November 30, 2005

Podcast History

I decided to take a hand at recording my own Wikipedia entry today. The results, for better or worse, can be found here with my rendition of Wikipedia’s entry for Podcasting. I was astonished to see how much the definition and history of podcasting had expanded over the past few weeks (then again, just look at how much Wikipedia itself has grown in the last year). I keep up with podcasting’s development on a daily basis so I have an incremental knowledge of what’s happening and what might happen. When you actually step back and take stock of what’s changed in this sphere over the last few months, you see the incredible strides the medium has made.

Personally speaking, I’ve never had such direct access to an emerging technology much less known at the moment that I was actually taking a small part in its development. Thanks to podcasting I basically got a crash course in how the internet of the 21st century works. We started doing our own shows at LearnOutLoud last February and that seems like a million years ago now. Back then we didn’t know if anyone was listening to these things or if this whole medium had any legs at all. Now even my mother knows what a podcast is, and she’s beginning to think about trading her walkman in for an iPod nano. I still can’t predict the future of the art much less tell you what the present state of it is at any given instance. If anything I’ve come to know that technology is no longer a static thing (if indeed it ever was) and I’ve become accustomed to this constant flux.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my reading for you. It has really placed the recent past into perspective for me and I think it serves perfectly as a podcast definition. It is also a valuable primer for all of the new listeners that join the podcasting community on a regular basis. With podcasting, the history books are being re-written every single day, and every moment of this is recorded by people like you and me.