Podcaster Adam Kempenaar’s first clue that something was afoot came when his internet host alerted him that he was at 80 percent of his bandwidth capacity.

Next came the note from a co-worker congratulating him for landing his movie-reviews show on the front page of the iTunes podcast directory. Then came the server crash, followed by a half-day of phone calls and negotiations to get it back up and running — and the e-mails, hundreds of them, from new listeners.

That was a year ago Wednesday, when Apple Computer launched iTunes 4.9, a version of its iPod jukebox software that simplified downloading, subscribing and listening to podcasts and, many say, began the medium’s mainstream ascent.

“It brought a whole new user group, a whole new set of listeners in touch with podcasting,” said self-styled “Podfather” Adam Curry, who is believed to have coined the word “podcast” and whose Daily Source Code show is cited as inspiration by many first-generation podcasters. “I remember how excited we were at the time.”

(Disclosure: The author of this report is co-host of The Strip, a commercial podcast covering Las Vegas that is referenced later in this article.)

The growth of the medium has been explosive ever since. Apple reported 1 million downloads of podcasts in the first 48 hours of the June 28 launch and now will only say that “millions and millions” of episodes of the 60,000-plus shows listed on the site are downloaded each month. By contrast, the largest podcast directory prior to the launch, Podcast Alley, listed just 5,400 shows as of June 28. (Podcast Alley now has more than 30,000 listings.)

Six months after the iTunes 4.9 launch, the word “podcast” was named the new word of 2005 by the editors of The New Oxford American Dictionary.
(more…)