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Redefining "Podcast": Nice Try But No Cigar, Creative Labs!

[via projectionist] You’ve probably heard of Creative Labs — they’re the folks behind the Sound Blaster card, which almost single-handedly brought Wintel machines into the multimedia age (kicking and screaming behind the Mac, which had better sound capabilities from the get-go). They’re not happy with the iPod’s prominence in the personal digital music player department, and as you can see on the page for their Zencast site, they’ve attempted to redefine the word “Podcast”:


Click this image to see a screen capture of the full page.

Contrary to what Creative will tell you, “Podcast” was not coined from “Personal on-demand broadcast.” It is a portmanteau (or if you prefer, neologism) of the words “iPod” and “broadcasting” coined by Ben Hammersley.

In the words of Jason Fried from 37signals: “A for effort, F for give me a fucking break.”

If there’s a Pavel Chekov award for getting history wrong (“Scotch was eenwented by lyeetle old lady een Leningrad!”), Creative Labs have a good shot at winning this year’s.

Full disclosure: As I make this entry, I’m listening to Johnny Cash’s When The Man Comes Around on the iPod nano that Wendy gave me for Christmas.

3 replies on “Redefining "Podcast": Nice Try But No Cigar, Creative Labs!”

Personally I think that this new abbreviation is actually a better one. I never liked that they named podcast after the name of a product, despite that I own an iPod myself.

Very well then! Raise you right hand and recite the following vow, and then we’ll be all set.

I (state your name) promise to never:

  • Refer to hasty, superficial approaches to problems as “Band-aid™ solutions”
  • Call blind obedience to a charismatic leader or movement as “drinking the Kool-Aid™
  • Use the brand name “Photoshop”™ as a verb meaning “to manipulate an image digitally”
  • Forswear the use of “Google”™ as a verb singifying “to make use of an Internet search engine”
  • and finally and most important, to eschew the term “Spam”™ in favour of “Unsolicited commercial email”.

Fight the Power! Smash the State! Accordion Guy is truly great!

But seriously…

It would’ve been fine if Creative had phrased it as “We prefer to think of ‘Podcast’ as standing for ‘Personal On-Demand BroadCAST'”. That would’ve been honest. Instead, they went with this little white lie, somehow unaware that a good chunk of their customer base are geeks, who are by trade and necessity some of the biggest pedants, nitpickers and sticklers for accuracy around.

To be fair, I’ve heard plenty of Apple zealots claim the same definition when confronted with the whole “CORPORATE PRODUCT”cast thing. I mean, there’s nothing inherently iPod about rss with mp3 encapsulations.

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