About 10 years after internet radio was first used, podcasting was birthed into being. Originally referred to as "audio blog posts" not “podcasts”, the purpose of this new media platform was to give content creators a new and engaging way to share their ideas digitally by allowing them to record, upload and distribute their voices to the internet as an innovative method of creating conversations.
The advancements didn’t stop there. Winer showed his software to a colleague, Christopher Lydon, in 2003. Lydon was a journalist who had been conducting audio interviews and inserting them as mp3s in his blog posts. Winer referred to this as “A weblog for the ears). Once Winer’s technology was incorporated in Lydon’s posts, readers were able to subscribe to the blog and access this audio content automatically. WIner then revolutionized the rss file world and created a software that enable the sending and recieving of audio files over the internet.
Did you ever notice how established media tend to give the same name to both the content and the device? “Radio” is both a box and a type of programming, as is “TV.” In 2004, “podcast” joined them, officially becoming the de facto phrase to refer to the platform that included the device as well as the content. The term was first coined in 2004 by combining the words “iPod” and “broadcasting.”
In November of 2004, during BloggerCon, Curry led a session on “audio blogging,” as well as “podcasting.” During that same month, the very first podcast hosting platform was launched and called Libsyn. The Public Radio International hosted the very first daily news podcast in 2005, and then in June of this year, Steve Jobs made the announcement that podcasts (an entire podcast directory) would be offered in the new version of iTunes. By December, “podcast” was the word of the year in the New Oxford American Dictionary.
Fast-forward to 2016 where, according to a Radio Ink study, listeners are downloading over one billion podcasts per month, making it one of the fastest growing media on the planet. Over the years, podcasting has evolved from being a simple audio file to having special effects and even intros and outros for branding purposes and engaging methods. Early influencers of podcasting took advantage of its low production costs and helped pave the way for other content creators to use this medium.
