What the history of podcasting means to you

When people hear the word history they tend to think of their old school lessons that taught them about what has happened in the past. Most people when they think of history tend to think of events that happened a long time ago, not something that happened in the last few years. This is one of the reasons that people have a hard time thinking about the history of podcasting because it came about in 2004.

While not everybody finds history useful the truth of the matter is that history is extremely valuable. History is important because it teaches us about things that have happened in the past and how that has affected the world we live in. In fact history has created the world we live in today because it teaches us about the mistakes we have made in the past and teaches us how we can prevent making these mistakes in the future.

When talking about objects people don't really think their history affects us like past events have, but that is far from the truth. Knowing about the history of an object, such as podcasting, allows us to understand how it was created, which in turn will allow us to make improvements on the product. Depending on who you are the history of podcasting can mean a variety of different things, such as important information for creating your website, information for your next school report, etc. Regardless of what you use the history of podcasting for it means something to everybody because it shows us how we have progressed from just a few years ago.

To understand the history of podcasting you will have to look back to the introduction of the internet because without the internet podcasting would never have been discovered. When the internet first became popular many people started doing something called blogging. Blogging allowed for anybody to share their feelings or opinions on any subject and share it with anybody who was interested. But the problem was that keeping track of your favorite blog was nearly impossible. This is where Dave Winer enters the picture, he created a type of news feed technology that allowed you to subscribe to your favorite blog and with that subscription you were automatically updated when new information was posted so you could go to the site and download the latest updates or blogs. This program that Dave Winer created is known as an RSS feed.

Once blogs and RSS feeds were well established the world was introduced to faster connection speeds and the ability to transfer larger pieces of information. From these advancements people began to create audio blogs, which were just like blogs but rather than typing out their thoughts the people simply recorded them and posted it on to their website as an MP3 file. Now audio blogs had one slight problem and that was everything had to be done manually, users had to go to the website to check for new MP3 files that they could download and once they were able to download the MP3 files they had to sync them to their MP3 players by hand. That is when Adam Curry approached Dave Winer about updating his RSS feed to include "file enclosure" to the feeds technology. After this was completed Adma Curry began writing the first podcasting software, which checked for new updates, read the file enclosure to see where to go and download the audio file, and then after downloading the audio file it was automatically transferred to an iPod.

While this is just a simple history on podcasting it allows us to see how podcasting first came about, which means that we can now understand where it can go in the future. If we didn't know the basic history of podcasting we would not be able to further that technology and improve upon it.