Sunday October 24, 2004
Podcasts: blogging for the ears
The LA Times

First came pirate radio, then Internet radio. But in the past month, a new
way of circumventing the broadcast corporations has emerged: podcasts.

Tune in to these blog-based homemade radio shows and you'll hear any number
of things: a weekly hourlong program about board games; a daily amateur
photography show hosted by an Australian computer programmer; regular
people, unschooled in the ways of radio, talking about anything and
everything the way real people talk - clumsily, with curses, dead air and
all.

If you've never heard of a podcast, don't worry. Neither has Google. Type
"podcast" into the search engine and it yields results but also asks, "Did
you mean: broadcast?"

Well, yes. Sort of. Podcasts are broadcasts only in the loosest sense. They
don't use megawatt transmitters to send signals tens or hundreds of miles
like terrestrial radio. Listeners can't hear them live because they are
prerecorded sound files; they don't stream in real time like Internet radio.

A sort of TiVo for amateur online audio, podcasts are radio-style audio
files posted inside blogs as MP3s that can be downloaded to an iPod or other
portable player. And they represent the next wave of peer-to-peer content
sharing - unlimited by available FM/AM spectrum, untouched by FCC
regulations, portable and full of possibility.

An audio extension of written blogs, podcasts are almost exclusively talk at
present. They are also almost entirely hosted by tech-savvy "early adopters"
who are working out the kinks. But that is changing rapidly as the
technology for producing and distributing podcasts becomes easier to use.

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. Curry is the brain behind
iPodder (software that automatically locates podcasts); Winer is the
developer of the format that lets podcasts be found.

In the four weeks since "Trade Secrets" was born, the number of podcasts has
jumped to at least six dozen. Podcasts don't follow a traditional broadcast
model. They follow in the footsteps of blogs.

In the blogging world, success isn't measured in market share and ad
dollars. It's measured in the personal satisfaction of creative expression
and the organic growth of a relatively small audience via word of mouth.
Already, that word of mouth is strong. According to Winer, listeners to
"Trade Secrets" jumped from 1,000 to 6,000 in a single week.

"One of the reasons that blogging succeeded was it didn't just lower the
threshold of publication to zero, it made it as easy as e-mail." said Linux
Journal senior editor Doc Searls.

In 1999, when Searls first began blogging, he said there were just a couple
dozen other bloggers. Five years later, there are at least 4 million.
Podcasting, he said, has similar potential.

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=57&u_sid=1237093