Ah, the battle over the history of podcasting has reared its ugly head once again. Gotta check my calendar. Is it a full moon already?

I’ve had a lot of email in the past 24 hours from people who want me to weigh in on the revisionist history issue. Personally, like most people, I really don’t care who invented it. But maybe that’s just because I didn’t invent anything. 🙂 Oh, wait! I was the first person to coin the phrase “podcatcher.” Is that worth something? Should I have my own page in Wikipedia?

I can provide a few factual dates to which I can attest first hand:

• First IT Conversations program:6/3/03, an interview with Phil Windley
• First IT Conversations podcast: 9/24/03, about a year before most of the podcasts you hear about. I was inspired by Dave Winer’s RSS feed of Chris Lydon’s MP3 interviews. I hand-copied Dave’s XML to create my own feed with enclosures.

But let’s not forget some of the other true pioneers, some of whose names are rarely mentioned in this discussion. A partial list might include:

• Jish Mukerji (first audioblogged August 2001)
• Harold Gilchrist (an audioblogging evangelist who first audioblogged January 2002)
• Adam Curry (audioblog post ~October 2002)
• Noah Glass (introduced AudBlog in February 2003)
• Eric Rice (Audioblog)
• Rob and Dana Greenlee (WebTalk Guys, going waaay back)
• and lots of people who published spoken-word audio on the ‘Net as far back as the early ’90s

Thanks to Harold who documented some of these people and dates earlier this year.