Related link: http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/12/the_new_radio.html

There is a curious, delicious irony going on today - exactly one hundred and ten years ago, Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio transmission, the first non-naturally generated radio waves to propagate through the ether anywhere in the world, though changes necessary for making broadcasts work effectively had to wait for the efforts of uber-inventor Nikolai Tesla.

By the 1930s, radio was the Internet of its day, with General Electric and RCA and others the Microsofts and IBMs of the time, and radio engineers that generation’s geeks. Indeed, the parallels between the 1930s and the 1990s have been drawn by more than a few historians fascinated by the science and society of communications.

The circle’s come full round. The combination of syndication formats, digital audio compression, inexpensive recording solutions and of course the Internet has made it possible for anyone to create their own “radio” show, despite the fact that the media, beyond their aural similarities, are vastly different in their deployments.

The term podcast derives from Apple’s explosively popular Ipod music players, which with their intrinsic recording capabilities also makes it possible for such devices to also serve as the “content creation” portion of the cycle. The “cast” part is of course much older, deriving from broadcast - to cast one’s lines (or signals) all over the place without regard to who may be listening, and the onomatopoeic similarities between broadcast and podcast of course cannot be overlooked.

Certainly Internet radio has been around for a while - most commercial radio stations started broadcasting feeds to the Internet before the turn of the century, but its only been comparatively recently that this was accompanied by the corresponding use of a syndication feed that provided metadata for the feed and made it possible for RSS syndicators to very handily treat such podcasts in a similar manner to the way that it treated blogs.

This in turn has led a number of adventurous people to brave the podcasting waters, not only producing their own radio music shows (in some cases with music from indie bands well outside of the pale of the large conglomerates, in other cases with music with somewhat more dubious copyright antecdents) but it has also made possible the digital equivalent to the talkshow. Of course, since its the geeks that are generally the ones producing the podcasts at the present, its perhaps not surprising that technically oriented podcasts account for a significant proportion of this sphere. However, stand up comedy sequences and even radio plays are also becoming regularly heard on the digital airwaves.

Radio, digital or analog, is a potent medium. Radio engages the mind, the imagination in a way that is similar to the way that books do; indeed, there is a lot of evidence that reading forces an intermediate vocalization in the brain, and that it is this vocalization that helps us understand the actual word, not simply the recognition of the word’s shape. Thus when we read a book we are creating not so much a visual panorama as a theater of the mind.

Television, on the other hand, is a medium for the eyes, one that neither requires nor fosters deep analytical thought, but instead moves much lower down the brain stem to that part of us that reacts; our twitch brain, the one that seems to be even more hard wired for video games. There are times I wonder whether we are forcibly regressing ourselves by being so immersed in such a medium, but that’s a debate for another time and place.

I find, over the years, that the amount of time I spend watching television has diminished to near nothing, and indeed, watching TV or even a video for any length of time leaves me feeling queasy and disrupted, as if my brain has been turned off and is only just coming back online. I suspect this is why it has become a favorite medium for political discourse (hah!); we hear not the message but see only the messenger. Marshall McLuhan is dancing gaily around here somewhere, damn him!

On the other hand, I find it difficult to exist without the textured scapes of sound that radio provides, helping me to immerse myself in my own stories and thoughts while nonetheless feeling the contrapunctal stimulants of music and voice. For years, while cooking I would turn on the baseball game, grimacing or cheering as masters of the medium such as Dave Niehaus would weave an enthralling story each night, with every pitch and run and spectacular catch like a stanza in a modernized Homeric tale. One time my wife came in and saw me cheering a home run, and wondered why I wasn’t watching it on TV.

“Well, it’s like this. On the radio, its an epic, glorious struggle of young men fighting to overcome harsh adversity, personal doubt, and the cruel and insidious evil of masterful villains. On TV, its a bunch of guys trying to hit a piece of cork with a stick.”

Thus, it is perhaps not at all that surprising, given this inclination, that I would eventually decide to try the medium for myself. M. David Peterson (or Mark, as he personally identifies himself when not trying to differentiate himself from a thousand other Mark Petersons) had approached me about wanting to collaborate on a Podcast that would cover the state of the IT industry, with an especial focus upon the Internet, XML and those facets that he and I both eat and breathe on a daily basis.

Having said this, you’d think that this would be a simple proposition, but from the time we first broached the subject we discovered one obstacle after another thrown in our way. Mark normally lives in Seattle, but has been working from Salt Lake City on a contract, while I of course am on the lovely, but somewhat difficult to get to island of Victoria, British Columbia. Work schedules and school schedules conspired to make the time necessary to do even a remote recording difficult, and Mark spent a couple of weeks trying to get all of the equipment working together for more than a few minutes.

I’d hoped to do a broadcast before the XML Conference in Atlanta, but any such conference takes a lot of preparation to begin without having to find the time to do a radio show. Once at the conference, the Internet connection was abysmal at the hotel, nowhere near good enough, and my hope to record people fell apart in the face of my just wanting to talk to people without shoving a recorder in their face. I’m slowly getting the hang of interviewing, but the writer in me is somewhat of an introvert at the best of times, and interviewing has to be one of the most extraverted activities I can think of short of sales.

Finally, we managed to get the stars aligned long enough to do our first show, a production which wrapped at about 3AM with both of us just stumbling tired. This first show of eXplorations, our #0 if you will, is not one of the most spectacular pieces of production in the annals of the medium - we just talked (and argued) about browsers … where they were, where they were going, how they were being shaped by the forces of today.

It was as much of an experience for us in testing out the equipment and getting a sense of what it would take to put together a more cogent piece than it is good radio (or even good podcasting), though I have to admit that having listened to it after a couple of nights of sleep an separation, there’s some interesting bits there for anyone interested in the state of the industry, even taking into account my own somewhat nasally voice and an abysmal microphone.

Thus, without further ado: eXplorations, Episode #0: Browsers.

In order to subscribe to the show, point your newsreader or podcast software to http://channelxml.com/podcasts/explorations/index.xml.
eXplorations will, as the name implies, be jumping about from topic to topic, though likely with more structure than our first episode may indicate. It’s intended to be both a cogent look at the industry and also a more general, and perhaps even philosophical look at the nature of programming and how its affecting all of us, at a personal and societal level.

While the schedule will likely be somewhat erratic at first, we are planning on producing the show on roughly a weekly basis. If you are interested in having a particular topic discussed or even in participating in an interview with us (don’t worry, we don’t bite), please contact me, Kurt Cagle, and we’ll set you up to join in the fun.

Until then, don’t touch that dial!

So what do you think of podcasting and its future as the next “radio”?