ANYBODY OUT THERE?

By Erin White
Arizona Daily Star
April 7, 2005

Podcasting allows anyone with a computer that has Internet access as well as a microphone to create their own radio show that can be downloaded for listening at the subscriber's leisure

From a small, white-walled room that houses his scattered equipment and Lola, his caged sugar glider, Jaz Garewal entertains around 2,000 people a few times a month.
 
This isn't entertaining that requires table and chair rental and a trip to Costco. Garewal's tools? A microphone and a free bit of audio-recording software.
 
The result is "Skinny Bones on Air," a radiolike program the filmmaker devotes to educating other first-time producers.
 
Garewal records the show and then uploads it to his computer.
 
From there, subscribers automatically download new installments to their computers and can then transfer the files to an iPod or other MP3 player.
 
With podcasting, as his work is called, audiences can store the files in their iPods to listen to whenever they want, as often as they want. Think of it as an audio TiVo.
 
Listeners surf Web sites like podcastalley.com or ipodder.org to find the latest ways the Average Joe - or, in this case, Average Jaz - is exercising his right to free and flowing speech.
 
Like web-logging (or blogging, in 'Net lingo), which essentially allowed anyone who could type to start an online newspaper or magazine, podcasting lets anyone who owns a computer with Internet access and a microphone create his or her own radio show.
 
The technology for putting together a podcast has been around for a few years, but the idea didn't really take off until last year, when the former MTV VJ Adam Curry developed a script called iPodder, which Wired magazine described as the illegitimate child of the Apple player and blogging.
 
The term "podcasting" was coined by Dannie Gregoire, who registered the domain name podcasting.net, in September.
 
Curry's script, Daily Source Code, may have been the first, but it's far from alone now. Podcastalley, a gathering place/information source for podcasters, lists more than 1,400 programs.
 
Garewal, a 26-year-old video editor in Tucson, latched on to the trend early, sending out his his first show on Nov. 1.
 
His foresight paid off: 2,000 subscribers equals a modest hit in the podcasting world, where a couple of hundred listeners constitute success.
 
Another Tucson podcaster, Richard Leis, gets excited if 20 people listen to Radio Frontier Channel, the science-and-technology-based shows he started up in early February.
 
Garewal's listeners are after movie production know-how. He starts his show with a weekly helicopter update from his friend Steve Gladish, who's training to be a pilot at Fort Rucker, in Alabama. Gladish, who doesn't know anything about making movies, "makes the show less boring" and keeps it from getting too technical.
 
Garewal's style is unrehearsed, but he does start with a polished DJ intro he finagled through a bulletin board for radio broadcasters.
 
"Welcome to another edition of 'Skinny Bones on Air,' " says Garewal (who is married to an Arizona Daily Star staffer). "We're a little low tech today because my computer blew up."
 
He's introducing the topics for the day when his cell phone rings.
 
"I'm getting a call. From my dad," he says before moving back to discussing the long and strange hours shooting an independent film requires.
 
He asks his guest, Haley Pinyerd, who appears in his yet-to-be-released movie, "On the Cutting Room Floor," if she has any good or bad memories. After looking at the ceiling and cocking her head, she replies, "Ummmm, good memories . . . probably the day you bought us all pizza. We were starving."
 
Later, Pinyerd launches into a story about a shoot that went so long people started falling asleep in random places.
 
This off-the-cuff approach isn't unusual.
 
On "The Dawn and Drew Show," Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus, a married couple in Wisconsin, banter back and forth. The two have good chemistry and those Wisconsin accents that turn normal words like "womb" into funnies. They pepper the show with enough sex jokes and salty quandaries to entertain more people than any other podcast, according to podcastalley ratings.
 
Most of "The Dawn and Drew" conversations - like what they might do for a million dollars - aren't fit for print in a family newspaper.
 
Existing programs on everything from wine to fishing to cover songs are regularly updated, and a subset of the phenomena, dubbed "Godcasting," has even popped up for the religiously minded.
 
Trend and culture watcher Robbie Blinkoff, an anthropologist for Context-Based Research Group, a trend-watching firm in Baltimore, Md. isn't surprised at how quickly the trend has caught on. Right now, he says, our culture firmly embraces the concept of individualizing everything.
 
Podcasting allows people to do that while at the same time belonging to a larger group.
 
"It's this new definition of community forming," he says. "It's sharing, it's collaboration, but, at the same time, you don't lose your identity in it."
 
Like blogging, he says, it's another example of doing your own thing together.
 
Podcasting also allows people to filter information - an invaluable function in today's age of data bombardment.
 
Already today the National Public Radio program "On the Media," is available in podcast form. Now imagine having the latest basketball game or that 2 a.m. KXCI program you love ready for a portable listen at any time.
 
Trend-watcher Blinkoff says in the podcast world it all could be on the horizon.