Podcasting - DIY radio

A podcast consist of a series of multimedia files (audio or video, but more frequently audio) which are distributed periodically. They can be downloaded by an Internet connection and an appropriate software (aggregator or “feed reader”); then they may be enjoyed anywhere, thanks to the possibility to insert them in the memory support of modern portable media players.

The term podcasting (hence "podcast") has been used for the first time on February 12 2004 by Ben Hammersley in the article "Audible revolution”, published by The Guardian. The novelty presented by Ben Hammersley to the general public is the possibility to create a real "personal radio" on the Internet, which enable the production and the online distribution of music and contents which others users can interact with. So Podcasting is interpreted by many as the natural evolution of online radio in its "do it yourself" version.

At a distance of 5 years, Podcasting is one of the more advanced and original audio distribution through the Internet: in particular, thanks to its peculiar relationship with "blogging" (a way to create Web sites similar to online "diaries”), it allows many Internet content creators to give a voice and a soundtrack to their own thoughts and reflections, making them not only sharable through a common Internet access via PC, but also "transportable", thanks to the common and spread portable media players.

However, the term Podcasting has generated some discussion and a sort of ambiguity. In fact, the neologism "podcasting" is the result of the fusion of two English words: "iPod", which actually more than a term is a product, a brand, the popular audio file player (and more recently video) MP3 by the american company Apple, and "broadcasting", which suggests a traditional broadcast (radio or television) program, planned according to the needs and purposes of the station. The term Podcasting, therefore, would be improper because neither the diffusion via the web (the real podcasting) nor the subsequent media contents listening necessarily involve a broadcast from a broadcaster to a recipient, as it is not strictly necessary to use an iPod to take advantage of it. Actually, the association with the iPod is due to the spread that the lucky Apple product had at the time of the Ben Hammersley’s article. This spread was so huge that even today the term iPod is often used as synecdoche for any type of portable media player, just like what happened to the Walkman (originally a Sony brand, then used to indicate any audio-cassette player or portable radio).

More recently, they tried to make the term Podcasting neutral (in the sense of "free brand", without references to Apple), trying to apply to POD the sense of acronym. So podcasting would mean Personal Option Digital casting, but this solution has not had much luck, and it has been traditionally accepted that the term derives from the well known and popular Apple product’s name.

Most of the active podcasts is constituted by the so-called "independent movement”, simple users who like spreading their digital audio or video content. However, there are many organizations (public and private, such as governments or traditional media) that offer podcasting services of their own audio or, most recently, video content. An noteworthy example is the Podcasting service of the British BBC, which offers the access to its radio programs, information and original contents.

The success of Podcasting - now widespread, but no more an exponentially growing phenomenon- is often recognized by the insiders as the first signal of a need for personalization of the contents characterizing the scenario of the new technologies in our era, called by many the "age of multimedia".