History of MP3 Blogs

Timeline

• 2000 October - RSS .92 announced, featuring RSS enclosure tags; the technology that powers podcasting. It was proposed by Tristan Louis, and implemented by Dave Winer, an author of the RSS format. Winer demonstrated the new feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News blog, becomming the first MP3 blogger to use RSS enclosures.

• 2002 February - Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog opens, with the intention of posting "special links, commentary, music recommendations, [and] petty gossip". His second post was all about music. It is currently one of the most popular MP3 blogs, and is considered to be a pioneer. Fluxblog has been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, The Guardian, NPR, the LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek.

• 2002 December - Fluxblog posts its first mp3s.

• 2004 February - Ben Hammersley coins the term "podcasting" in The Guardian. Other podcast evangelists run with the name, including Dannie Gregoire, Dave Slusher, Dave Winer, and Adam Curry.

• 2004 April - Benjamin Walker's "Blog Jockeys" story hits NPR, featuring Matthew Perpetua, Elaine Chang, Sean Michaels, and professor Justin Hughes.

• 2004 September - Dannie Gregoire registers Podcast.net, today one of the largest podcast directories.

• 2004 September - iPodderX is the first popular podcatcher with a graphical user interface, but others follow. iSpider rebrands their software as iPodder, and releases it as free software.

• 2004 September - Adam Curry launches the ipodder-dev mailing list. iPodder gets slashdotted.

• 2004 September - "The Music Blog Boom" is published in Rolling Stone. Soul Sides, Fluxblog, Music (for Robots), Gabba Pod, The Suburbs are Killing Us, and Cocaine Blunts are listed as the "Best of the Blogs".

• 2004 September 28th - Doc Searls begins keeping track of how many results Google finds for the word "podcasts". On that day, there were only 24. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18th. A year later, there were over 100 million.

• 2004 October - The first "how to podcast" articles begin to appear online.

• 2004 November - Blogharbor's John Keegan tells Internetnews.com, "Despite the welcome media attention to the podcasting phenomenon, there are probably fewer than a thousand Internet users podcasting at this point in time".

• 2004 December - Wikipedia user, BanyanTree creates the MP3 Blog Wikipedia article. It starts with a list of links to MP3 blogs,consisting of Cocaine Blunts, Fluxblog, Scissorkick, Soul Sides, and the Tofu Hut. A few days later, the list is expanded to include Aurgasm, Knobtweakers, and Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again. It isn't long before the task of maintaining the MP3 blog list is too overwhelming for a Wikipedia article.

• 2005 June - Apple adds a podcatcher to iTunes 4.9, and launches the iTunes podcast directory. Two days later, they announce that over one million people subscribed to podcasts via iTunes. Many popular podcasts see their subscriber numbers double literally over night.

• 2005 July - The first Podcast Expo is held, introducing the People's Choice Podcast Awards.

• 2005 - Podcast was named "word of the year" by the New Oxford American Dictionary

• 2006 April - The Music Blog Wiki is established. It is the first Wiki to inspire much collaboration from MP3 bloggers.

References

• Benjamin Walker, Blog Jockeys, NPR.
• Bill Werde, "The Music Blog Boom" Rolling Stone, 8 Sept. 2004.
• MP3 Blog in Wikipedia.
• Podcasting in Wikipedia.
• iTunes Podcast Subscriptions Top One Million in First Two Days