On April 29th Adam Curry finally presented us his long expected ‘strategy cast’. This was going to be the unveiling of the Holy Grail: the future of PodCasting. Was it really?
I’ve been listening to Curry from the first PodCast he made he made last year and I have been enjoying it. It has made me look for other PodCasts and now I’m listening to stuff like ‘The Theory of Everything’ of Benjamen Walker, ‘Earthwatch Radio‘ and ‘Whole Wheat Radio‘.
The fun of this new technology or movement is that it has nothing to do with the big business, big corporations or expensive infrastructures. It is the extension of the open source movement, blogging and means total democracy. Everybody can do it and people are getting into PodCasting because they feel they have something to say and not because they want to sell you something.
Last year, in the spirit of that movement, Adam Curry together with Dave Winer, setup an open directory where everybody could advertise their PodCast. The result was that PodCasting skyrocketed even more and you could read about it in every newspaper.
Soon after that the first cracks began to appear. Up to than Curry had been working mostly with Dave Winer, the inventor of the RSS feed which technology is the core of this movement. Curry went to Florida to meet up with his friends Dave and Ron Bloom to discuss ‘the future of PodCasting’. The PodCast Curry made after that meeting sounded as if something had gone totally wrong. The fact that the PodCast directory was handed over to Curry, all Curry websites were moved off Dave’s servers and Dave name is hardly ever mentioned by Adam indicated that they must have disagree on something fundamentally.
After the ‘strategy cast’ and the news about Adam’s radio contract with Sirius it is obvious that Ron and Adam are trying the steer the PodCasting movement back into the arms of the big corporations and where the money is. If you read the recent comments on Dave website it’s obvious that he wanted nothing to do with that. That maybe one of the reasons for the splitup.
Next step will be that Adam is going to decide, more than what he’s already doing, which PodCast we should be listening to and which PodCasts will be sponsored via his PodShow firm.
Thank God Sirius can only be received in North America and the World is a bigger market than just the US. Let’s make sure that PodCasting is not going to be like those other “great products” from the US, like Disney World, MacDonalds, Coca Cola & SUV’s.