Well, I think that this was meant to be. If last year the word of the year was Weblog , according to Merriam-Webster Online, this year that honour seems to have been granted to Podcast, according to ‘Podcast’ is the word of the year.
What I find quite interesting from that particular piece of news is actually the definition itself of Podcast:
“A digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player,”
And the reason being that we seem to be missing one key important element which is part of every podcast, and that is web syndication. I think that is the main key differentiator from every single podcast, the fact that you can subscribe to them using your favourite syndication software, whatever that may be and keep yourself always up to date. I do hope that whoever may have come up with that particular definition would be able to include that as well as it would be much more representative than anything else from what a podcast should be. Thus we shall watch out and see what happens.
Technorati Tags : Podcast
Absolutely right – this is the time and this is the technology that will push the web out of its limitations as a visual media and into the participatory multi-media. Podcasting is where free SPEECH becomes real. The good news is that it simultaneously opens up the web to a group that’s had limited participation previously – the sight-impaired and the poorly literate. That later group will include the pre-literate. Voice attachments to email will become passe as podcasting and blogging evolve together. Is this the end of the broadcast world and the start of the blogcast world?
You are absolutely right, Andy. We are at the breaking point where sharing content and knowledge is no longer going to be restricted to text and hyperlinks. Now we enter a new era; a multimedia era where not only written text but also sound and video will become more and more popular and with the help of already well known portable media players it will become pervasive enough as well to make it all stick together in a much richer environment than ever before. Indeed, we are now at the beginning of a new blogcast world where end-users are always in control of the media and not vice versa.