The creation story of podcasting
A two-part story about the creation of podcasting and the reporting thereof. It's complicated. Far too complicated for a single blog post. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
by Dave Winer Sunday, April 23, 2017

An addendum to the creation story of podcasting.

At the end of 2004 the creation story was MTV star creates podcasting. Of course that was wrong, it was a partnership. And many others contributed. It wasn't an act of invention or a single person's accomplishment. Lots of people contributed.

Lately Chris Lydon has been getting much-deserved credit for his role in the bootstrap. For a good year he was the leading edge of podcasting. A lot of today's most popular podcasts owe Chris for his inspiring early work.

Steve Gillmor and Doug Kaye also did their part.

And don't discount Adam Curry's contribution (the MTV star). Once he got his podcast going a whole community of podcasters followed. Many of today's podcasters follow the form he pioneered too, which is vastly different from Lydon's.

Me? I was the geek and the showrunner for the first few years. I held the conferences and twisted the arms and wrote the code. If you don't think there's a lot of that in bootstrapping a new medium, well you don't know how it works.

Part II

One of the reasons the story of podcasting is so scrambled is that no one has done a thorough and patient reporting of it.

Reporters sell a story, and have a fixed amount of time to report it, so they interview one or two people, read the Wikipedia article about podcasting, and repeat the same mistakes the previous reporters made. I've seen this happen in other areas, mistakes in Wikipedia become an alternate truth, long before Kellyanne Conway and DJ Trump

Until recently the standard podcasting story left a whole year out, and Chris Lydon's contribution. It's as if there were a blank unfilled spot in time when nothing happened in podcasting, yet the opposite is true.

i've just been casually looking for stuff in various archives, including the BloggerCon websites, and came across a gorgeous description of podcasting by Adam Curry written in Sept 2004, in advance of BloggerCon III in November. I asked all discussion leaders to do this. He told the story in a very clear way from his point of view, as a Dutch guy (you can totally hear that), a radio pirate, and somewhat bitter visionary (as all visionaries become, given enough time).

BTW, it's signed Ron Bloom, but I'm pretty sure it's Adam who wrote it. It sounds like him. And as far as I know this document has never been cited in a story of the development of podcasting.