Popularity of Podcasting

The word about podcasting rapidly spread through the already-popular weblogs of Curry, Winer and other early podcasters and podcast-listeners. Fellow blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google found for the word "podcasts" on September 28, 2004. On that day, the result was 24 hits. There were 526 hits on September 30, then 2,750 three days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18. A year later, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word "podcasts."

On October 11, 2004 the first phonetic search engine for podcasting was launched called Podkey to assist podcasters to easily connect to each other. Capturing the early distribution and variety of podcasts was more difficult than counting Google hits, but before the end of October, The New York Times had reported podcasts across the United States and in Canada, Australia and Sweden, mentioning podcast topics from technology to veganism to movie reviews.

USA Today told its readers about the "free amateur chatfests" the following February , profiling several podcasters, giving instructions for sending and receiving podcasts, and including a "Top Ten" list from one of the many podcast directories that had sprung up. The newspaper quoted one directory as listing 3,300 podcast programs in February, 2005.

Those Top Ten programs gave further indication of podcast topics: four were about technology (including Curry's Daily Source Code, which also included music and personal chat), three were about music, one about movies, one about politics, and—at the time number 1 on the list—The Dawn and Drew Show, described as "married-couple banter," a program format that USA Today noted was popular on American broadcast radio in the 1940s. After Dawn and Drew, such "couplecasts" became quite popular among independent podcasts (those not derived from a preexisting radio show).

In November 2004, podcasting networks started to appear on the scene with podcasters affiliating with one another. The first was the GodCast Network, followed by the Tech Podcasts Network, the Association of Music Podcasters and others.

In March of 2005, John Edwards became the first national-level US politician to hold his own podcast. Within a few episodes, the show had all the features of a major podcast: a web site with subscription feeds and show notes, guest appearances, questions from the audience, reviews and discussion of books, musical interludes of podsafe (noninfringing) songs, light banter (sports and recreation talk), even limited soundseeing from on location. Later in the summer of 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush became a podcaster of sorts, when the White House website added an RSS 2.0 feed to the previously downloadable files of the president's weekly radio addresses.

In May 2005 the first book on podcasting was released, the award-winning Podcasting The Do it Yourself Guide, by Todd Cochrane

By mid-2005, the medium had acquired backlash. Some experienced Internet users declared podcasting to be either nothing special (just a variant of blogs and mp3s), or already past its peak (because of growing exposure, and/or adoption by unsavvy Internet users).

In June, 2005, Apple staked its claim on the medium by adding podcasting to its free iTunes 4.9 music software and building a directory of podcasts at its iTunes Music Store. The new iTunes could subscribe to, download and organize podcasts, which made a separate aggregator application unnecessary for many users. Apple also promoted creation of podcasts using its GarageBand and Quicktime Pro software and the MPEG 4, m4a audio format instead of mp3.

In July 2005 the first People's Choice Podcast Awards were held during Podcast Expo. Awards were given in 20 categories.

As is often the case with new technologies, pornography has become a part of the scene, producing what is sometimes called podnography. Other approaches include enlisting a class full of MBA students to research podcasting and compare possible business models, and venture capital flowing to influential content providers.

The growing popularity of podcasting introduced a demand for music available for use on the shows without significant cost or licensing difficulty. Out of this demand, a growing number of tracks, by independent as well as signed acts, are now being designated "podsafe". (See also Podcasting and Music Royalties.)

In September 2005, the first podcast encoded in 5.1-channel encoded Dolby Headphone was created by Revision3 Studios with their 14th episode of Diggnation. The Dolby encoding lasted for only a few minutes of the podcast. On October 12, 2005 Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod with video capabilty. In his keynote speech he demonstrated the video podcasts Tiki Bar TV and Rocketboom. On December 3, 2005 Sony Computer Entertainment America announced that the PlayStation Portable would support podcasting using the RSS Channel feature after upgrading to 2.60.

In November 2005 the Podcaster News Network was launched that focuses on news and world events to include Sports, Business, Lifestyle, Politics, Religion and World and US National News.

"Podcast" was named the word of the year in 2005 by the New Oxford American Dictionary and would be in the dictionary in 2006.

The term "podmercial" was coined in early 2005 by John Iaisuilo, a radio broadcaster/podcaster in Las Vegas, who promptly trademarked it. The term "poditorial" was coined by author John Hedtke in July 2005 while writing half of "Podcasting Now: Audio Your Way!"

In February 2006 the first official Guinness Book of Records World Record for most popular podcast was awarded to The Ricky Gervais Show. The show, produced by the Guardian Unlimited and hosted by Positive Internet maintained an average of over a quarter of a million downloads per weekly episode.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia material "Podcasting".