Podcasting has made a major leap to the world of multimedia (audio and video) for the Internet and the Web. This article tries to bring up some interesting facts related to the development of podcasting. It is by no means try to be a complete and thorough, but more as an overview. I also try to focus on general ideas instead of chronology.

Before podcasting, audio and video were dominated by large providers like Real, Apple, Microsoft, among others. Most of them invented proprietary technology that require specialized software to play and stream.

Most companies who want to publish their multimedia files need to decide on which solutions are probably the best for them. Not to mention the high price tag assigned to the server side solution like RealServer.

Then there came blog software, which was originally used by a group of techie who want to publish information, thoughts, ideas of all kinds without going through the hassles of editing and uploading static HTML file. Content management software exist, but still a blog with its simplicity attract many new users.

To make long story short, blog software became so popular and suddenly, everyone and his brother (and sister) can get themselves heard on the Web, even they only know how to write and send e-mail.

Podcasting tries to extend this effort a little bit further into the voice medium instead of just the static and somewhat boring text medium. Voice has the interactivity factor not available in text.

RSS feeds existed as a way to deliver summary of Web content. The syndication feature was also being used only by website mostly owned by tech-savvy webmasters. Typical uses include updating developers and interested users about the update of new software, development of new tool, etc.

In 2001, Adam Curry and Tristan Louis wanted a way to deliver audio and video content via RSS feeds, of which RSS evangelist, Dave Winer responded by adding specific enclosure element to his company’s RSS specification. Radio Userland was the first blogging system to incorporate this capability.

Adam Curry was one of the people behind the early development of the open source iPodder podcatcher in 2003. It was not called iPodder at that time, but simply in the form of script that automatically transferred media enclosures to iPod.

Curry and Winer created the first collaboration podcast, which they called Trade Secrets. It quickly gained popularity among bloggers, of which contributed big time to propel podcasting.

WikiPedia reported that the fist possible use of the term podcasting was as a synonym for audioblogging or weblog-based amateur radio in an article by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February 12, 2004.

Podcasting has only started to take off the ground and got much attention in October 2004, which was just a little more than a year ago.

The idea is brillaint, while taking advantage of the existing well defined technologies like HTTP, RSS and popular audio and multimedia file formats (MP3, WMA, etc.)

Link: WikiPedia, iPodder.
See also: Podcast Statistics.

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