One thing I do know Is that it is indeed a “cast” of some sort. There has been a lot of talk on the net news and blogs about the whole podcast ready cease and desist letter from apple for using the word pod in the websites title etc. It has been talked about so much that I wasn’t going to say anything about it. But I was just sitting here thinking about it and figured Id join the fray and put my 2 cents down on the subject.

 

The very first podcast I downloaded and listened to was the return of the screensavers, before it was called twit. I downloaded the file, burned it to a cd and listened to it on my way to work. Me, like many tech guys out there, missed Techtv once it was taken over by G4 and that podcast was right on time for me. After that I was hooked, I then found other podcast to listen to, The Chris Pirillo show, Twit, Geek News Central, Major Nelson, Diggnation, and The WOW Taverncast. Today I have about 20 or more Podcast on my list of shows I listen to back and forth to work every day.

 

The thing that has bothered me from the very beginning was that they were called Podcast. Like I said, I started out burning them to CD’s to listen to in the car, I then graduated to using a Psp in the car, then a Treo 650 in the car, and now I use a creative zen vision M. The one device that was not listed is indeed a Ipod. Nope I’ve never owned a Ipod, Never listened to a single podcast on an Ipod. I knew Ipods were extremely popular but I just couldn’t understand why name something as great as this after a device that not everyone will own.

 

Another thing, even though Ipods are the most popular mp3 playing device, there are others. And what happens if another device comes along and take over the Ipods popularity. Its not all that uncommon in the tech gadget business for the leader of a particular genre of product to bounce around to different manufacturers, Look at the graphic card market. There was the Voodoo2 for a while, then the Tnt2/Geforce, then Ati, then back to Nvidia. Things change and rotate around as time goes on. So why are we naming these great audio rss feeds after a specific device. To me it made the whole thing sound like a fad. But its been about 2 years or longer so we all know its not a fad, its here to stay.

 

So now we face this problem, will Apple make us all stop calling our podcast….podcast? Of course not. Apple knows that podcasting is huge and will continue to grow. Having their product’s name headlining it is a very big plus for them. We all can stop worrying that we all will be told to not call them podcast anymore. By naming podcast…podcast, we all have put a whole other reason for buying an Ipod in apples lap with no effort or planning on their part.

 

Don’t get me wrong, incorporating podcasting into the Itunes music store boosted the popularity of podcasting by terabytes in what felt like a day. And I’m sure a lot of podcasters are thankful for it.

Should we change the name? Well it almost seems too late to change the name now. The people who know what podcast are knows them by podcast, there’s really no turning back now.  My personal opinion is that I think apple shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and start going after these people that have added this additional reason to by an Ipod. Cause lets face it. There’s tons of people out there that think you do have to use an Ipod to listen to podcast. And now that Microsoft wants a piece of the mp3 player pie, the biggest concern for apple should be to make sure podcasting stays podcasting. Zunecast may sound a bit silly but it can be gotten use to