If you mentioned podcasting to someone in 2006, then only a small minority of people would have known what you were talking about. The audio podcast slowly dripped into the public consciousness thanks largely to Ricky Gervais, and even more so to Karl Pilkington, who became a cult figure thanks to his joining the team of Gervais and Merchant. It was The Guardian who asked them to make a podcast in the first place, which was available free of charge to whoever wanted it. Because Karl Pilkington didn't have a job at the time, they started producing their own podcasts and charging for them, and even that didn't stop them from becoming one of the most downloaded podcasts of all time. By about 2005/6, YouTube was slowly making a name for itself as a place to, to use their tagline, 'broadcast yourself'. The full potential of YouTube was a little while off, but a site called MySpace was also starting to emerge. In short, with the right amount of promotion, singers, comedians, actors, writers, and broadcasters didn't need television or radio as much as they once did. Or rather they wouldn't soon, as like all things to do with the Internet, nobody understands what you mean straight away. It's the same as the downloading singles situation, people didn't understand.

An aborted project of mine, which is the one I wanted more than anything to work, was a show called The Pod. Basically, The Pod was going to be an online thing, chose from one of the following options; Internet television show, visual podcast, vodcast (a compound name for a visual podcast, I personally think people who cut two words up and stick them together as one word are funts), or a word we don't use anymore, webcast. I had a building earmarked as a studio, that's how far it went. The Pod's pitch was as follows:

The Pod combines elements of the best music and variety shows, the only difference is that it isn't on television, it's on your computer! Music, comedy, interviews, for you to watch when YOU like. The Internet is the telly and radio of the future, and The Pod intends to be at the forefront of this revolution. Aside from showcasing the best unsigned talent, we will also feature big name interviews and performance.

Reading that back, I can see how nobody took me seriously, how could you possibly replace the telly with your computer? Although, in my defence, the Internet wasn't quite as portable back then, so you wouldn't have been able to watch it on a phone or tablet, (and of course because the tablet hadn't been invented). I remember agents turning down interview requests because they weren't sure what I meant when I said things like "television, but on the Internet". Such strange times they were, the olden days.

Of course these days things have almost gone full circle; the podcast is an acceptable form of broadcast, YouTube and Vimeo are shop windows for the talented, bands can get into the hit parade without a record label, people can watch television on their mobile phone, and you can even do your shopping this way. While it's nice to have been around in the early days of the World Wide Web, or The Information Superhighway, I'm glad that it progressed into something we all 'do'. In the bad old days of dial-up, Internet television would never have worked. In fact, hardly anything to do with the Internet as we know it now would work; YouTube has a nasty habit of buffering now, imagine spending an entire week and spending a million pounds on your phone bill just to see a dog on a skateboard! In these more enlightened times, we all know that there's something online for everyone.

All of this brings me back to the once bizarre concept of the Internet as an entertainment medium. Podcasts are now considered as good as radio shows, and thanks to YouTube (to name one video site), the idea of making something yourself is now acceptable. Today, seven years after I first bashed my head against a brick wall trying to explain it to people, I went to a meeting at a company who make Internet television!

White Collar Zoo is a far more ambitious version of my vision for online entertainment; a whole 'television' network of different dedicated channels showcasing music, comedy, film, and any other aspect of creative arts. This is where I was tonight, at their headquarters on Nottingham's fashionable Hockley/Lace Market border, to talk things over. I had initially been invited by my mate Darren, who runs the online magazine Nottingham Live, (the online magazine being another concept that would have been met with derision and confusion in equal measures in the not too distant past), and now has a channel on the WCZ site. His show is a serious panel based debate programme centred around the music scene, and we were discussing the content, guests, and so on. I was given a tour of the studio (they have a floor in what was probably once a factory, now an office building), and left with a very positive feeling about the whole thing. We film the pilot episode in a couple of weeks, I'm not sure how I'll even be, as I have only ever done radio before, where it doesn't matter what you do with your face as long as your voice doesn't falter. When I recorded Charity Shop Film Guide, I was reading from a script, which is something I have never been able to do, and it showed because my eyes kept wandering away from the camera. I can ad-lib, or memorise a script and get away with it, but give me something to read out loud and I sound like I'm in a hostage video. It'll be fine. Really.