Podcast Pickle

» see podcastpickle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Podcasting in early 2005 had no front door. There was an RSS feed with an enclosure tag in it and a few thousand people who understood what that meant. There was nowhere a normal person could go to see what existed. Gary Leland put up Podcast Pickle in March of that year to be that place, and for a while it was one of maybe four sites that mattered for finding a show.

I got broadband around 2006 and podcasting still did not reach me. The medium was overwhelmingly American and entirely English at that point, the shows were long, and I was on a connection where a forty-megabyte audio file was a decision rather than a download. What I remember of that window is MSN and forums, not a subscription list.

The Pickle was a directory that behaved like a community. It carried profiles and forums alongside the listings, it gave shows an embeddable player they could drop on their own site, and it ran a feature nobody else did: podcast family trees, tracing which shows had spun out of which other shows. Time put it on a list of the fifty coolest websites in August 2006 and the Webbys named it a finalist the same year. By March 2007 there were more than twelve thousand podcasts and vidcasts on it.

Apple had already put a podcast directory inside iTunes in June 2005, and that is the whole ending in one sentence. Every independent list spent the next decade sliding down the order in which people looked, until nobody looked. Podcast Pickle went down in 2015 after ten years.

~ the record ~

~ the family tree ~

The family tree feature is the part worth keeping. Early podcasting was small enough that lineage was legible: a show split, a co-host left and started their own thing, a network formed out of four people who had been guests on each other's episodes. The Pickle drew that as a graph and let you walk it. No directory since has bothered, because at the current scale the graph would be meaningless, and because the platforms that won have no interest in showing you where a show came from.

~ the january that was not the end ~

Leland announced in January 2010 that he intended to close the site at the end of that month. Then he did not, quite. The word at the time was that the directory might not go away completely and the forums might stay up. That is the shape a lot of one-person web projects take on the way out: an announced date, then five more years of the thing limping along because switching it off is also work.

~ the redirect ~

The archive shows podcastpickle.com serving real pages into March 2016 and answering with a redirect by that July. Where it pointed was podcastrepairman.com, another Leland project, which is a fairly gentle way to retire a domain: send the traffic somewhere you still care about rather than to a parking page. Wikipedia dates the shutdown to 2015 and the crawler agrees closely enough that the year stands.

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