I’ve seen this in three places now, so I reckon it’s a real buzzword: Podcasting.

The idea is simple:

1. Someone with an ego creates and makes available, MP3 (etc) content
2. Someone with no discretion enables a certain bit of software.
3. Said piece of software automatically loads said content onto the latter person’s MP3 player without any manual involvement on the part of the player’s owner.
4. The latter person (presumably) listens to the former’s content.
5. Hilarity ensues.

Those who gleefully pleasure themselves with ever-reinventing and finessing The Web/Blogs/RSS just love this idea; as it happens RSS seems to be a good technology for distributing the pointers to “podcasts”, as well as framing them in chronological order[1] and syndicating them.

Various Blognoscenti are frothing amusingly that this makes possible a new world order – Doc Searls for instance:

[garage.docsearls.com]

PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.

Or, to use an 80% analogy: It’s homebrew TiVO for Internet Radio!

From my perspective: as someone who uses the streaming content on [www.bbc.co.uk] with incredible frequency, I would love to be able to “timeshift” the programs by loading them onto my iPod for flights.

And I do, by using RealPlayer, WireTap and iTunes; it means I can take a MP3 of the Shipping Forecast with me, for when I can’t sleep while travelling.

But notice that word “timeshift” in the last-but-one paragraph? There’s the crunch. Go lookup the battles that various American companies have had regarding that topic and VCRs, and recast them all over the internet, but bigger, messier, and with higher stakes.

So: in summary, I think Podcasting is a bit of a Tamagotchi fad; I welcome any broadcasters who face-down the RIAA, BPI and other vested interests (ever noticed that “Desert Island Discs” is not available to the BBC’s ListenAgain users?) and make a long-term committment to make their programs downloadable.

More kudos still to those who make the resultant programs Podcastable. However, I believe that’ll be pretty rare.

On the upside: Podcasting could of course lead to an explosion of personal creativity and expression, Arthouse Audioblogging with undiscovered tortured geniuses releasing stuff in small quantity, developing their names, gradually finding fame and fortune… but you will have to wade through a lot of cack to find such.

Ever seen Open-Access/Community TV?

Further: one of the joys of reading ASCII blogs is that a lot of my friends and colleagues are people who write well, think interestingly, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to spend a long flight sat next to them, much less invite them to whisper in your ear for the duration of the trip.

To freely speculate on pre-emptive media backlashes: I wonder when the first “MPEG/AAC Decoder Overflow iPod Virus” will rear its ugly head, so the vested media interests can tell us about the dangers of Podcasting, and how this is a terrifying new threat.

Or maybe some terrorists will encode and Podcast MP3s that are full of evil alpha waves that will somehow force people into being mind-controlled zombies.

Now there’s an idea for a 1960’s movie remake.

—
[1] so long as the datestamps and timezones are formatted properly, eh Dave? 😎