The implications behind the ‘who named podcasting’ question

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What upsets me about Dave Winer’s re-fashioning of the origins of podcasting is not the debate about who got to the name ‘podcast’ first (as Winer points out, he heard this first on September 15th 2004, while Ben Hammersly talked about ‘podcast’ as an alternative to the then accepted term of ‘audioblogging’ on February 12th 2004).

I’ll credit Winer and the iPodder-Dev list for adopting the name podcasting for their project, sure. I’ll credit Winer for adding enclosure support to RSS (and that’s the big one, tech wise). But there’s no way that Winer can take credit for creating a name that was already in circulation. I’ll use Winer’s own words here from September 2004 (my emphasis):

At the core is an activity they call podcasting, a really simple idea with a powerful implication.

Or in his post this month:

In a phone talk, Adam [Curry] and I discussed this, and agreed we needed a name for the activity, and that Gergoire’s suggested term was pretty good, so we agreed to use it.

It’s the fact that, yet again, everyone is forgetting that it was Kevin Marks who did the first ‘podcatcher’ app that moved files automatically from an RSS feed to an iPod and demonstrated this at the Audioblogging conference in October 2003. And he demonstrated the working python script to Adam Curry. There were countless people involved with this media before the Winer/Curry PR machine got started, and there are countless more people since then that have created true value.

Winer may have built the first hooks into RSS and hoped people would exploit it (in essence the raw materials). But did he build up the infrastructure that went with podcasting? Did he think about how podcasts could be monetised? Did he sit there and sweat out technical details, procedures, rules of thumbs, build up shows, build up networks, use podcasting to make the world a better place? Or was it a growing and distributed community that worked on all these areas individually and jointly?

Winer has a place in podcast history, just as I do with my Bafta nomination for podcasting in 2005. To boil all those disparate stories of the wild frontier of early podcasting down to the actions of just the individuals on the iPodder-dev mailing list is disingenuous at best.