KAFPodcasters

• What is Podcasting
• Who listen to podcasts?
• Podcasting is audioblog
• A brief history
• Feature of Podcasting

A brief history

A brief history of the podcasting will bring you to the author of the RSS software, Dave Winer who along with his colleague Adam Curry had brought it out in October 2000 and used it to adapt blogging with audio files on request from public. Winer fidgeted around the features of the software and its adaptability to really replicate audio file for the use of the public at large, and tested it with 'enclosures' for the first time in January 11, 2001 when he successfully 'enclosed' a song in his blog called "Grateful Dog".

A brief history will also include the mention of the first company which incorporated this new feature, i.e. Radio Userland where David Winer, his colleague Adam Curry and audioblogger Harold Gilchrist joined hands in designing the podcast in its primitive stages. At the time podcasting involved "a way to automatically move audio files from Radoi Userland's download folder to an audio player" (source: Wikipedia and redirected from Podcast).

Two years afterwards in September 2003 Winer improved upon his invention by bringing out a special feature in his RSS with enclosure software which could handle posting of interviews and talk-shows in the text-only blogs. The concept caught on the attention of other bloggers and the growth and application of the RSS software started catching up both in application and in demand from public. A brief history will bear testimony to the fact that following a marathon conference organized by the Winer, Curry and Harold where the history of the RRS with enclosure software had been presented and explined to the web developers at large, collaborations with iTunes and iPod commenced. This makes the base of the podcasting as we see it today. Following this conference and based on the understanding Winer and his team obtained from fellow developers, downloading mp3 files from iTunes and/or Userland Radio had started through podcasting. The first real podcasting as we know it today came as a result of this conference, from a team of developers, August Trometer and Ray Slakinski which was launched in September 2004. A second group - iSpider - re-christened the software used as ipoder and posted it for use on the Internet as free software.

The term podcasting came in much later when Ben Hammerley questioned the people at large what name the new phenomenon can be known as - among the suggested names he quoted were audioblogging, podcasting, and guerillamedia among others. How the name podcast stuck it is not really known but it could be reinforced by the fact that soon after this public question there had been a great number of audio content webpages launched having "podcast related content".

A brief history points out that the first podcast service provider had been launched in October 2004 which was complete with storage, RSS creation tools and downloads as well as definite bandwidth. Within a few months, in February 2005 Carl Franklin launched the first podcast production company then known as PWOP Productions. Presently it is almost exclusively working with Microsoft and a few other companies. Very soon after a couple of Australians also launched a podcasting production company on a commercial level, called Commercial Podcast Network. The third major player in the promotion of the podcasting is the London Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) who immediately picked up the new technology and launched its own podcasting platform. This vastly improved the acceptance and publicity of the podcasting to the people at large as well as developers and bloggers worldwide opening the doors wide for a host of their applications for the larger dissemination of information and technology besides the purely entertainment material it normally broadcast.

A brief history will also cover the fact the podcasting has found place in the Guinness Book of World Records with the podcasting of the episodes of Ricky Gervais Show which had achieved a mind boggling download rate of 295,000 per episode.