Podcasting - the Wave of the Future is Now!

Much of the technology associated with Podcasting has been around for nearly seven years. Because other Internet-related technologies and emergent mobile technologies changed so rapidly, it was only a matter of time before podcasting became what it now is today - a crucial and fast-growing link in the larger Internet-Mobile Convergence universe.

Where did it all begin?

And just what is Podcasting?. The following is a universally accepted definition. The source is the highly acclaimed computer dictionary site - Whatis.com:

•Podcasting is the preparation and distribution of audio files to the computers of subscribed users utilizing RSS (or Really Simple Syndication ). These files may then be uploaded to digital music or multimedia players like the iPod, other MP3 devices or any of the new generation of Smart Phones. A podcast can be easily created from a digital audio file. The podcaster first saves the file as an MP3 and then uploads it to the Web site of a service provider. The MP3 file gets its own URL, which is inserted into an RSS XML document as an enclosure within an XML tag.

What makes podcasting distinct from other digital audio and video deliverables is the use of syndication feed enclosures. This concept was initially proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis in October, 2000, and implemented in somewhat different form by Dave Winer, a software developer and an author of the RSS format. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92, by defining a new element called "enclosure", which would simply pass the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator . Winer demonstrated the feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog on January 11th, 2001.

During its first two years, the enclosure element had relatively few users. Winer's company incorporated the new feature in its weblogging product, Radio Userland, the program favored by the small number of audiobloggers then in existence, as well as other techies. Since Radio Userland had a built-in aggregator, it provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called audioblogging . All that was needed for "podcasting" was a way to automatically move audio files from Radio Userland's download folder to an audio player (either software or hardware) - along with enough compelling audio to make such automation worth the trouble.

While few developers of RSS-capable blogging software or aggregators, at that time, made use of the enclosure element, in June 2003, Stephen Downes, a Canadian by birth and a renowned researcher noted for his online research daily newsletter, OLDaily.com, demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files in his Ed Radio application. Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL or Webjay audio feeds.

In October 2003, Winer and his friends organized the first Bloggercon weblogger conference at Berkman Center. During this conference, software engineer and author of the weblog Epeus Epigone, Kevin Marks , demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes for transfer to an iPod, and a new era was born.

After the conference, famed former MTV VJ, Adam Curry , offered his blog readers an RSS to iPod script that moved MP3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea. The iPodder idea was picked up by multiple developer groups. While many of the early efforts remained command-line based, the first podcasting client with a user interface was iPodderX (since called Transistr).

During the birth of podcasting, the excitement was all about a new set of factors that would influence the future of podcasting and it's offshoots such as phonecasting - I'm speaking of RSS enclosures, audio-talk MP3s posted freely on the internet, iPods (and by extension, the many other MP3 and other other devices that would soon flood the market), and software that would be the glue that brought these things together. In five years, though, the iPod will be as exciting as a toaster; RSS enclosures will be just one of many vectors for URLs of talk audio; the dominant form of talk MP3s will not be shows longer than 30 minutes, it will be clips.

If one needed to describe the landscape in terms of the story that exploded across the upper blogosphere in August 2004, words would surely be inadequate, because what kept it all held together, then as now, would and will be hypertext, URLs, HTTP, and, most telling of all, social customs as pertaining to Internet usage by the myriad social networking communities found online, as well as those yet to emerge.

So…what changed in 2004 that allowed podcasting to begin its' penetration into the social and underlying tech consciousness of the Internet?

Until that moment in time, the overwhelming majority of Internet audio was still being offered to users in the method established during the phenomenal, initial growth of the Internet during the mid-90s. The customers for this method were the television, radio, music, and movie behemoths, in short the mainstream media companies. The providers for this method included large players - like Microsoft, Real, Apple, and Macromedia, among a few others. This style featured proprietary, expensive, and user-hostile technology like URLs that changed constantly, Internet-Explorer-only HTML, and dedicated media servers like RealServer.

After the first Podcast era, Internet standards became more consistent and high-speed connectivity was more ubiquitous. The customers then became talkers making audio in their spare time with cheap hardware and existing software, while the providers were hackers making more sophisticated podcast toolsets in their spare time with low-cost, existing toolsets.

If not for that change there would be no change at all. Podcasting would have no talkers if they needed Windows Media Server rather than Apache, and it would have no listeners if the old practice of obfuscating URLs was still followed. But Apache was a tried and true server technology that summer, and this begs the question of why podcasting happened at that particular time frame.

In brief…there were two factors that signaled the cognoscenti that podcasting was ready for primetime.

One factor was that all the dominoes were in place and ready to fall…consensus for web standards was overwhelming among developers, there were people skilled in the practice of audioblogging, and blogging was a well known narrative frame. The other factor was that there was a catchy new name for audioblogging - "podcasting" - connecting the dominoes to a compelling current event, especially during the iPod's peak as a cultural iconic standard.

When the upper blogosphere, in all its geekazoid glory, jumped on the podcasting theme, it inspired talented and energetic people to become podcasters, and recently, phonecasters. While this very first generation of podcasters were creating the original history of podcasting as experienced from the upper blogosphere, they were inadvertently doing all the right things to make the dominoes fall to their advantage, and as we are beginning to see - to the disadvantage of the major, corporate Media players. Perhaps, what we are witnessing is a true paradigm shift in the creation and distribution of all forms of media.

So, where are we today?

Well, the convergence between Internet and mobile technologies…fueled by mobile developers, entrepreneurs, advertisers, content developers and an ever-hungry consumer critical mass…has brought podcasting/phonecasting to the front and center as the most exciting current technology to hit the Internet, now, and for the foreseeable future. The right companies and developers are on the crest of the wave. It is absolutely the perfect time to be involved in this space and they are rushing to take advantage of this technology. With a projected figure of nearly 2 Billion devices penetrating the world market by 2008, and with these self-same devices able to absorb, store and podcasting/phonecasting content, the future is indeed bright for those who get on board now. It's a tsunami, so get ready to ride the beast!