Datasheet

Winer’s initial choices about podcasting’s technology reflect that he served the poison pill. Yet, by the

time he wrote this, podcasts were being delivered in many different file formats, including Quicktime

files that played on Video iPods from Apple Computers Inc. The cat was out of the bag, and new uses

must and will be found for podcasting or users will route around the rigid boundaries.

In fact, if podcasting is going to remain relevant — and we think it will — the technology will be

extremely pliant, supporting many file formats and many more business models. Had the inventors

of the personal computer decided what kind of projects it could be used for, the PC would have

been designed for failure. In fact, one of the fathers of the PC, Alan Kay, says today that the prob-

lem holding back the personal computer today is reliance on the narrow range of ideas he helped

think up in the 1970s.

Why Podcasting Is Different

The unique thing about podcasting is the flexibility it enables for both producers and the audience.

Both producers and audiences enjoy immensely more freedom today than they did in the broadcast

schedule. Creative people, whether voice talent, writers, or ordinary people with a passion — about

almost anything, from their hobby to the history of their family or a project at work — can find an

audience. Even small audiences are eminently reasonable in podcasting, because the costs of pro-

ducing and delivering programs are so low that any niche interest can be served. We saw the same

phenomenon in publishing with the advent of computer desktop publishing, when a flowering of

small magazines suddenly appeared to serve incredibly focused markets and newsletters sprouted

in every industry and at every company.

Listeners, too, are freed in an important way: The schedule they listen on is in their hands, not

controlled by the broadcaster who delivers the shows. Podcasts allow the complete reordering of

the listening day, providing users who download programs the ability to start and stop a program

at will, to listen at their leisure to programs at any time of the day or night. The result of this

bidirectional freedom is a media environment where programming is offered by producers and

selected and listened to by people on a fluid schedule and under a far broader range of business

models than were possible before. Add to this easy-to-distribute environment the element of

portability — a podcast can be loaded onto a variety of portable devices, from MP3 players to wire-

less telephone handsets — and the location of the listener has been radically transformed. No

longer does listening to a program on the Web mean having to be tethered to your computer. Just

export the show to your iPod and go.

Thousands, if not millions, of different messages can be delivered through a podcast. What blogs

are to the newspapers, podcasts are for radio, deconstructing the strict order of the mass-media

marketplace. Where radio and audio production have been rarified professions in the mass media

era, the relentless march of Moore’s Law has brought the tools and distribution networks that made

those mass media expensive to experiment with and compete in to a generation known as podcast-

ers. This book is your guide to producing programs and forging new channels of communication

between your coworkers or family that are as easy to use as e-mail.

Podcasting: Where It Came From and Where It’s Going

Part I

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