - although at present the main issues seems to be changing +ve to -ve occasionally ;) I think using the RSS feed name (after removing http, etc) will act as a good failsafe - and possibly reading the title and web URL from that will prevent most spamming. An interesting one will be search manipulation, which I'm sure will be possible, but as they aren't rated by quality it's not so tempting.
rss feed based on the feeds that take place within a certain amount of miles from a location that a user selects. So they'd enter their lat and long and then all feeds within 100 miles would be fed into one feed. Don't know if it's possible, but it'd be cool.
That's definitely doable - the tricky bit is making sure the interface is usable. I can't make it interact with the flash directly, unfortunately, but I could add a simple parser to the search for 'near <podcast name>' or 'near <long> <lat>'. Or just add a second search option - I'll have a think.
A list of all included feeds
If I've got the right end of the stick (it's nearly 2am, so probably not!) I think that's done already (the data links at the bottom-right). Also, there's now a cool feature in the XML button at the top-right. That creates an RSS feed for your current query (including keyword searches) so (for example) you can add a feed to a blog for 'all UK electronica podcasts'.
impliment different colors for different genres and allow the map to display differently based on genre
That's very tempting, if very hard to categorise! I'd be really keen to have a link with podcastalley (probably on RSS feed URL) as that would provide the genre information automatically! The data feed is now written in such a way that I can do lots of cool colour/size changes if I want (e.g. make more recently updated podcasts more obvious).
tags: include tags and meta data in some way. Geeks love that stuff.
That's already partially there, but only in that the descriptions are indexed. Again, that could be done by pulling the keywords fields from podcastalley's database (*wonders if any admins are reading*).
have a checkbox that allows for opening the podcasts feed in a new page.
This is a trickier interface issue. I'd rather keep the main page as simple as possible (in fact, I want it simpler!) but it would be a useful option. I may be able to do some nifty Javascripting so that clicking on a point gives a little hovering window with a short description and the two links, but that'll need more playing ;)
Cheers!
Mike