Bickering among ‘Pod Squad’

: Who is the “Podfather”?

And who cares?

A high-bandwidth donnybrook has exploded onto the Internet, as two successful entrepreneurs are waging a hissy war over who deserves the credit for “podcasting,” a new technology that allows computer users to create, and to automatically download, homemade sound files. The files can be played in a car, on a PC, or - hence the name - on an Apple iPod. Enthusiasts call podcasting “the radio of the future.”

In one corner: high-tech legend Dave “The Geek” Winer, who claims to have launched the first podcasts in 2003 when he was a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. Across the ring: Adam “Pretty Boy” Curry, a former MTV music presenter, tabloid celebrity in Holland (don’t ask), supercool helicopter pilot, and promoter extraordinaire, who just started hosting a Sirius satellite radio show devoted to podcast music, comedy sketches, commentaries, monologues, etc.

I’ll analyse the significance of this dispute in a moment. But first, the vituperation.

Winer - “does not play well with others” is my quick take - feels betrayed by Curry because they were once friends and close co-workers. Winer says that after a lengthy collaboration he thought he and Curry and Curry’s associate Ron Bloom had set up a business partnership. “Then I heard they were going into business together. They said they weren’t - that turned out to be a lie. I started podcasting and that’s when it took off. Everything they are doing, they are copying me.”

Winer lashed out at Curry on his website, scriptingnews.com, after reading a Wired News article about Curry that began: “They call him the Podfather.”

Last week, Curry fired back, in a withering send-up of Winer and his hang-ups. “Dave went off on me in an incredibly hurtful manner,” Curry told his podcast audience. “It’s all about credit, who created this, who created that. What Dave accuses me of doing is that I didn’t give him proper credit ... You just want to be famous, Dave, and you are. You don’t have to go asking for credit all the time.”

Mixed in with his anti-Winer remarks were two songs: the Lascivious Biddies’ “Famous” (“I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street”) and the Connie Francis standard “Jealous Heart.”

Who is right? Sirius puffery, which quotes Curry liberally, refers to him as the “originator” of podcasting, “the former star MTV VJ who developed podcasting.”...