The Origins Of Podcasting
About a year and a half ago I was contracted by O’Reilly Media to co-write a book about podcasting. After writing in all of my spare time I churned out several chapters and reviewed over 100 podcasts.
As it turns out, they published the Podcasting Pocket Guide, which only contained a small amount of my work. The rights to the rest was eventually returned to me.
I was particularly pleased with Chapter 1. Mainly because I took a long time in researching the roots of podcasting, and also because I thought I’d produced it in an interesting way. I’ve been thinking of releasing the chapter in this weblog, and as Scoble points out the anniversary just passed, so I thought I’d be great to release it as a series.
The following is the work I did on the chapter. Some might take issue to a few section on who, and when, things occurred. Although I’m pretty sure almost all of it is very accurate, I’m happy to hear from anyone who might like to add or change anything. The beauty of a blog is, I can always go back and make updates on the fly.
I start with a little history of radio, because it’s important to understand what compels many to use podcasting as a more liberal way of distributing audio. It also provides a way to explain why podcasting is an important medium.
Here are links to the three parts, and separate sidebars:
Introduction to Podcasts part 1
Introduction to Podcasts part 2
Introduction to Podcasts part 3
Introduction to Podcasts sidebars
September 25th, 2006 at 9:09 am
[…] Richard Giles has released the first part of his unpublished book on podcasting, including a very interesting history! […]
September 25th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Looks like you have done a bunch of research. Congrats! But using your description of podcasting, I’d say that you skipped over a big part of the history.
In 1995 I founded a company called NetRadio. We provided streaming audio over the web in the form of a radio station. We were widely recognized as the first to do so. Technically, since that was streaming, it wouldn’t be “downloadable.”
But enter a now defunct company called PointCast. We made a deal with them to have the NetRadio stream “subscribed to” as part of the PointCast screen saver. It was in turn downloaded onto the user’s computer as part of the PointCast stream. It was very much like podcasting without the RSS.
I also noticed you started with a history of radio section. It was well done. But you seem to skip over the Internet radio stuff and move right to podcasting.
Maybe it fits your book better to do it that way, but I thought I’d throw this in for your consideration. Doesn’t do me any good personally these days since I long ago left the company I founded (NetRadio) but in the interest of accuracy and perspective thought it might be worth a mention.
Good luck with the book. Send me a copy and I’ll review it on podcastingtricks.com.