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Did VoloMedia invent Podcasting?
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 by Dave Winer.
They claim they did, in late 2003. 
I'm certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their "invention." It certainly predates it.
1/11/01: Payloads for RSS.
Through out 2001 we did trials and experiments to learn how the protocol worked in practice. Radio UserLand, shipped in Jan 2002, was both a podcast distributor and a podcast client.
By July 2003, I had helped Chris Lydon boot up his series of podcast interviews with the new bloggers of the day.
All that happened before VoloMedia filed their patent application. Or so it seems.
ReadWriteWeb has a piece on the patent.
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Dave Winer, 54, 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 Berkeley, California.
"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.
Dave Winer
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.Last update: 7/29/2009; 3:18:56 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
