Well here’s Wikipedia’s definition. Here’s About.com’s answer. Here is what Dictionary.com has to say. And of course, here’s the classic definition from Ask a Ninja:

Now, I’m not just trying to be facetious, but I think the Ninja’s definition is the only one that captures the true meaning of podcasting. The dictionary suggests that you’ve got to have web-based audio on an RSS feed and you have to distribute it to subscribers to say you have a “podcast.” About’s definition is a little more loose, saying it need’s only to an audio file on an RSS feed, also mentioning that the RSS feed is just a means to “broadcast” the audio over the Internet. Wikipedia’s broadens the definition even more by saying it’s just got to be a digital-media file on a syndication feed.What all these definitions lack is the concept of repeated publications; the “factory” in the Ninja’s definition. If someone made a weekly media update of his travels around the world and sent it out to anyone who asked for it every Friday at 12:01am via an automated email mailing list… that would fail all the formal definitions. But the Ninja would say that someone is publishing some interesting media and distributing it on a regular basis over the Internet, so it’s a podcast. And I’d have to agree.

Here’s an example of a student who recorded a single interview session as a class project, listed it in a xml file dedicated solely to that mp3, and submit it into our directory without the intention of ever releasing any other episode. According to the formal definitions, that’s a podcast. The Ninja would probably call that “brine,” and I would tend to agree with the him again. That is not a podcast.

The formal definitions get deep into the technical requirements of a podcast and ignore the true concept of what makes a podcast a podcast. Unfortunately, computer’s have a lot easier time understanding technical definitions, and so the formal definitions also define what directories will call podcasts… including DailySplice. The problem we’re having is the same problem all the other directories have, we don’t really have a “podcast directory,” we have a directory of xml documents that contain media enclosures. If you wrap your media file in an RSS feed like the above mentioned student did, we’ll list it.

What we can do though is analyze the publishing habits of a “podcaster” and, over time, determine if that RSS feed is really a podcast or just an mp3 file wrapped into an xml document. This is exactly what we try to do. Our podcasts are ordered by something we call “PodRank,” which, in part, is a measure the “podcastness” of an RSS feed based on the non-technical aspects of what constitutes a true podcast.

Of course, as soon as you steer away from the formal technical definitions you start to get a lot of grey area and everyone starts to develop their own opinions. One of our goals is to make it easy for you to find podcasts that match your own criteria. Our advanced search is one feature we’ve included on our site to help make this possible. Here you can define criteria like number of episodes per week or average duration to ensure search results meet your own definition. Please leave feedback on how this is working for you and what factors you think are most important. We look forward to bring you the most real “podcast” directory soon!

Tags: Our Podcast, podcast directory, podcasting

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Random Postings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.