Rant against the abuse of “Podcasting” popularity!


I take exception to the mis-use of the term Podcast in the recent [redacted] issues.

If only you would actually follow up the link to Google you provide and use it to define Podcast, you would find this: “Podcasting, …, is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, …”

And from Wikipedia: “Podcasting is an automatic mechanism by which multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client, which pulls down XML files containing the Internet addresses of the media files.”

What you have is not a podcast, it is a manual download of an audio file. I would gladly add an RSS feed to my podcatcher and listen regularly as new shows are automatically downloaded – like a real podcast. I will not regularly be registering all my details on a page before manually downloading the audio and manually causing it to be synchronised to my MP3 player. I’ve done it once and will not be doing it again, no matter how compelling the content.

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