This week, I listened to episode 167 of the Radio Survivor podcast, titled “Alternative Histories of Podcasting“. The guest was Andrew Bottomley of SUNY-Oneonta, and the conversation covered the “popular” start of podcasting (Dave Winer, Christopher Lydon, Adam Curry, et al), and a look at audio available on the Internet before the 2004-2005 time period. The hosts seemed to take issue with defining “podcasting” as the technical tools making it possible to subscribe to audio files (podcasts) and easily load them to mobile devices (MP3 players, smartphones). I do not deny that the examples that Dr. Bottomley gave of Internet audio files pre-2004 were correct, but I think there is a reason why they were not called podcasting – because there was no “pod” available! For better or worse, the iPod was the first convenient audio player, iTunes was the first convenient way to get audio on a device, and the name “podcasting” grew out of the development of these tools and other tools of audio production and distribution.
I hope that Dr. Bottomley will document his research in this area (seems like he is working on a book). However, I am more interested in finding good podcasts to listen to, and playing around with creating podcasts myself. As Dave Winer has pointed out, creating and distributing podcasts is an open platform – anyone can do it. People can disagree on “who was first” or “what is a podcast”, but I want to focus on the practitioners, the people who are creating podcasts, no matter what the topic.
