A month ago, as I was coming off a conversation about podcasting with a friend, I decided to do a little satire of the technology and created a new RSS-based media distribution technology: padcasting. I had an almost unused .Mac site that was begging to be used for something, and a mind for mischief.
As I continued the prank, I actually put some dev time into it, fiddling with the guts of Blosxom to leverage its static rendering features to automate the page generation for the “plog”. I substituted a set of scanned graphics for the usual text date headers, and *bing*, I had a completely (well, almost)scanned paper website.
What amazed me was that some people took it seriously. I had people writing me, asking questions like “what about accessibility?” and “what about search engines?” Well, duh. Those are the same problems facing podcasting and audio blogging. That was sort of the point in the exersise, no?
But then I found that I liked the format. I started playing with it some more. The great thing was that I was still getting traffic from Google–but only from people who were actually trying to find my site, not people who accidentally stumbled onto it from some stray keyword or some stupid trackback for all-nude Texas Holdem that I hadn’t deleted yet.
And I could do low-tech visual storytelling, still use hyperlinks within the content (which you *can’t* do in podcasting), and plog while totally disconnected and sync later without having to lug around a laptop or re-key.
Then these guys in Switzerland started to riff on the concept, and dedicated their site to me, “The Father of Papercasting”.
Maybe there’s something to this. Maybe it’s just a long-running April Fool’s gag gone awry. Either way, I’m sticking with it. I’m going to shift over to Pyblosxom so I can do some more automation…maybe I’ll even build a GUI.