If the internet stands for anything, the truth should be part of it. I looked at www.wikipedia.org the other day and was somewhat distressed by their article on podcasting. Given that the articles there are subject to continuous editing, some of the more egregious omissions may get corrected -- or not -- it seems that anybody can come along and change things. So I thought I would take a small stab at providing a quickie, encyclopedia-like definition of podcasting since I get asked about it so often.

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Podcasting is a form of on-demand media utilizing unattended software to download a media file to a local storage location for dispatch to either a computer based player or, more preferably, a mobile playing device. It requires a content provider to link to media in a standardized and repeatable way so that an individual user can use a client program to pull down the media reliably.

While it borrows its current name in part from Apple's Ipod, it was not an invention of Apple, does not require an Ipod and existed as a technique well before the term "podcasting" was coined. Contrary to some popular mythology, podcasting was not invented by a VJ. A variety of tools and techniques over the past several years have been utilized to deliver audio and video payloads to devices that can read and understand them. Companies like Audible.com have deployed technologies similar to the podcasting clients of today, but these were largely commercial efforts that were in aid of delivering subscription based content.

Modern "podcatching" software owes a great debt to the software development efforts of Dave Winer, who has contributed enormously to the effort of syndicating content over the internet. Mr. Winer's inclusion of an "enclosure" tag in RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) provided a means of pointing to a media file as part of a stream of syndicated content. The first regular user of this feature was Christopher Lydon, who with Dave Winer's assistance, began a series of interviews that were distributed from his blog as an RSS 2.0 feed in the summer of 2003. It was Chris Lydon who began "podcasting" regularly fully one year before the major surge of notariety for the technique.

The current popularity of podcasting probably has more to do with the number of portable players in use rather than the efforts of one or two people. Nobody is sure how many podcatchers are currently in regular use. It would appear that the popularity of the topic of podcasting may well outstretch its actual impact as a medium at the present time. Some shows purport to provide up to 80,000 downloads per podcast however there are no verifiable metrics or data to support these claims.

Distribution of large files in quantity over a short period of time (ie: a few hours) will lead to server and network problems without major investments in advanced internet technologies. For the time being it would appear that podcasting is ideally suited to distribution by small groups and independent communicators that utilize the diversity of the internet to distribute their targeted messages. Homogeneous delivery of thousands of podcasts by an existing broadcaster or even a well funded start-up seem largely unsustainable due to a lack of revenue generating models for the medium. Some "podcasters" have relied on micropayments over the past few years, however their number is small.

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Do you have anything to add? What clients or techniques did you use before podcasting got "invented"? I never thought the hacked up and horrible attempts at scripts that I wrote to automate the downloads of Chris Lydon's mp3 interviews could have lead to pop deification. I'm sure there are hundreds of us who feel that way and yet one man continues to take credit for something for which there was known prior art and available hacks. If we let podcasting rest on its current foundation of deceit, hype and hysteria we really are renovating Studio 54.

(I'm posting this without links initially.)