Bickering among the '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 analyze 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." That's an exaggeration, although it is acknowledged that Curry's marketing hustle put podcasts on the Big Media map. To be fair, Curry has often cited Winer's contributions. In his history of podcasting posted on ipodder.org, the Grand Central Station of the tiny podcast world, Curry repeatedly credits Winer with helping him navigate the headwaters of the fledgling technology.
Some of the acrimony between Curry and Winer concerns commercialism. ''We have philosophical differences," Winer says. ''They're typical Hollywood guys. I don't take money, period."
There is an outside chance that podcasting could be the Next Big Thing, or maybe one of them. In April, radio conglomerate Infinity Broadcasting launched an all-podcast radio station, KYOU in San Francisco. The category is ''do-it-yourself" radio. All of KYOU's ''programs" are podcasts sent in by listeners. Sample content: ''Xenophobia and the Jewish Druid: An introduction to a story and a story about a holloween [sic] experience in a Los Angeles park, the world's stupidest mugging and of course, xenopohobia [sic]." So far, NPR doesn't have much to worry about.
Curry's four-hour show on the subscription-based Sirius network ratchets up the commercial stakes for ''amateur" podcasters. Although Sirius claims to broadcast ''100 percent commercial-free music," Curry's broadcast is labeled a talk show and carries ads. The Apple iTunes online music store will soon be adding easy-to-download podcasts, which seem destined to join the category of things that were once free and cool and now are not. Well, not free anyway.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
