POD-101: Introduction to Podcasting

In 1945, A DJ for WMCA named Barry Gray grew weary of playing music on the radio and put the telephone receiver up to the microphone so he could talk to a bandleader, named Woody Herman. Soon Gray started accepting call ins by listeners and to this day he is referred to as the father of talk radio. Many radio stations in the fifties experimented with talk radio, and in 1960 two radio stations adopted an all talk format, and through the next few decades talk radio developed and became what we now know it to be, a few nationally syndicated radio shows with a mix of local content for listeners to enjoy.

In the late 90’s talk radio had fully developed and not seen much change until a bit after the turn of the new millennium, and the internet became a new inexpensive medium which allowed broadcasters to play a talk radio show for very little initial investment, often as inexpensive as a $10 microphone and the technology would do the rest. Internet broadcasters then decided to save the audio files from their shows and post them to the web so anyone could listen to them on their own time, and thus the very first podcasts were born.

The New Oxford American Dictionary was its 2005 word of the year, and defines the term as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.”

In October of 2000 users of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) requested the feature to have “audio-Blogging” as part of the software. In RSS 0.92, the first RSS enclosure allowed to have audio files automatically downloaded. Since then, a number of other pieces of software which do things very similar have come about.

How these pieces of software work is rather simple. Users will initially download a program such as Juice Receiver, and then they will search for podcasts they might like from a number of podcasts directories, and if they find something they like, they can click a button and the podcast receiving program will download the audio file for you to play on your computer or your personal music player, such as an Apple iPod or a Creative Zen.