Select a letter from the alphabet

Podcast, podcasting

Updated : Wednesday 30 November 2011

Podcast is one of those words whose meaning has changed quite a bit in the space of a few months. When I first defined it in January 2010, it was a not very sexy technical term that didn’t seem to invite much comment. The original definition of podcasting went like this: a combination of Ipod and broadcast, a way of broadcasting video or sound files online, hence podcasts. It allows you as a listener to come back to the file whenever you want: all you have to do is listen to it via your podcast player (like iTunes or AmaroK). As an example, you can listen again to a BBC radio programme by going to the BBC website, where the Podcast feature lets you download the programme on your computer to hear it (or listen to it again) whenever you want. The advent of the podcast has definitely brought greater freedom.

  • Over the past few months, though, podcasting has grown in popularity especially among younger internet users, the ones who set the trends on the web. The really young — though it’s not just them — are spending increasing amounts of time glued to their screens (well, we knew that much) not playing online video games but checking out the latest online sketch by their favourite standup comic. A whole new generation of comics has hit the internet in recent months. They produce sketches costing next to nothing, delivering a humorous take on their daily lives to a webcam rigged up in their grungy bedrooms, which they then post on Youtube or dailymotion for you to download as a podcast. This type of funny sketch on the internet is now called a podcast, as in "Have you seen the latest Richard Herring podcast?" (he’s the latest success from the Edinburgh Fringe, available on www.comedy.co.uk). The word podcast has thus acquired a connotation of something fun or humorous.

And there’s nothing to stop you surfing this trend yourself to tell the world about your run-ins with the boss or the in-laws: with a podcast you have a huge potential for going viral, so why not give it a try?

Write a comment
http://mynetwords.com/Podcast-podcasting,237
mynetwords.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
55143
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:IELQPAYNRSQ7ZJLQUTSBHCZUTETJDYMC
<urn:uuid:43aa3548-56de-4998-ad0d-b863c4962923>
2013-05-18T15:14:01Z
213.186.33.4
sha1:FGJ76HEXQEYHKH3VTMX3F6MCRPLAXHP3
<urn:uuid:a23fe421-f883-42ac-827a-bc8f24a5dc62>
http://mynetwords.com/Podcast-podcasting,237
response
<urn:uuid:613eeb65-cfea-4ea5-9a0d-499856123c15>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf