Podcasting: The Next Big Thing - A Little History

Podcasting began to take off in August of 2004. That is when Adam Curry made his original iPodder script available over the Internet. At that time, he had been doing a radio program for a year, which was winding down. He realized that he wanted to continue to do some form of radio show. Earlier that year he had helped a friend who was maintaining an RSS feed that handled MP3s, which gave him the idea for a program application that would download the files to a digital music player. To make a long story short, he learned to program in Applescript, and created an application that allowed users to download MP3 files automatically and store them on their iPods. Because he was not entirely pleased with how the application came out, he took the bold step of releasing the source code, in the hope that other developers would help him improve it.

It worked better than he had ever dreamed. Not only did developers help him improve the script, but other people wrote their own versions of the iPodder application, which they also placed in the public domain. All of this activity received its first boost at the end of August, when the Inquirer published a news article that described the phenomenon and helped to explain its appeal. After that, according to Adam Curry, “Once people started to figure out that it’s fun to host and record your own radio show, a community was born.”

Subscribing to a podcast radio show is not difficult. All you need is a computer, podcast receiving software (also known as an aggregator) such as iPodder, and an MP3 music player. Subscribing to a podcast means that the show will be automatically downloaded to your computer, ready and waiting for you to listen to and/or move to your player. The steps to subscribe to a show do vary, so you will want to be careful when following the directions. If you just want to listen to a particular show rather than subscribe, most sites will also have directions for directly downloading only one show.

The technology takes advantage of Really Simple Syndication, a version of the so-called “push” technology that automatically delivers content to users. At one time, this technology was not taken seriously; it was thought that users would grow annoyed with it, particularly if businesses saw it as another chance to advertise. It hasn’t quite turned out that way. Online news companies have set up RSS feeds so that news junkies can get stories about their favorite topics delivered right to their computers without needing to visit the sites. Like the newscasters, podcasting recognizes that Web surfers like the convenience of having something delivered directly to them – but only if it is something that they really want. Nobody wants to be sold to, but most people do want to be informed and entertained.

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