Podcasting: the Word of the Year

The word “podcasting” has not only been officially included into the New Oxford American Dictionary, but also declared the Word of the Year 2005. Erin McKean, the Editor-in-chief of the dictionary, had this to say about the event: “Podcast was considered for inclusion in 2004, but we found that not enough people were using it. Many were not even familiar with the concept. This year (2005) it’s completely different story. The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon. [...] Choosing the word of the year is incredibly difficult. Not just because of the enormous amount of data we look at – everything from blogs to technical journals to suggestions sent by email – but because everyone has such opinions about what makes a word Word of the Year material. You’d be amazed at how hard our editors campaign for their favorites. I’m surprised nobody tried to bribe me”.
Some figures

Today it’s difficult to determine who was the first to feed audio files into an RSS channel for free access. The growth dynamics of the innovation is much more interesting, and it’s just striking. On September 28, 2004, a blogger and a columnist Doc Searls started monitoring the number of results found by Google search engine for enquiries on “podcast”. On that day, there were 24 results. On September 30 there were 526 hits, and three days later 2,750. This number doubled every few days (!) and exceeded 100,000 already on October 18. A year later this figure was 100,000,000. Today it’s 239,000,000.
Podcast software

As of today, there’s plenty of software solutions for podcasting purposes. Products by Apple deserve a special mention. It was this company that determined the growth dynamics and released in summer 2005 a new version of its popular audio player, iTunes 4.9, with podcasts support. At the same time, the corresponding department was opened in the well-known on-line iTines Music Store.

Some readers might consider the style of this article too optimistic. But I can tell you that podcasting is a very serious phenomenon with a rather short but rich history. It’s just in Russia it’s only making its first steps, whereas in the West it has already become a usual data transfer channel. It’s enough to remember that it appeared less than two years ago and to have a look at the list of mass media that are already using it in their broadcasts: ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR, MTV, Discovery Channel, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NewsWeek, MSNBC, and many others. Today is the day of official opening of iXBT.com podcast project.