Submitted by johnh on October 6, 2004 - 13:41.

What the hell is this podcasting crap?

I was quietly ignoring it for weeks, secure in the knowledge that it was just Dave Winer plugging the enclosures feature of RSS 2 by other means (conveniently ignoring the fact that you can send encoded binary data in any XML format you like already by wrapping it in [CDATA] tags).

But today I see that the bullshit wagon is starting to get some traction - admittedly almost entirely at the hands of Winer and Adam-Curry-who-isn't-famous-unless-you're-over-35-and-American - with a couple of truly outrageous pieces of nonsense.

Exhibit A: A suspiciously-anonymous, wilful, pollution of Wikipedia. "They are published in an RSS 2.0 enclosure feed", no doubt because just downloading an MP3 won't work with an audio file. But the first line is just puke-inducing: "Podcasting is based on asynchronous bundles of passion". Wankers, wankers, wankers.

Exhibit B: Why Podcasting Will Save Radio. Get a fucking grip.

Let's set this straight for a minute.

1. If it's not live, it's not radio.
   If you have to download 30Mb of data before you hear anything it's - at best - audio-on-demand.
2. If it's not instant, it's not radio.
   Download it overnight to your iPod? "...and here's the news from yesterday. Get it while it's cold."
3. If only five people in the entire world are doing it and insisting all the while that you need a £400 piece of kit to play, it's not interesting.
   (This, of course, being something it shares with Digital Radio, but I digress.) "iPod, iPod, iPod, we have large disposable incomes and we're big fish in our vanishingly-small micro-famous pond." Yawn. Welcome to BRN - the Bourgeois Radio Network. Call me back when someone's listening. But they won't be.

We've heard it all before:

"DTP enables anybody in the world to put out their own magazine." Or in other words, DTP enables anyone in the world to put out a butt-ugly photocopied pile of crap using every single font that came free with Microsoft Publisher. Having the tool does not mean you can design something and it does not mean you can write your way out of a paper bag.

"Self-publishing enables anybody in the world to publish their book." Self publishing enables anybody whose vanity matches the size of their wallet to print a book which nobody wants to read. There's a better-than-average chance that the publisher didn't want to print your book because your book sucks. Get over it.

And now we have "Podcasting [spit] enables anyone to produce their own radio programme." Whoopee-do. You mean I can spend 2 hours downloading an MP3 of someone with a nasally whine mumbling incoherently into a low-quality microphone while driving around in his car? Really? Can I?

Speech radio is NOT just about talking into a microphone. It's about communicating a message to people. It's about good writing far, far more than it's about having a 'good radio voice'. This stuff has neither.

It's not radio, people. It's like downloading a talking book. Except without the writing talent.

[sigh] On the plus side this thing *might* have something going for it in the ongoing battle to 'save radio'. While the ego-ridden rich kids are concentrating on this little successor to Pointcast and its provenly-failed ilk, it means that they're opting out of the real future of broadcasting, where a million stations bloom without the restriction on frequencies inherent in the old model, and the best programming gets the biggest audiences. And if that means they won't be getting their goo all over our thing, so much the better.

More on the real story tomorrow. I've got a piece in the works due in by then.

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