The earliest Lydon podcasts
In 2003, we created an archive of all of Chris Lydon's early podcasts. I had completely forgotten, it resurfaced today. Let's make sure we don't lose this important record.
by Dave Winer Tuesday, March 7, 2017

In the very early days of podcasting, I kept a weblog of all of Chris Lydon's shows. It was a Manila site and had an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures, with all the shows. The site has since been converted to WordPress, and the people who did the conversion preserved the feed and its enclosures. The podcasts are still linked into the feed after all these years. Excellent preservation work! ;-)

On Sept 3, 2003 I wrote a post on that site that points to a zip archive of all of Chris's early podcasts in a single 413MB download. The internet was slower back then, because I said in the post it might take as long as five hours to download. Hah. I just downloaded it in a few seconds. 

It includes interviews with (in alphabetic order):

Harold Bloom, Ed Cone, Daily Kos, Robert Fisk, James Gleick, Glenn Reynolds, Julie Powell, Stephen Kinzer, The Real Preacher, Elaine Scarry, Doc Searls, David Sifry, Slugger O’Toole, Polly Toynbee, Eugene Volokh, David Weinberger, and myself. He also has a full Howard Dean speech, given in Concord, NH, and interviews with people who were present at the speech.

I totally forgotten that we had done this. It came back to me via an email from a librarian who wanted permission to use these podcasts in an archive of early podcasting. Of course we said yes. 

People wonder why we should preserve the history of the web. This is why. Now fourteen years later we can hear those podcasts and compare them to what is being produced today. I believe this work will stand up well.

PS: As a backup I uploaded a copy to scripting.com.