Podcasting in Minnesota

Podcasting first began in earnest around mid-2005, driven in large part by a guy named Adam Curry. Curry has often been cited as the “godfather of podcasting”—at least from the promotional side while a guy named Dave Winer figured out and delivered the technical capabilities to make podcasting actually work—and at least Curry is still active with his No Agenda podcast.

During 2005, Curry would often play promos from podcasters around the world. One local Minnesota tech visionary, Garrick Van Buren, had started up a podcast group called PodcastMN (site is gone but here is a link to an archived version). Van Buren graciously managed the show feeds, set up the meetups, and was the guiding light of the group. At one of our meetups he suggested that the group record a short promo and send it to Curry.

Curry never played it, but many of us forgot all about it (and mostly about Curry himself) and went on with our respective podcasting adventures. Some of us stopped our original shows, some morphed in to others, but I’ll bet everyone still listens to a lot of podcasts themselves!

The PodcastMN folks at this particular meetup were (in order of appearance):

• Garrick Van Buren – at the time he recorded the First Crack Podcast. Now defunct, he did record Open Loop podcast with a local tech legend, Jamie Thingelstad, but Jamie is now CTO at SPSCommerce and may be why the last show was a year ago.

• Cayenne Chris Conroy – he is still recording his humorous Teknikal Diffikulties show

• Joel Anderson – A Klingon Word from the Word podcast which he is also still publishing

• Sue Grandys – Uncomfortable Questions was a show I always enjoyed — it’s been said ‘everyone’ has a story and Sue always pulled it out of people — but her last show was in 2012

• Steve Borsch – Connecting the Dots podcast was one I wrapped up in 2007 in favor of the Minnov8 Gang podcast, a show that is now in its 269th episode

• Mike O’Connor – His show Sex and Podcasting was done as an experiment, one leveraging his background in community radio. He stopped in 2005 but then started up again with GeezerCast, an effort that entailed, “Podcasting to my unborn grandchildren.“

• Eric Larson – EricCast is his show and he’s been recording virtually non-stop since the beginning

• Tim Elliott – Winecast was his show and Tim blogs at this site too. He is also a co-collaborator and co-host (with Graeme Thickins, Phil Wilson and me) on the Minnov8 Gang podcast.

It’s been nearly 8 years since we were at that meetup and podcasting is still alive and well in Minnesota as well as nationally and internationally (see Remember podcasting? It’s back – and booming). How many podcasts are out there? Stitcher, a podcast listening service and mobile app, states that they are, “… the easiest way to discover the best of over 20,000+ radio shows, live radio stations and podcasts.”  More shows, and video podcasts, are coming online every day as well so this medium is still in its toddler phase. It will be interesting to see where this goes when it becomes easier for listeners (or video podcast watchers) to discover and stream new shows.

Give a listen to this short ‘promo’ to Adam Curry recorded in October of 2005 so you can hear just a handful of we early podcasters here in Minnesota, and how we positioned our shows:

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