Introduction to Podcasts (Part 2)
The History of Podcasting
In some respects suggesting that podcasting has a history is amusing; the term has only been around since late 2004. The concept however has been brewing for several years and a number of people contributed to its creation.
The Internet has allowed many movements to occur in the last decade, and there is no doubt that podcasting would have happened sooner or later, but it was spurred on by a small collection of individuals, none more so than Adam Curry.
The Birth of iPodder
In 2004, Curry was living in the Netherland’s with his wife and daughter. He was finishing a year’s contract as a DJ at Radio Veronica (which incidentally started as a pirate radio station onboard the Borkum Riff, broadcasting to the Dutch public) and he planned to move to the U.K. with his family as a change of lifestyle.
In his hours off-air Curry had been developing a computer application by tinkering with some computer code in a language called AppleScript. He knew his effort wasn’t perfect, but he was proud of his development nonetheless. It did a very basic job of collecting audio files from different sources on the Internet, and automatically loading them onto his iPod so he could listen to them at his leisure. He named the code iPodder, and he released the first version to the public on August 15, 2004.
Note: For the curious, AppleScript is a language for Apple’s computer operating environment. It’s made to be a simple English-like language that enables people to automate computer tasks and applications easily.
Although Curry had never programmed before, he’d decided to start out of sheer frustration. He’d had the idea for the computer program for several years, and had mentioned its application to some clever programmers in the hope they’d develop it. Very few had been interested, and so he began learning the little bits of code he needed for the development.
Curry’s move to the U.K. was a plan to change his lifestyle, but he had no idea what a dramatic change the next few months would bring.
Really Simple
In the mid-nineties Curry met a hard-core developer named Dave Winer, who was an old hand at writing software applications. Dave helped to create several different companies and many different technologies that defined computing.
Dave constantly sounds like he’s half asleep, but he’s got a keen mind for working out the intricacies of technology. He started the company Living Videotext, which was sold to Symantec for a tidy penny, and later started another company called Userland Software. This helped him become a major driving force in the popularity of weblogs, because of its blog software called Radio Userland (which was originally created as a music sharing system).
Over the years, Winer was one of several people that helped develop a form of computer language called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Its purpose was to make it easy for anyone to receive information over a computer network like the Internet: basically a really simple way to syndicate information. It’s now widely adopted by online news providers, like newspapers, magazine, and weblogs, so anyone can easily subscribe to their updates, known as a feed. Advocates swear by its efficiency because they can peruse dozens or hundreds of updates much quicker than they can visit the individual websites in a web browser.
Note: RSS is also known as Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary. In most cases you’ll see an orange icon with the text RSS or XML on a web site that supports the format.
The two stayed in touch, and as Dave built Radio Userland, Curry used it and provided constant feedback. Occasionally Curry’s insight delved headlong into his understanding of the radio industry and his thoughts on how it overlapped with technology. Even back in 2000 he was watching the developments of RSS and suggested that he thought it was “the key to successful growth of personalized content consumption.”
Building on his years of experience in broadcast and his working knowledge of the Internet, Curry came up with his Last Mile theory and published it to his weblog in October 2000. He knew that people were impatient and that the wait for large files to download made people disinterested; they’d rather do anything but wait. He suggested that people should be able to subscribe to a source of media, like a person whose taste in music you enjoyed, and that their recommendations could be trickled down to your computer overnight. That way you could listen to the tunes the next morning instantly.
When Curry met with Dave in New York for a Userland brainstorming session he pushed the message hard, and in between meetings at the Carnegie and Katz’s Delicatessens he got his message across. Dave left the session and in January of 2001 added one simple element to his RSS specification called an enclosure. Simply put this was a way to include a multimedia payload into a feed. Publishers could now include video or audio in their syndications.
The Dawn of Podcasting
A major hurdle had been overcome; the technology was now in place to make it easy to publish any media, including audio and video, to the Internet for subscription. What didn’t come were publishers. Eventually a few applications were developed to use the enclosure feature, like syncPod (that Kevin Marks demonstrated at BloggerCon in 2003) and Enclosure Extractor, but there still wasn’t one that was easy for anyone to use. Without subscribers there was no incentive for publishers to dive into producing audio or video shows.
In the meantime RSS was becoming popular with authors of the written word. Online newspapers, magazines, and weblogs used the code to improve the usability of their website. This led to greater development in applications called aggregators, or newsreaders. Users of the applications could subscribe to an RSS feed, which would deliver the information straight to their computer on a regular basis. The software became popular with geeks who wanted to keep up to date with the latest news quickly and easily.
Some early adopters started using the enclosure tag for audio. Harold Gilchrist, a pioneer of audioblogging, was one of the first in October 2002.
It wasn’t until almost a year later that Dave Winer decided to start his own experiments. Christopher Lydon, an American media personality, was conducting a series of interviews with blog personalities and releasing the audio online. Lyndon interviewed Winer in July, and Dave used the audio as his first media payload on August 19, 2003.
Curry, a celebrity blogger himself, met Lydon on the eve of the BloggerCon conference in 2003 and they hit it off. When Lydon heard Curry’s ideas he confessed, “I’m a political journalist and talk-radio jockey who wants to use the free, global range of the Internet to extend the magic of good conversation. So here we are at BloggerCon, scratching each other’s backs, learning fast and expecting to make something happen.”
In June 2004, Winer started his own audioblog called Morning Coffee Notes. He’d been chatting with Steve Gillmor, a technology journalist (or as he prefers to be labeled, an anarchist), about his audio show called The Gillmor Gang (see the review). Gillmor suggested that one of Winer’s audio shows was the best he’d heard in some time. That evening over dinner Winer chatted with Andrew Grumet, another software developer, about creating a business around RSS and audio. He figured the only way for it to take hold was to start his own show and see where it led.
Podcasting started to gain momentum. With a collection of interesting content, like Lydon’s interviews, IT Conversations, The Gillmor Gang, and Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, more people sat up and took notice.
The Daily Source Code, Curry’s own show, was born on August 13 2004. He’d been listening to the new collection of shows and decided he’d start one to encourage programmers to join the development of iPodder (that’s why he used the word code in the show’s name).
It wasn’t long before a collection of other high quality podcasts appeared, like: Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles on August 20, The Dawn and Drew Show on September 23, Coverville on September 28, and Reel Reviews on October 17. Many more started to appear, and Doc Searls, an author and popular blogger, noted that on September 30 Google found 526 results. By mid-October that number had exploded to 109,000.
Note: As we write this the results for the term podcasting in Google is 9,390,000. Why not try your own search for the term. We bet it has grown.