The Podfather
This week the “people in the know” were all outraged to learn that the “podfather” (a pretentious name if I ever heard one) Adam Curry was caught editing the history of podcasting on Wikipedia. Curry tried to blow off the incident as his own ignorance of the Wiki editing system. Um, the so-called inventor of podcasting can’t figure out how to edit with Wiki? Yeah, right. In any case, Curry ended up taking a lot of heat from the blog and podcasting community. Dave Winer also added his two cents, I’ve seen Kevin Mark’s side of it from #joiito. So what do I think?
I think Curry has become obsessed with the title of “podfather” and sees this as a way to get back into the national spotlight. Really, before podcasting Curry was just the big-haired VJ from MTV who as long past his prime. Yeah, I know he did some “cool” internet things with On-Ramp and THINK, Inc, however, he was no celebrity then. Now, he’s back in wired, he’s on Sirius, and a million people are reading blogs about him. Ego gone amuck.
I don’t know if we’ll ever really know who started podcasting. Maddox surely has his own opinion, and a video of Kevin Marks showing of podcasting a full nine months before Curry’s ipodder script is now available. If I had to guess, I would say a lot of people talked about it, played with it, and by a stroke of luck, Curry became the podfather. No one should denigrate what he’s done to push podcasting, but someone needs to give him a kick in the nuts so he can get back to pushing podcasting again, and not just himself.
