aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

A podcast by any other name would be much sweeter

I am of the opinion that one of the smartest things Apple has done, ever, was to embrace podcasting by incorporating it into iTunes. Podcasting is cool… the iPod is cool… pure Apple marketing manna from heavan. We might as well call it “Applecasting.”

Somebody ought to tell the lawyers! Those creeps:

Apple has laid legal claim to the word “Pod,” arguing that other companies that use the word as part of their product names risk infringing the trademark of its popular iPod music player.

The legal campaign, which in recent days has drawn challenges to products with names such as Profit Pod and TightPod, reflects a broader attempt by some of the most successful consumer technology companies to prevent their best-known product names slipping into common useage beyond their control.

At a Duke University Podcasting Symposium last September Jonathan Sterne spoke out against the term “podcasting.” He argued - persuasively - that we should rightfully call it “broadcasting” and that what we have come to believe is broadcasting should rightfully be called RCAcasting: It’s a centrally controlled corporate model that explicitly excludes anyone who is not professional. While…

...in the early days of radio it was dominated by amateurs and… hobbyists and it was somewhat chaotic. People did what they wanted… But between about 1922 and 1934 RCA’s model of broadcasting gets defined as the natural model for radio… Receiving only sets...became the dominant form of radio that people acquired, purchased, and encountered in their every day lives. The other thing is that amateur broadcasters were edged out by stations that had larger transmitters and by regulators that gave most of the spectrum to professional broadcasters. So in other words, whereas in 1925, professional broadcasters might shut down in a city on Tuesday night for amateur night… by 1929 that didn’t happen anymore.

Apple’s going to use us up then toss us out too! Before they do let’s scream to high heavens that podcasting has absolutely nothing to do with iPods!

Sterne’s is a message of cautious optimism for the future of peer-produced media; and he’s confident we won’t be calling it podcasting:

Can the name be changed? Yes and it probably will be if history is any indication. Podcasting is a year old. Let’s talk about other media techniques when they were a year old… Radio didn’t become radio until the 1920s, actually quite late. People called it wireless for some time. So will it stay podcasting? No, not necessarily. And one of the reasons it’s important for me to come to a podcasting conference and call it broadcasting is maybe some podcasters will go back and start calling it broadcasting. And say all we’re doing is broadcasting on the Internet and we have the same rights and should have the same legitimacy as the people who previously held the monopoly on the term.

Let’s let ‘em have it!

Via Techememe.