DIY radio with Podcasting

At IT Garage, Doc Searls explains Do-It-Yourself Radio with Podcasting. Dan Gillmor says, "This is going to be a big deal, sooner than you think."

Doc writes:

Since the Net and the Web came along in the early and mid-90s, I've had a growing impatience with waiting around for stuff on the radio I might care about. Another way to look at it: All radio, commercial and noncommercial, including what we call the "content", was turning into the same kind of stuff-to-endure as the advertising and promotional announcements that paid for it.

But now most of my radio listening is to what Adam Curry and others are starting to call podcasts. That last link currently brings up 24 results on Google. A year from now, it will pull up hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions.

So this morning, here in my hotel room, I listened to the latest edition (September 27) of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes about the open-sourcing of Frontier, and a conversation between Adam and Dave about all the above, iPodder, Trade Secrets Radio and much more.

What matters is that all the standards we're working with here are open. They're the new and growing infrastructure for a new class of 'casting. It won't replace old-fashioned broadcasting, just as FM didn't replace AM, and TV didn't replace radio. And it's not narrowcasting, which is conceived as broadcasting for fewer people. It's podcasting. I'll create an acronym for it: Personal Option Digital 'casting. ...

PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.

I hesitate to promote it, because, as Adam points out, the NAB — National Association of Broadcasters — is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations on Earth: far more influential, even, than the RIAA. (For more about that, and other alternatives to traditional radio, read Scott Woolley's Broadcast Bullies, at Forbes.) And the day will come, perhaps soon, when commercial broadcasters, and perhaps even NPR affiliates, will feel threatened by personal podcasting.

So what the hell. Let's bring it on.