I’m catching up on podcasts that have been backing up on my DMP (digital media player—my own TLA). I was struck by the number of podcasts that have referenced a controversy that has been growing ever since Pod Prince Adam Curry and his partner, Ron Bloom, launched BoKu Communications and PodShow, BoKu’s first offering.

The gist of the outcry is this: “Don’t let money corrupt podcasting.” There are concerns that some podcasting content will be restricted to those who pay for it, that PodShow will over-produce podcasts, that commercial interests will take over the enthusiastic amateur podcasting base. Even Todd Cochrane added his $.02 on his April 1 show, decrying any podcasts that are edited. “Live to the hard drive” was his battle cry—he records it and uploads it with no post-production at all. And that, he suggests, is what podcasting is. Who, he asked, would want to do anything else? That’s too much like (ugh) radio.

Time for a deep breath, everybody.

Podcasting, according to an excellent definition in the Wikipedia, is “the practice of making files (usually audio files) available online in a way that allows software to automatically detect new files (generally via RSS), and download them.”

What it’s used for is up to whoever wants to produce one, whether it’s Neville and me, Todd, Adam, or General Motors. The only way the current “real” podcasts will be lost is (as Curry and Bloom noted in an hour-plus-long show the other day) if the bandwidth available for podcasts becomes limited. With podcasts delivered primarily over the Internet, that’s not going to happen.

A couple points are worth making here. First, just like the Web, podcasts will evolve down multiple paths. The Web, remember, initially was a bunch of enthusiasts toying with early versions of HTML to see what they could do. When Michael Strangelove launched his “Internet Business Journal” back in the early 1990s, the idea of business defiling the sacred Internet was so horrifying to the Net’s early citizens that Strangelove actually received death threats.

Business, of course, took to the Net like weeds to a garden. But they didn’t destroy or overwhelm all the other evolutionary paths the Web took. If it had, blogs would never have been able to flourish.

There’s room out there for all kinds of podcasts: those that are live to the hard drive, those that are engineered in post-production to a highly polished sheen, those that are used for public relations purposes, those that are just time-shifted recordings of commercial radio broadcasts. There will even be room for podcasts you have to subscribe to. (Remember the outrage when some Web sites began requiring registration or subscription?) I’ve even advocated podcasting as a communication channel for internal communications, with the feeds delivered over intranets instead of the Internet, which means they’ll be available to nobody but employees of a given company.

All of which is just fine. Even if XM Radio makes Bob Edwards’ show available as a podcast feed for paying subscribers, you’ll still be able to get your Dawn and Drew fix. One does not preclude or overwhelm the other.

God, the things people get worked up over. Next thing you know, they’ll be thinking San Francisco wants to force all bloggers to register and pay a fee!