Last Friday, Adam Curry kicked off his new all-podcast radio show with Sirius — 4 hours each weekday, hand-picked selects from the pod-o-sphere. Here's a Q&A I filed for Wired News with Curry from his home in Guildford, UK.
WN: The audio on your new radio show will be donated by listeners. What kind of material do you expect?
Curry: People will be submitting podcasts, promos for podcasts you can find online, podsafe music, mashups, sound-seeing tours, maybe narrating a walk down the street in their neighborhood. These are things we haven't heard on radio for the past 20 to 30 years. Using the theater of the mind, using sound as art — this is something we've forgotten how to do in radio.
WN: Tell me about the very last podcast you created. What was in there?
Curry: I just uploaded one today (.mp3). I talked about the Dutch Marines who stopped by my house last night.
I talked about the Sirius show, and about an audio trivia quiz that Jan Polet does. He selects three songs, and you have to identify who sings them. I suck at it, but I love that there are people out there sitting on subways, with their headphones on, screaming, "That's the Doobie Brothers!"
Link to Wired News interview.
Previously: Xeni Tech on NPR: Pod People invade radio
Update: For the record — Adam Curry is a gracious man. During this interview, he was only too willing to point to the valuable contributions of others — Dave Winer, Christopher Lydon, and others — in creating / scripting / evolving the technology and the medium we now call podcasting. During the course of our Q&A, Curry spoke at length about Mr. Winer's work, and the work of many coders and podcasters. For reasons of space and focus, not all of these comments were published in Wired News. This is a practice which people who work on "dinosaur blogs" like to refer to as "editing." But since some bloggers have asked, I'd like it to be known that Curry spoke generously and selflessly about the accomplishments of others. He didn't call himself a "podfather" or "pioneer" — I did. And neither of those terms of respect are exclusive — in other words, there can be more than one innovator, and indeed, there are. This interview was not intended to be the be-all, end-all history of podcasting or RSS. It was simply a conversation with Mr. Curry, about the interesting work he's done in this field, on the occasion of Sirius launching the world's first "all-podcast" satellite radio program, with him as host and curator. And that is all.
To paraphrase Jeff Tweedy: Respect is not a loaf of bread. Its expression does not create scarcity. Extending it to one person does not make any less of it available to share with deserving others.
