A few have asked how iPodderX got started, and how I feel I helped kick start the podcasting...
Its no secret that Dave Winer and Adam Curry have had big ideas for enclosures for a long time, but to be honest I had no clue! I was a user of RSS via NetNewsWire to read blogs, but I had never read the spec or anything, I was just happy to see a way to subscribe to a few blogs instead of having to check them all the time. I didn't understand the format wars between RDF, Atom, and RSS -- I thought it was stupid to have all of these formats, as a user it just didn't make much sense.
Now you know that I was truly just a user, but something happened around this time of last year, I was missing TV shows of my favorite show at the time, CSI. I needed a way to download the shows via bittorrent which was the most common way to distribute TV shows on the net in an automated way. This is when I started to investigate the syndication specs for ways to attach a file or file link inside of them, I found RSS to be the only one to be well suited for this task has it has the enclosure tag which podcasting is built around today.
On June 1, 2004 I released Nucleus, and it got a bit of press from Israel for some reason, but Adam Curry was the first to post a comment on my small blog. At this point I subscribed to Adam's blog to see what he was up to and a couple of months later the first iPodder script came out. I thought it also was a great idea!
I took what I learned about RSS though Nucleus and rolled that into pyPodder which was a python version of the iPodder script with a better export to iTunes script. I wrote pyPodder without looking at iPodder as a challenge to myself. This time around the first person to comment about pyPodder was August:
Great stuff!
Works flawlessly.
I was ecstatic, but I had a problem... Podcasting was starting to really pick up steam and people wanted a lot of things I didn't have time to do. I needed help or I needed to help with another team. I joined iSpider (now known as iPodder Lemon) for a short period while August was taking pyPodder apart and making iPodderX. August asked for some assistance and showed me what he was working on and I begged to be apart of it. iPodderX became the first podcasting client to sport a GUI interface! August and I have worked well together ever since and are set to release 3.0 of iPodderX very soon, I can't wait!
Ps. I've been planning on writing this for some time, Andrew's account of his part in the podcasting history kicked me in the ass to finally write this :)