DELTA SIERRA CHARLIE
Restoration of DSC, Daily Source Code Podcast RSS feed
In August 13 2004, Adam Curry, co-creator of the medium of podcasting, launched his first podcast, Daily Source Code.
Daily Source Code is a milestone in the history of podcasting, even though it was not the very first podcast recorded. Its last episode was aired on November 30, 2013.
A podcast is an audio programme that is focused on one topic, published in episodes, and is free for listeners to stream or download to their electronic devices on demand. Today, over 100 million people in the US alone tune into podcasts for information and entertainment every month.
Podcasting was invented by a software developer, Dave Winer, alongside Adam Curry, a former MTV video jockey and early advocate for Internet-related businesses.
Winer had previously created RSS (Really Simple Syndication), the system used in Internet blogging. Curry suggested applying Winer’s blogging technology to digital audio files. Also, since the market had just exploded with Apple’s iPod, Curry coded a programme that allowed people to download online radio broadcasts to the device.
Journalist Ben Hammersley coined the term “podcast” – a combination of the words “iPod” and “broadcast” – as a way to describe the new innovation in an article for The Guardian newspaper. In this way, podcasting gradually developed.
This is an attempt at restoring part or fragments of the DSC feed, through bits and pieces through Internet archeology, google-fu and brute-force, piece together what would be similar but not necessarily identical to what the original DSC RSS feed looked like.
It is an impossible task, but the impossible just takes a little longer ...
By scouring sources, some fragments has been found. A combination of sources and fragments could be used to rebuild parts.
Many small pieces of information was gathered through searches for RSS fragments, some were same stale copy of the RSS, some were snapshots from the live RSS as it got updated over time.
Episodes and other material were found when a BTSync link surfaced and lots of material gathered by somebody still hosting almost all episodes. btsync://BSOB4VLQZYXFUZV6RYXW4APTX3M2GY2CQ?n=dsc
Yeah, we dug up the first podcasting application, the little piece of software that automated the task of watching a folder and moving downloaded MP3's onto Adam's iPod .. "Automagically". You can find the source code in Applescript along with the writeup: iPod
I'd happily accept Pull-requests. Add, correct, adjust or tweak anything that you know or have fact, evidence for.
To get a better picture and something to reference to, a timeline has been established a DSC - Timeline.
A work-in-progress copy can be found here: daily-source-code.rss