I've been watching the hype about podcasting with some wariness but it looks like it is here to stay. I just noticed that Greg Reinacker (NewsGator) and Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon) have announced that they will have better support for RSS 2.0 enclosures and thus podcasting. This weekend I also started the roots of getting podcasting support into RSS Bandit, Torsten will likely finish this work once he is done with the GUI for NNTP newsgroup support.
Speaking of podcasting and RSS 2.0 enclosures, I agree 100% with Joshua Allen's points in his post, History of Podcasting. He wrote
Dave Winer doesn't want to end up like Eric Bina, written out of the history of a creation he helped usher into reality. Adam steps up to make sure Dave gets credit. This time, there is less reason to worry. First, the WWW (which Eric helped enable) is now an independent and democratic public record which can triangulate the major media. And blogs, which Dave helped enable, are one source of that public record. The public record shows that Dave was planning “Radio” via RSS for a very long time. Dave has talked about these ideas for a long time, but I have to admit that I wasn't quite prepared for how fast it would actually happen. I believe credit goes to Adam for such a fast and effective bootstrap, but it also proves that all of the work on RSS laid a good foundation for quick incremental innovation. I also think that one of the major success factors was that the nattering nabobs ignored podcasting and dismissed it until it was too late to inject their stop energy. Many of the nabobs were so convinced of their own stories about “RSS is broken”, that it never occured to them that something like podcasting could be successful. They were so busy trying to reinvent RSS that they ignored an idea that Dave has been giving away for free for years.
Dave Winer doesn't want to end up like Eric Bina, written out of the history of a creation he helped usher into reality. Adam steps up to make sure Dave gets credit. This time, there is less reason to worry. First, the WWW (which Eric helped enable) is now an independent and democratic public record which can triangulate the major media. And blogs, which Dave helped enable, are one source of that public record. The public record shows that Dave was planning “Radio” via RSS for a very long time. Dave has talked about these ideas for a long time, but I have to admit that I wasn't quite prepared for how fast it would actually happen. I believe credit goes to Adam for such a fast and effective bootstrap, but it also proves that all of the work on RSS laid a good foundation for quick incremental innovation.
I also think that one of the major success factors was that the nattering nabobs ignored podcasting and dismissed it until it was too late to inject their stop energy. Many of the nabobs were so convinced of their own stories about “RSS is broken”, that it never occured to them that something like podcasting could be successful. They were so busy trying to reinvent RSS that they ignored an idea that Dave has been giving away for free for years.
There's a lot of innovation and interesting end user applications that can be built on RSS today. However many XML syndication geeks are prideful and would rather reinvent the wheel than use existing technology to solve real world problems.