Carrying the Lantern

Bill R.: Dave may be too sensitive here, but I must agree that I also would prefer the short history of what we now call podcasting, but what had no sexy moniker just a short time ago, got straightened out. So I'm going to offer to both he and Adam to draft a history, collaboratively, with them. Since the NYT just wrote about podcasting, we better strike soon. Here's Dave's statement of concern...

Should we do this the old-fashioned way?.

Adam Curry is my friend, and that's not a small thing for me, but it's not true that he solely invented podcasting. We were doing it at Harvard almost a year before Adam's first podcast. I started doing regular podcasts myself in June of this year. I did a podcast from the T at the DNC, and from Interstate 25 in New Mexico. All this before Adam started the Daily Source Code in August.

Now that the buzz has grown so much, which is basically a good thing, the distortion level has gotten super-high and Adam is becoming the sole inventor of the art and technology. Part of me doesn't care, but some of the stories that are coming out are incredibly mean. That I mind, a lot. (Sorry, I'm not going to point to them.) There have always been a lot of hitchhikers, even hijackers, as a format or protocol or activity becomes popular, but Adam isn't one of those people. We've been working on this together since Y2K. He's supported everything I've done, and vice versa. We're friends, and I hope to work with him for many years to come.

There's another angle to this. The iPodder software was the first software to handle enclosures specially for iPods, but Radio UserLand had support for time-shifted enclosures in its first release in January 2002. So to say that iPodder was the first software to enable podcasting, would be taking a fairly narrow view of what podcasting is. Even though Adam gives me credit for the RSS work I did, he didn't actually give me credit for the software, or for the podcasts we did at Harvard in 2003, and my own personal podcast stream starting this summer.

So there's this question out there -- should we just overlook that the story being passed around is wrong, and getting wronger every day, or should the bloggers and podcasters care to have the real story get out there? I'm tired of fighting for credit, but I'm equally tired of inventing stuff and popularizing stuff, which is really hard work, and having other people make the money and get the credit. More than tired, exhausted. And I'm already getting trashed for the work I've done here, believe it or not. That's more than tiring, more than exhausting, that's harrowing.

Time to go for a walk and listen to Woz talk about the early days of hacking and Apple.

[Scripting News]