First came pirate radio, then Internet radio. But in the last month, a new way of circumventing the big, bad broadcast corporations has emerged: podcasts.
Tune in to these blog-based homemade radio shows and you'll hear any number of things: a weekly hourlong program about board games; a daily amateur photography show hosted by an Australian computer programmer; regular people, unschooled in the ways of radio, talking about anything and everything the way real people talk -- clumsily, with curses, dead air and all.
If you've never heard of a podcast, don't worry. Neither has Google. Type "podcast" into the search engine and it yields results but also asks, "Did you mean: broadcast?"
Well, yes. Sort of. Podcasts are broadcasts in only the loosest sense. They don't use megawatt transmitters to send signals tens or hundreds of miles like terrestrial radio. Listeners can't hear them live because they are prerecorded sound files; they don't stream in real time like Internet radio.
A sort of TiVo for amateur online audio, podcasts are radio-style audio files posted inside blogs as MP3s that are then automatically downloaded to an iPod or other portable player. And they represent the next wave of peer-to-peer content sharing -- unlimited by available FM/AM spectrum, untouched by FCC regulation, portable and full of possibility.
An audio extension of written blogs, podcasts are almost exclusively talk at present. They are also almost entirely hosted by tech-savvy "early adopters" who are working out the kinks. But that is changing rapidly as the technology for producing and distributing podcasts becomes easier to use for the technically disinclined.
Under the radar
A month ago, the only podcast was "Trade Secrets," a daily news and technology talk show co-hosted by podcasting's pioneers: former MTV VJ Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer. Curry is the brain behind iPodder (software that has replaced the time-intensive work of finding and manually downloading podcasts by automatically locating them for the listener); Winer is the developer of the file format that allows the podcasts to be found.
"When MTV just started, it was really exciting because here was this new thing. We didn't know the format," said Curry, 40, drawing a parallel between the make-it-up-as-you-go-along early days of MTV and the infancy of podcasting. "Of course, it was mostly, 'I'm totally into this! These guys rock!' But it was pretty honest in the beginning, and I think because podcasts are controlled by no one and everyone can do whatever they want, it's just refreshing."
