Scripting News: Podcast Hotel

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Podcast Hotel

I described the idea of a podcast hotel in a Trade Secrets podcast with Adam Curry in 2004 or early 2005. The idea was pretty simple. Rent a cheap hotel in the middle of nowhere. I was thinking St Augustine Beach, FL. A few meeting rooms, a decent-sized ballroom with lots of tables and chairs, we truck in food, high-caffeine soft drinks, and a bunch of connectivity and wifi. Spend $100K and everyone rents their own room. Double-up if the price is prohibitive. Car pool. Swim in the ocean. Walk on the beach.

Spend a week there, writing code, blog stuff, doing podcasts around the clock. This was in the early days when you could fit all the podcasters in a dinky beach hotel. Then, basically -- you'd get infinite connectivity if you stayed long enough. Everyone would get to know each other, and there would be a dozen podcasts that were great, tons of great ideas, and out of that would come a roadmap for all of us. And a great memory of when we worked together, to help launch an industry, a new human activity.

Unfortunately it never happened, for a lot of good reasons, mostly that it's hard to get people to work together.

Now in San Francisco, tomorrow and Saturday, there will be a conference at the Swedish American meeting hall on Market St, that is called Podcast Hotel, but it's a pretty ordinary conference, not even an unconference, and nothing like the podcast hotel we envisioned.

I may stop in tomorrow or Saturday to schmooze a bit, shake hands, listen to a bit of stage-talk, and wonder What If.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:42 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Mar May