RasterWeb!

Well, everyone seems set on defining podcasting, and heck, since I consider myself someone involved with it before it even had that name, I might as well toss in my two cents…

See, I keep reading and hearing people who say that podcasing is not new, I mean, it’s just the same as web-based radio/audio shows, except you can automatically download it. Or by gosh, I have some commercial application that records streams and converts them to ogg files, so that’s the same thing too! Right? Right?

Dammit people, it’s NOT the same thing!

I see podcasting as the combination of a few of things. Using the enclosure tag in an RSS 2.0 feed, and automating the process of receiving the enclosures specified in the RSS feed.

I think this is pretty close to Dave Shusher’s definition of Podcasting.

Oh, and the fact that it is using open stuff, like RSS 2.0 and (usually) MP3 is what made things really take off. Like I said, people were automating the download of audio content before, but it was a hack, not a platform. What is a platform? Something you can build upon. (Hopefully without having to buy your way into.)

I checked the date of itconv.pl and it says 2004-02-12, which means that in February of 2004 I had automated the download of enclosures from the ITConversations RSS 2.0 feed provided by Doug Kaye. (Oh, itconv.pl was about 50 lines of perl code I wrote to automagically download the new ITConversations Doug released…)

And as Doug reminds us, before he was doing it Dave Winer and Christopher Lydon did some stuff with enclosures as well, which is what spurred him on. (Looks like I added enclosures links to AmphetaDesk on 2003-09-24.)

And Dangit, let’s give some props to Dannie J. Gregoire, who appears to be the one who made up the word podcaster.

So anyway, podcasting happened, and is happening because of a combination of many things, and many people. I see things like “Podcasting came about from Adam Curry, Doc Searls and Dave Winer” or “A month ago, the only podcast was ”Trade Secrets,” a daily news-and-technology talk show co-hosted by podcasting’s pioneers: former MTV VJ Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer.” and while Dave and Adam did a whole lot to move things forward, there were, and are, other people involved, and each one makes things grow a little bigger.

Do you think weblogging would be what it is today if the only sites doing it were the ones mentioned under ‘ye olde skool’ on tpoowl? Network effect people!

Ok, I’m tired, signing off…. Next time I’ll try to be more upbeat, or post something about the cats. ;)

(Note: It has been mentioned that Ben Hammersley is probably the first to use the term “podcasting” in public, though I still think it was Dannie J. Gregoire who applied the term to what we were doing in late summer 2004.)

Today as I was pulling out of the driveway I had to pause for this teen to walk by, so I started to fire up the Car MP3 Player (aka Rio 500) as I waited. I finally pull the car out and drive past him and see he’s carrying an iPod.

Can you believe it!? Me, a proponent of the iPod Platform… a veritable early adopter of podcasting actually in near sight of an iPod owner and user! All the while fiddling with my Rio 500… Sigh… Is there no justice in the world?

I thought to myself, is he listening to Daily Source Code? Evil Genius Chronicles? Or even our own RasterWeb! Audio? Aw, probably just some MP3‘s he stole from Steve Ballmer…

Perhaps it’s all just a ploy to get you to use this freeiPods referer link and get me that iPod…

Failing that, I’ve done some rough calculations, and have determined that with the ad revenue of this web site, we’ll be purchasing a (used) iPod sometime before 2006 rolls around…

I actually recorded an audio blog post about a month ago on the topic of indexing and searching audio files, but due to an equipment malfunction, all was lost, and I didn’t feel like trying to record it again. So I’ll write up what I had. (Oh, it was somewhat in response to Maciej Ceglowski’s Audioblogging Manifesto.)

Let’s go forward my friends. Forward, into the future! Imagine Google in 2019. I know, Google will be long gone by then, but as to not totally blow your mind, we’ll use Google as an example. Google has these different operators to use when searching, which might allow you to look in the url, or the title, or whatever, now imagine something like ‘inaudio’ or ‘invideo’ where you could found words contained within audio or video files? But how would Google (or it’s replacement) index words in audio files? Well, with some massive cluster of Linux computers of course, and some really smart software by really smart people. (Insert bit about advanced speech recognition here.)

While Maciej probably wrote up his manifesto, and then recorded it, most people will go the other way, first recording something, and then not typing it up. Yes, I said not typing it up. You shouldn’t have to, right? So that gives us these audio blobs (blobs, not blogs – ever notice how similar those words are?) that are these containers into which we can’t quite see into. Give it time. I’m saying 15 years because it’s a total guess, and if I look back at the world of computing and the internet of 15 years ago, I think we’ve come a long way.

Oh here’s another idea, what if the software or device you used to record yourself was able to do the speech recognition, and embed that in the file? Or able to recognize the background music or sounds and make note of them? Or add links based off of your mentioning web sites/urls?

Today’s MP3‘s hold metadata about the audio, but tomorrow’s format may hold the audio, video, and hypertext versions of something, all combined into one blob, fully indexable, and readable even on an old 2010 PowerMac G9.

So while rich media search is happening today (see Singingfish) the world of indexing the actual content, not just the metadata, is going to happen. I’m sure of it. It’s all just a matter of time.