if(typeof(media) != MP3) then media != podcasting

I find today's thoughts by Dave Winer, who helped co-found the podcasting model, interesting. He argues that if an organization/individual is distributing media in a format other than MP3, it's not podcasting.

Dave's post seems to passionately argue that podcasting should remain a non-commercial platform, as such would encourage and allow DIY'ers to enter the game, with an equal chance at success as a Fortune 50 getting involved. The fact that MP3 as a format is portable and freely available to create content, and accessible by anyone with a computer built in the last 8 years , and naturally makes it hard to do auto ad insertions (services like Fruitcast are trying to angle in here), promotes the community aspect of it. It's a scheme inherently including the little weekend hobbyist having his own ad hoc talk show out of his basement on a zero-budget, as well as the corporation wil millions to spend on equipment, facilities and talent.

But to me that's besides the point.

I respectfully disagree with my colleague because it's a necessity to defend abstraction within a platform. Podcasting is a means of distributing media over the Internet by way of referencing multimedia within an RSS feed. That's the commendable part and that's where it should end. I've received other formats in podcast aggregators of other audio/video formats (Windows Media, Quicktime, AVI, various MPEG flavors), and while the lack of uniform distribution method does admittedly make it frustrating at times, that's also the beauty of it. We can do these kinds of things with the freedom to change it up and use new presentation fomats within the same delivery mechanism. But productions not explicitly conforming to using MP3s shouldn't be alienated from the podcast community.

I look a little deeper than what file format a show's in to determine if it's a podcast. How abojt the MP3 productions that don't use RSS feeds, and just put them up on blogs? I'd say this was bad (or at least incomplete) podcasting practice, but podcasting nonetheless.