Education in Podcasting

What makes podcasting unique from other digital audio and video delivery is the use of syndication feed enclosures. The concept was 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 had discussed the concept, also in October 2000, with Adam Curry, a user of his software, as well as having other customer requests for audioblogging features.

He 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 how the feature would work by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog on January 11th, 2001.

For 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 Curry, audioblogger Harold Gilchrist and others. 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 made use of the enclosure element, in June 2003, Stephen Downes 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 September 2003, Winer created a special RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center colleague Christopher Lydon's weblog, which previously had a text-only RSS feed. Lydon, a former New York Times reporter and NPR talkshow host, had posted 25 in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, which Winer gradually released to the feed. Announcing the feed in his weblog, Winer challenged other aggregator developers to support this new form of content and provide enclosure support. Not long after, Pete Prodoehl released a skin for the Amphetadesk aggregator that displayed enclosure links.

A month later, in October of 2003, Winer and friends organized the first Bloggercon weblogger conference at Berkman Center. CDs of Lydon's interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content enclosures could deliver; Bob Doyle demonstrated the portable studio he helped Lydon develop; Harold Gilchrist presented a history of audioblogging, including Curry's early role, and Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes for transfer to an iPod. Curry and Marks discussed collaborating.

After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSStoiPod 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 (now called Transistr), developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski and released in mid-September, 2004. Shortly thereafter, another group (iSpider) rebranded their software as iPodder and released it under that name as Free Software.

The term "podcasting" was one of several terms for portable listening to audioblogs suggested by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February 12, 2004, referring to Lydon's interview programs ("...all the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?"). In September of 2004, Dannie Gregoire also used the term to describe the automatic download and synchronization of audio content; he also registered several 'podcast' related domains (e.g. podcast.net). The use of 'podcast' by Gregoire was picked up by podcasting evangelists such as Dave Slusher, Winer and Curry, and entered common usage.

Education in Podcasting cont'd >>