Podcasting Officially a Word

goldseries writes "The BBC is reporting that the New Oxford American Dictionary is adding podcasting to the dictionary. A year ago it was rejected because not enough people were reading it, but, in a ode to the speed of technology's growth, it is being declared the word of the year. Podcasting has been in the Oxford Dictionary of English since last summer. Podcast beat out words such as lifehack and rootkit for inclusion in the dictionaries. I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is."

Comments

Food for thought...

[Antony-Kyre]

It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

Re:Food for thought...

[cjb-nc]

"I got your memo, would you go Xerox 10 copies for me for my next meeting?"

There's a word that was ubiquitous some number of years ago. Can't say I've heard anyone use Xerox as a verb in quite a while. Now it's copy or photocopy. Podcasting will go the same way, eventually. I seriously doubt it will take more than 10 years, much less 50.

Re:Food for thought...

[meringuoid]

It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

Quite possibly. Remember how 'Hoover' became a generic term for a vacuum cleaner? How 'walkman' became a generic term for a portable personal cassette player?

I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players - or, if Apple defends its trademark as well as it probably will, the obvious corruption to just plain 'pod'. The increasingly widespread currency of the word 'podcast' might well cause this to happen more quickly. If you can listen to podcasts on it, it's a pod, right? Not an iPod, because that's only the Apple ones, but a pod nonetheless...

Re:Food for thought...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

Marry N'uncle, a swivven'd comely wench shall tell thee by the nonce.

Re:Food for thought...

[erroneous]

"maybe"

Pah

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll stick with audio download.

Re:Pah

[baryon351]

Right. can someone explain to me the difference between new trendy "podcast" and the old "ftp" or "scp" or "http" that we use for everything else? It's the same old technology just dressed up

Convenience. Back in the early 90s, I remember many remarks like yours about the new WWW. "Can someone explain to me the difference between this new trendy "world wide web" and just downloading files by ftp? It's only text and gifs anyway". Yes podcasts are all just mp3s and xml. They're also one hell of a lot more convenient, in the same way that anyone sane would rather go to www.site.com/index.html instead of manually downloading some text with references to half a dozen images and then go hunting down the images it referred to.

Podcast = find a show you like, subscribe. listen.
Audio Download = find a show you like, find how to download it from that particular site, find how often it's updated to know when to check again, download it, move it to your player/audio device, listen.

Admittedly neither is much different to the other for one single download of one episode. or two. perhaps three, but when you find ten separate podcasts you quite like listening to each episode of, you're bound to just throw it in the too-annoying-to-continue-with basket. This kind of automation benefits the listeners who keep getting their shows easily, and the casters themselves who don't have to continually get their audience to go through a rigmarole of steps just to hear the show. Radio doesn't make you do that.

Re:Pah

[Jearil]

it's kind of funny listening to your rant... You've never used iTunes to get podcasts before. This is an obvious statement, else you wouldn't have made such a silly comment.

Apple really did do something good when they added podcasts into iTunes. Since iTunes is basically the only "official" way to get music onto an iPod anyway (and the one used by most people who own one), the whole podcast thing is made completely simple. You find a podcast in iTunes.. anyone can get their podcast in there, it doesn't take a license agreement or anything with apple, just an available feed that you tell them about. Every time you load up iTunes to resync your iPod, it automatically goes and downloads any new episodes of all of your podcast subscriptions. No bookmarks, no checking back on each one at different web sites for each one (imagine checking 20 websites a day, all for a different podcast, just to see if one updated). Just load up iTunes, update all of your podcasts, update your iPod, and you're good to go. I know on a mac anyway just plugging in the iPod will do all of those steps for you, as usually the default action to an iPod being plugged in is to run iTunes and update it.

Now granted, the end result of automatic podcast updates through iTunes will get you the same as if you went to those 20 different sites and downloaded sperate mp3 files from each and manually put them all onto your iPod (or other mp3 player I suppose), but it's not as easy. And this is where you sound the most silly.

It's exactly the same thing with a distribution method tacked on.

Well DUH! That's the key! Distribution methods are super important, that's what the grandparent was pointing out! Who wants to go and download each element of all web pages you travel to as all of their seperate components and put them together themselves when you can just use a web browser that does all of that for you? An easy distribution method will make a technology go from something that's "neat" that a bunch of geeks will toy with, to something that the general population will jump on.

Re:Pah

[baryon351]

Oh wow, I thought it was just a low-bitrate audio file, but apparently it will magically appear on my iPod without my knowledge! Oh, what's that? You still have to figure out how to find it the first time, (evidently some people have never heard of bookmarks) download it, you still have to check back periodically, barring an RSS feed (which AFAIK still wouldn't get the file for you, just give you notification and/or a link), and copy it to my iPod...

No. You don't get it. You don't have to go find it and download it, You don't have to check back periodically, you don't have to copy it to your iPod, you don't have to bookmark anything, yes it does magically appear on your iPod. You do have to figure out how to find it the first time, but hey. if you can't find something by typing in a search term on the iTunes Music Store and clicking "subscribe" you've probably already been institutionalized.

As you hinted at by saying "barring an RSS feed" that's just what the xml side of a podcast is. an RSS feed that podcasting software (like iTunes) takes, and then does everything you need automagically.

Plugging the iPod in to charge it kickstarts all the syncing behind your back. Yes, magic, once you've done that first step of finding a podcast you like and going "ooh. I like that" and clicking subscribe. Done. Nothing else to be bothered about except listening to it.

Including rootkit would be more consistent

[dascandy]

> ... but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept ...

Thanks to Sony and the like, there are more than enough people running a rootkit, so include the word already...

Re:Why does podcasting need its own word?

[NevDull]

What the fuck is a webcast?

If you're going to be cynical, be properly cynical and stop using words that sound like buzzwords but mean absolutely nothing.

A podcast is an RSS feed with the URL of an audio file in each entry.

$sys$ROOTKIT

[digitaldc]

Now noone will ever know what a rootkit is.

FYI, if you anagram Podcast, you can come up with 'Stop a CD'

Re:Why does podcasting need its own word?

[spot35]

Probably just feeding the troll but here goes anyway...

It's less words. It's entered the public consciousness as Podcast. Apparently, "birthplace", "bump", "torture", "olympian", and "mountaineer" weren't discrete words till Shakespeare coined them and they entered the public consciousness.

Remember, language is a forever mutating beast and will continue to do so, whether you like it or not.

Other Technical Words..

[Digital Warfare]

I always wondered why other technical words such as "bollocks" never made it in..

Rootkit is in the New Oxford American Dictionary..

[Afecks]

..you just can't see it ;)

Excuse me?

[springbox]

It's just a fad word for downloading audio from the Internet. This pretty much summarizes it. How did it get added to the dictionary so fast? It's not even generic - it was created in part based on a modern day product. If anything, it should be going into a slang reference guide not a dictionary.

Re:Excuse me?

[SandSpider]

Specifically, it's a word for downloading binary content (generally large binary content, usually audio, video) from the internet in a way that doesn't require active user intervention after subscribing, using a pull model rather than a push model. So emailing an MP3 would not be a podcast, because it's a push technology, but if you use a pull technology such as RSS, Atom, or some manner of SOAP application to direct the download, then it would be a podcast. (Of course, people misuse the word, so it may become more generic than that, but properly, it's as I've written above).

The point is that it's such an easier interface for the end user that it has become popular in its own rights. Technically, television is movies, just in your home and not in a movie theatre, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be another word describing it because the interface is different.

And what's with the attitude that a dictionary is some sort of sacred document that should only include words that you think means something special? Is it the third-grade teacher mentality, which says that "ain't" isn't a word, despite its common usage? The great thing about dictionaries is that they can include all forms of words, and give you the proper instances for use. In the example above, the Oxford English Dictionary says:

ain't - informal contraction of
  am not; are not; is not : if it ain't broke, don't fix it. [ORIGIN: originally representing London dialect.]
  has not; have not : they ain't got nothing to say. [ORIGIN: from dialect hain't.]

USAGE The use of ain't was widespread in the 18th century and is still perfectly normal in many dialects and informal contexts in both North America and Britain. Today, however, it does not form part of standard English and should not be used in formal contexts.

A proper dictionary should include words that people want to understand the definition of. If everyone is using the word podcast, and you don't know what it is, a dictionary might be a good place to look it up, especially nowadays when dictionary information is available online so can be distributed faster.

=Brian

Re:What!?

[1u3hr]

I can't believe podcasting got into the dictionary before rootkit did!

Results 1 - 10 of about 74,600,000 for podcast.

Results 1 - 10 of about 8,480,000 for rootkit. So obviously podcast has more currency, and I think in the non-tech media the ratio would be much higher.

Re:Why does podcasting need its own word?

[toleraen]

Yes, indeed, why create more words? There are already too many words out there! Less words would be doubleplusgood!

You are oh so right....

[spectrokid]

I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is."
No, no non-techies should have to know about this. They ought to live in a world where it is ok to listen to a CD you bought legally in a normal shop.

podcast or blogcast?

[hutteman]

I guess Microsoft employees can now stop calling them blogcasts

Different Strokes

[scottennis]

I always thought "podcasting" sounded like a euphemism for masturbation.

Re:What!?

[Big Nothing]

True, but if you wanna play the numbers-game:

Only approximately 4.5 million users will be using podcasts by the end of 2005.

Up to 24 million users may be infected by the SONY rootkits. In addition, there ARE other rootkits out there...

Ah, well - I just felt like being a smart-ass.

Depends which country

[nighty5]

Not so the US, but the word 'root' in Australia is slang to have sex.

Rootkit - sounds like some sort of fuckfest preparation guide!

Re:What!?

[geoffspear]

6 billion people this year will be affected by flurgamistophon, and none of them know what it means.