science

History of podcasting

History of podcasting is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand History of podcasting rather than just read about it. In short: Podcasts, previously known as "audioblogs", have roots dating back to the 1980s. With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004.

Key takeaways

History of podcasting belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect History of podcasting to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of History of podcasting from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Podcasts, previously known as "audioblogs", have roots dating back to the 1980s. With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004. Today there are more than 115,000 English-language podcasts available on the Internet, approximately 4,550,000 podcasts available globally, and dozens of websites available for distribution at little or no cost to the producer or listener.

Precursors

The Illusion of Independent Radio is a Russian samizdat "radio program" created in 1989 in Rostov-on-Don and distributed on magnetic tape and cassettes. It was the first Soviet Russian prototype of the media phenomenon that was widely developed in the 2000s as podcasting. Before the advent of the internet, in the 1980s, RCS (Radio Computing Services), provided music and talk-related software to radio stations in a digital format. Before online music digital distribution, the MIDI format as well as the Mbone, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The MBone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs. Many other jukeboxes and websites in the mid-1990s provided a system for sorting and selecting music or audio files, talk, segue announcements of different digital formats. There were a few websites that provided audio subscription services. In 1993, the early days of Internet radio, Carl Malamud launched Internet Talk Radio which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert". It was distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one". A 1993 episode of The Computer Chronicles described the concept as "asynchronous radio". Malamud said listeners could pause and restart the audio files at will, as well as skip content they did not like. Some websites allowed downloadable audio shows, such as the comedy show The Dan & Scott Show, available on AOL.com from 1996. Additionally, in 1998, Radio Usach, a radio station from the University of Santiago, Chile, explored the option to broadcast online and on demand streaming talk shows. However, the development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launch of Napster, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software. Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been developed at Compaq Research as early as 1999 or 2000. Called PocketDJ, it would have been launched as a service for the Personal Jukebox or a successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player. RantMedia were early pioneers of various internet radio programs dating back to 1999 (What The Hell podcast, incorporating IRC chat and video before YouTube chat was created) and 2005 (Newsreal with Sean Kennedy podcast). In 2001, Applian Technologies of San Francisco introduced Replay Radio (later renamed into Replay AV), a TiVo-like recorder for Internet Radio Shows. Besides scheduling and recording audio, one of the features was a Direct Download link, which would scan a radio publisher's site for new files and copy them directly to a PC's hard disk. The first radio show to publish in this format was WebTalkGuys World Radio Show, produced by Rob and Dana Greenlee.

Timeline In September 2000, the first system that enabled the selection, automatic downloading and storage of serial episodic audio content on PCs and portable devices was launched from early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go. To supply content for its portable MP3 players, i2Go introduced a digital audio news and entertainment service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download episodic news, sports, entertainment, weather, and music in audio format for listening on a PC, the eGo portable audio player, or other MP3 players. The i2GoMediaManager and the eGo file transfer application could be programmed to automatically download the latest episodic content available from user selected content types to a PC or portable device as desired. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the i2Go company ran out of capital during the dot-com crash and folded.

The RSS connection

In October 2000, the concept of attaching sound and video files in RSS feeds was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis. The idea was implemented by Dave Winer, a software developer and an author of the RSS format. Winer had received other customer requests for "audioblogging" features and had discussed the enclosure concept (also in October 2000) with Adam Curry, a user of Userland's Manila and Radio blogging and RSS aggregator software. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92 by defining a new element called "enclosure", which would simply pass the address to a media aggregator. On January 11, 2001, Winer demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog. For its first two years, the enclosure element had relatively few users and many developers simply avoided using it. Winer's company incorporated both RSS-enclosure and feed-aggregator features in its weblogging product, Radio Userland, the program favored by Curry, audioblogger Harold Gilchrist and others. Since Radio Userland had a built-in aggregator, it provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called "audioblogging". All that was needed for "podcasting" was a way to automatically move audio files from Radio Userland's download folder to an audio player (either software or hardware)—along with enough compelling audio to make such automation worth the trouble. In June 2003, Stephen Downes demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files in his Ed Radio application. Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL or Webjay audio feeds.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with History of podcasting

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what History of podcasting claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to History of podcasting before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about History of podcasting ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of History of podcasting

In research: History of podcasting appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses History of podcasting in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: History of podcasting is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics History of the Internet, Podcasting, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for History of podcasting outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study History of podcasting in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what History of podcasting means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain History of podcasting out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is History of podcasting in simple terms?

Why does History of podcasting matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study History of podcasting?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on History of podcasting.