`Podfather' plots a radio hit of his own

"He's building an audio version of MySpace.com," said Mark Ramsey, president of Mercury, a San Diego-based radio research and marketing company. "Whether he can pull that off in the mass market, who knows?"

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A more democratic playlist

NOT surprisingly, Curry is confident he can. Like all great rebellions, his is one that pits an army of tech-savvy Davids against a lumbering and bland Goliath as represented by the nation's media conglomerates. To Curry and his followers, corporate media isn't necessarily evil -- well, maybe a little evil -- but it certainly can't be trusted to judge what we should see and hear. And as media companies, particularly in radio, have merged, they've become bloated and, even worse, boring, argues Curry.

In place of a mainstream media, or at least alongside it, will be companies like his and the others that will inevitably follow, Curry believes. They offer what the mainstream media never would or could -- a way for regular folk to create and consume their own media content.

"We don't have water cooler conversations anymore," said Curry. The mainstream media "is so diluted, so packaged, so predictable. There's so very little that is new or interesting. We've lost a lot of social connectedness that used to come from that. And what we're building here is a social media network for human beings."

When asked about profitability -- \o7the\f7 question in podcasting and all new media, for that matter -- Curry is somewhat vague. He gave no firm date for showing solid returns. But PodShow is attracting advertisers, he noted, a recent coup being the signing of paper product company Dixie for $200,000 as a sponsor for "MommyCast."

PodShow also has reeled in impressive venture capital money as well. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital -- the parties who invested in Yahoo and Google before most people ever heard of an Internet search engine -- have pumped nearly $9 million into PodShow.

"Radio is very, very big business, but they've gotten too corporate," said Mark D. Kvamme, a Sequoia Capital partner. "The writing is on the wall. Look at user-generated sites like MySpace and U2 -- they didn't exist three years ago. PodShow didn't exist 18 months ago, and sending audio over the Net makes a lot of sense right now."

But podcasting, which has shown explosive growth in its approximately two years of existence, still isn't the Web. While most people have probably heard of "podcasting," far fewer understand it and even fewer actually engage in it -- either as an actual podcaster or a listener.