Jon Watson has some alternative thoughts on how to define podcasts.

I think his definition of podcasts, calling them “like a radio show except that you download it from the Internet instead of listening to it on a radio,” is a bit narrow. After all many podcasts are delivered in video format so the correlation to radio really doesn’t fit. Not to mention the fact that you can’t subscribe to radio shows like you can to podcast shows.

Nonetheless, Jon is entitled to his opinion. Which leads me to the belief that perhaps there is not one perfection defintion for blogs or podcasts. Seems to me that they can mean different things to different people.

Some folks define podcasts as a genre of media. This type of person might say, “Did you listen to that podcast?” just like they might say “Did you watch that TV show?” Others identify podcasts with a medium of delivery for content via the internet. I guess I’m one of those folks who fall into the second category.

A podcast show, as I like to call it, could be something like a show you would hear on the radio. Or it could be a video covering topics like sports, music, travel, culture or just about any other topic or style you can imagine. Some podcasts sound a lot like shows that you would listen to on the radio. Others have formats and content with no equal on any radio show that I’ve ever listened to.

When I hear someone mention that they produce a podcast, the one thing that sticks in my mind is the fact that no matter what type of content they are producing I can subscribe and get updates automatically, either by using their RSS feed or iTunes.

So we may agree to disagree and that’s fine. There’s still a long road ahead and I don’t think that podcasting has found a final place alongside other forms of media. Not by a long shot. By the time it does I’m sure that my young daughter will be in college and I’ll have long since moved on to the next new thing in internet media distribution.

[tags]Social Media, Podcasting[/tags]