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Podcasting: Art Versus Commerce The founding fathers of podcasting have different views By Frank Moldstad

You know it's a new medium when you can type "World's First Podcast" into Google and get 64 pages of people who claim podcasting firsts, but no direct reference to who actually did the first podcast. The "World's First Podcast Consultant did a brilliant job of getting himself at the top of the list (but was missing from the search a couple of days later). Next came the World's First Podcasting Survey , followed by the World's First Podcast-only Novel. Further down the first page, up popped the World's First Serialised Radio Drama  podcast.

By contrast, it's easy to determine who gets World's First honors for more mature technologies such as photography or VCRs. A search for World's First Photograph reveals multiple references to one taken by Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826. The World's First VCR for consumers was developed by Sony in 1964, the CV-2000, but only a few hundred were sold, according to the website TVHistory.com .

Nevertheless, the two people who are generally acknowledged as the fathers of podcasting, Adam Curry and David Winer, are still at the center of its evolution. But now they're at odds over podcasting as a business model. Winer, a prominent software developer who wrote the RSS 2.0 specification that powers podcasting, is against commercialization of podcasts. Curry, best known as one of the first MTV VJs, sees a big opportunity and has launched a company to pursue it.

Daily Source Code's RSS calendar for August 2004.

Curry's Daily Source Code blog hosted the first podcast on August 13, 2004. But for now at least, the first show seems to be unavailable. The first RSS calendar link on the Daily Source Code blog leads to a "Page Not Found" error. So, we can't hear Curry's immortal words, "Watson, come here," or whatever it was he said.

But according to his accompanying blog text for that date: "While on vacation in Sorrento Italy, I was inspired by two audio files my download script had 'plopped' onto my iPod. One was an edition of IT Conversations from OSCON, where Robert Lefkowitz discussed the meaning of source code. The other 'program' was Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes about the debates between bloggers and journalists," he wrote. "Today marks the first episode of the Daily Source Code, available through it's own RSS feed as an enclosure."

Reacting to Curry's poscast soon afterward, Winer wrote on his own Scripting News blog , "Once you become a regular listener of an Internet radio program, like The Gillmor Gang, or Adam Curry, or even my own Morning Coffee Notes, and if you have an iPod or equivalent, you immediately want to be able to dock your iPod and subscribe to the channels, so you have to do absolutely nothing to have the latest installments of your shows pre-loaded on the iPod as soon as they're available. Adam has been saying this for a while, but until I became a subscriber myself, I didn't get fully get how important this is. The practices we have developed for reading weblogs and newspapers in our Web browsers apply equally to disconnected listening on the iPod." 

But now Curry has upped the ante. He believes he's found a viable podcast business model, launching BoKu.com with partner Ron Bloom for the purpose of "commercializing the podcast movement through marketing, advertising, commerce and other vehicles."  

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