Are we still in podcasting 1.0?

Hard to believe, but this was the original Fireside

I lead a sheltered life where I try and avoid self-described (or worse, other-people-described) ‘entrepreneurial geniuses’. So I barely know who Mark Cuban — the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and now progenitor of Fireside, a new live audio app thingamabob — is, let alone why he’s giving a keynote speech at Podcast Movement, a big trade conference in Nashville. But anyhow, it seems that his speech pissed a bunch of people off, especially because he said that podcasting was still “1.0” and hadn’t substantively changed since 2005. And, understandably, this made a lot of people who’ve been leaders and innovators in this space for the past decade and a half irritated.

But it’s sort-of what I say quite regularly. I don’t use the quasi-tech jargon of 1.0, but I do say that I don’t feel like podcasting is the finished product. And, like Cuban, I’ve long held that streaming audio has to play a big role in the future of podcasts (even though the Clubhouse implosion has slightly shaken my faith in the ease of retrofitting that to the existing structures of podcasting). But I think that the Cuban contra mundum controversy does raise some interesting questions, and whether podcasting is still in its 1.0 phase is complicated. Here’s my take:

Let’s break the chain of podcasting down to three key groups. First of all content creators (like myself), then funding…