I had seen Adam Curry mention the CNN article on podcasting and I read it . Fool that I am, I failed to notice that I was mentioned in the sidebar. That’s pretty durned cool. Adam liked the article and by and large it was good but it lost me right here:
They say podcasting does for audio what TiVo did for video, with more diverse, grassroots programming you build yourself by subscribing to RSS feeds.
I used something like podcasting before it was cool, at a fee-based site, Audible.com.
Audible is an audio bookstore, and I’ve been hooked on audio books for years.
Since podcasting is defined by the automatic handling, saying that you used to do this a long time ago by listening to audio books is stretching the point pretty thin. This is kind of like when weblogging really hit as a phenomenon and folks bent themselves into pretzels trying to find a way to redefine the term such that they were a proto-blogger. “I used to weblog years ago, except I did it longhand in a notebook with a little lock on it.” For the record, I’ve been listening to captured internet radio of one form or another on portable devices for years and yet I don’t consider that I was involved in podcasting prior to August of this year. The defining aspect of podcasting, the automatic handling, just hadn’t been built before then.
All that said, it would be quite cool if Audible.com implemented some form of podcasting by allowing you to subscribe via RSS to your own bookshelf, not unlike what IT Conversations does with allowing you to subscribe to your queue. Especially for periodic subscriptions of shows or periodical, having them show up automatically would rock.
