Dave Winer has has a few notes about who "invented" podcasting. He traces his efforts at Userland to the January, 2002 release of Radio. All I know is that, in ICANN circles, we've been distributing MP3 sound recordings of DNSO meetings since May, 2000. We didn't automate the download from the 'net to the iPod (there weren't even iPods then), but "load and go" was what we were trying to accomplish. It worked too. We didn't invent anything to do it either: there was plenty of 'prior art' for downloadable "broadcasts" even in May 2000. What the rush of podcasting the last few weeks has shown though is that iPods and other portable audio storage media have reached sufficient penetration in the user market for the phenomenon to explode. That's the new thing. The incredible thing that Adam Curry and Dave Winer have done though is make the process easier. They've also pushed enough content to their existing audience to prime the podcasting pump. They got this thing to explode...and that counts for a lot.

If you want to subscribe to my audio feeds, you should add the following RSS feed...

http://blog.lextext.com/blog/audio/index.xml

to your aggregator or iPodder or whatever you're using to grab syndicated audio. I ran the feed through Dave Winer's podcast debugger and it checks out. Thanks Blogware!

A first for this site: a podcast...   more »

New Skype address: lextext.

I have recordings of the recent Senate hearing archived on the web site under a new "Audio" category. The first file (http://www.lextext.com/senate31july2003.mp3 | 21.8 megs) contains the presentation of the prepared statements and the second file (http://www.lextext.com/senateQA-31july2003.mp3 | 14.3 megs) contains the Question and Answer session. Not much happened.