SUMMARY: personal take on the 'what?', the 'so what?' and a bit of related history surrounding a relatively new phenomenon: podcasting

DETAILS (the what/so-what/history follow shortly):
There's been a lot of buzz about podcasting over the last 5-6 weeks, amply chronicled in particular by radio-afficionado-extraordinaire Doc Searls in his IT Garage item of Sept 28 2004 as well as numerous mentions in Doc's personal weblog; originator Adam Curry's open-source ipodder and surrounding site at ipodder.org (detailing the rapid evolution since Aug 22 2004, and providing links to the downloads, history, philosophy, etc.), and the huge-and-rapidly-growing selection of items (the links which follow go straight to the relevant articles) on Wired, Slashdot, NBC4, and others you can find yourself by Googling for: podcasting - for instance check out the WebTalkRadio interview with Doug Kay of ITConversations, about 38 minutes into this interview (MP3).

Podcasting: What?

Podcasting provides 'time-shifted radio' (think TiVo or Personal Video Recorder for audio) in the form of MP3 files automagically-downloaded (from sites you pre-select) to your personal MP3 player (e.g. while you sleep, or at work), so that you can 'grab-gadget-and-go' and listen to that audio on the move, as well as have your playlist automatically updated next time you 'dock' or connect to the net. Your pre-selected sites are in fact those obtained from a (rapidly growing) list of RSS 2.0 feeds that contain enclosures, namely the MP3 files themselves... but they could be anything, as there's already a vipodder for aggregating videoblogs. The 'pod' is from iPod, since the original ipodder scripts transferred files seamlessly to an iPod and iTunes, but in fact the tool is totally generic, and open source at that; it allows you to set up bitTorrent downloads if you like, and is extendible. Syncing with any gadget is pretty simple, as this podcasting -> PocketPC article shows. [update 11 Oct: fixed that PocketPC URL to one that has some step-by-step tips]

Podcasting: So what?

Podcasting glues-and-scripts-together a lot of things that are already available, but the big 'so what?' comes from the fact that until now nobody had really achieved the complete cradle-to-grave life cycle from out-in-the-ether -> RSS feed -> portable gadget, and in a way that was open source and extendible: this is what has really fired the imagination.

Sure, it is still a little geeky at this minute. Sure, the feeds tend to be a bit 'audioblog'-ish or 'tech-talk-radio'-ish. Sure, there are some way-cool time-shifted radio tools such as Replay Radio (check it out, by the way... I love it!), RadioRecorder for Mac, and hardware/software gizmos like Griffin Technology's Radio Shark. Sure, there are some do-it-yourself Streaming Internet Radio Station tools such as the venerable Shoutcast (which I used to great effect at Xmas 2000 with a bunch of 10-year-old kids to make their own school radio station).

But the excitement stems from the fact that none of the fantastic innovations I've just listed have (until now, that is) solved the problem of getting direct from the audio originator to the portable device in such a 'hands free' and remarkably scaleable manner. So forget what you see (or rather hear) right now. Think about the possibilities -- with one important caveat I have to add: I watched Shoutcast undergo a daily-doubling of growth with glee and excitement, only to see it peak at several thousand 'stations' (Shoutcast sources), and stay steady at that level for several years!! In theory, podcasting could witness a growth akin to the explosive growth of blogging, but I personally think one of the rate-limiting factors is simply the inability to quick-scan/judge/browse/edit/search-within audio files easily. So while they're an absolutely rich source of exciting commentary, independent music, new ideas we haven't yet thought up, and all kinds of open source spoken media (think foreign language materials, audiobooks, news, analysis, etc), I'm not getting worked up about the death of radio or anything like that.

Podcasting: Personal history flashback

Like many net old-timers I've met, and as you'll see in spades throughout Doc's site linked above, I grew up huddled around the glowing tubes ('valves' here in the UK) of my shortwave and AM radios. Indeed, I think some of the motivation for Voice over IP and Internet Radio has come from the 'hidden DX-er' in many of us. There have been many milestones along the way to the podcasting activities now generating all this excitement, but I just want to list four that stick out in my mind:

1. RealAudio / Progressive Networks (later to become RealPlayer and RealNetworks): Rob Glaser started Progressive Networks in February 1994, and RealAudio 1.0 was released in April 1995, immediately changing the face of (if not literally launching) 'net media'. People began to realise what was possible, and an entire industry was born. A personal highlight for me in 1995 was listening on my computer in the UK to the first-ever live-streamed sporting event, the Seattle Mariners playing the New York Yankees, with the first ball thrown out by the sons of Mickey Mantle.

2. AudioNet/Broadcast.com: Marc Cuban's AudioNet, later to become Broadcast.com, was founded in 1995 and soon became the largest customer of RealNetworks. They were the ultimate gateway/service, helping conventional radio stations reach out onto the Internet, particularly with live sports broadcasting. The old media worlds and new media worlds were jointly changing the face of radio. [In 1999, Cuban earned around two billion dollars by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo! ]

3. Shoutcast: Justin Frankel, creater of all-time great freeware MP3 (and later other media-playing) product Winamp in 1996, worked with his buddies to provide some cool plug-ins that 'reversed the flow', so to speak, and let any Tom, Dick or Harriet set up an instant Internet Radio Station. Though it remains a little geeky to this day, Shoutcast opened the doors for many thousands of people to produce and distribute their audio content to millions of others. [In 1999, Frankel sold his company NullSoft to AOL for about $100Million]

4. Podcasting: Well, here we are in 2004, and I add this optimistically to my list simply on the grounds that it stands in my mind along with the other three as contributing to some 'fresh buzz' surrounding audio-on-the-net, and I like that a lot... it's been a few years since I felt that way, hence this article.