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Dec 8, 2005

Registering Interest

Posted in Geek at 5:49 pm by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add your comment

The Register reports this week on the inclusion of the word “Podcast” in the New Oxford American Dictionary and the fact that certain other trendy words from the current vernacular failed to make the grade, among them Sudoku, bird flu, rootkit and bloggin. Maybe next year.

There is some uncertainty as to the true etymology of the word podcast. Most people assume it’s iPod broadcast, with no i’s. Others claim it’s short for Personal On-Demand -casting or Portable Audio-casting. It’s unlikely to be either of these latter two, and more obviously simply a trademark free abbreviation of iPodcasting without the legal problems.

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2 Responses to “Registering Interest”

  1. 2
    David Bradley Says:
    July 31st, 2007 at 8:31 am

    It’s interesting that you should ask about the Sciencebase podcast now given that I’ve just relaunched it and each post now has a “listen now” button right below the title ;-) I’ve also added a link to the podcast in the left-hand menu, just above the big orange RSS button.

    Originally, I did a six episode podcast towards the end of 2006, for which I recorded a jingle on guitar, a voiceover (done by my wife), and my own voice, reading the news. It went under the name of the Geordie Boffin Podcast. However, each episode received only about 200 listeners, so I kind of assumed it wasn’t something most Sciencebase readers wanted. Just last week I implemented the Odiogo plugin for our CMS, which “reads” each post and renders it as a downloadable and streamable mp3 file. The Sciencebase podcast RSS feed can be picked up by iTunes. Just for simplicity the RSS feed for the podcast is not fulltext, it provides just the intros and then a “Click here to play” link. The plugin does a fantastic job of rendering post using a voice synthesiser, which does now mean you can listen to Sciencebase on the go without my having to endure my dulcet tones.

    So, check it out, or rather, listen up!

    db

  2. 1
    John Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm

    You used to have an interesting news / interviews podcast, but now things have changed around and I can’t find..that’s a shame. Can we have a link for it somewhere prominent?

    Great site, incidentally.

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