I let the From the Basement (FTB) domain expire last week. FTB was a podcast that Bart Pursel, Chris Millet, and I did on a weekly basis from November 2004 through March 2005. This was back when Google would return the, “did you mean broadcasting?” question when one would attempt to find information on it all. We started FTB really as a research project — I wanted to know about RSS enclosures and I really wanted to understand what it took to create a “podcast show” like Adam Curry had. What happened was a very fun weekly event that ended up gaining some listeners … once we realized people were listening we started to feel both terrified and amazed all at the same time. It was hard to let it go, but at the end of the day we weren’t using it and I have enough podcasting in my life at the moment.

Every week we would gather in my basement to create the show. Over the weeks it got very complicated … we couldn’t just fire up GarageBand, we had to get really creative with the whole thing. By the time we figured out how to really pull it all off we were using three laptops, a 7 band equalizer/mixer, two microphones, and a Kaos sound effects pad — and that was just the hardware side. For software we would routinely bring in “guests” using iChat A/V or Skype, iTunes to mix in music, a web browser to find interesting information and to mix in sounds from websites, and Audio Hijack Pro to record it all. Let’s just say setup took us a while.

At any rate, the shows got better and better, but more outrageous each week. We ended up taking them down in about June 2005 when it was clear they were not safe for office consumption. It was a great time and really laid the groundwork for our understanding of the power of the podcast. In our minds we were radio personalities … we also feel like we were the first vodkasters out there!