How It Started

Over the past month, a number of people have been working together on a concept that has been dubbed participatory podcasting. What is it and why is it so interesting?

Well, the idea started with Michael Lenczner and me sitting at Laïka, a local nerd hangout, talking about something no one seemed to give a damn about, namely del.icio.us' abilities as a dynamic podcast feed creator. This was back in November or so. Both Michael and I saw potential, and I decided to give it some thought. I experimented a little with del.icio.us and wondered what could be done, and how this could help podcasting.

I started thinking - couldn't this, maybe, allow podcasting to be opened up a little? Right now, the current infrastructure is: one podcaster talks to a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people. Let's flip that on its side and let people talk to people instead. Everyone. No gatekeeper whatsoever. Del.icio.us can help us do this.

There was a problem though: del.icio.us was broken. This was at the time when the company had been acquired by Yahoo!, and a bunch of stuff was being moved here and there. More importantly (to us), tag bundles (the ability to combine one set of tags with another) were not functioning, and continued to fail at their promise for a number of months. I found myself checking back every little while, to see if they were working again, but they inevitably were not. I was frustrated.

On February 7th, I read a post on the blog Life in cloudspace (linked from Dave Winer) that got me interested very quickly again. I began to realize that no one had been working on these ideas for a number of months. I was realizing that if I didn't get started on this, other people might move it in other directions and I wouldn't be involved. I was kind of panicking, so I checked back at del.icio.us - and it was working! So late that night I wrote this post and hoped that people would be interested. I showed it to a bunch of people over the days that passed, and got a lot of positive responses and, along with it, a few great people that were interested in participating (noted in a previous post).

The actual conversations that have developed since then can be found here, and the RSS feed is here. Please listen in and subscribe - I promise you'll hear some interesting ideas.

Anyway, that's enough for now, so I'll just publish this and write more in a little bit. Hope you don't mind. :)

By the way, the subscription link for this blog is here. I always found it hard to find on Blogger, so I'm just putting right there for everyone to see.