It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to rant about the misuse of the term podcast. But I’ve got a good one and can’t seem to help myself. I suppose I’m something of a podcast bigot when it comes to my staunch defense of what makes a podcast a podcast.
What makes this rant particularly special is its basis on a piece that appears in the April 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries magazine. This issue contains an article entitled “Creating Communities With Podcasting” by Angela L. Jowitt, who is at the library of the Universal College of Learning in New Zealand.
The article starts innocently enough with a basic description of how the author came upon podcasting and how it fit into the overall 2.0 mentality that the library was trying to embrace. She then moves on to discuss recording and publishing “podcast files” on a trial basis. The use of the phrase “podcast files” should have been a red flag, but I read on blindly.
Here’s where I gasped openly: “As we were making the files available simultaneously, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was not initially set up.”
Come again? We’re podcasting without an RSS feed? I was so stunned by this unexpected twist in the article, I didn’t actually read the following sentences. We’ll come back to those.
Instead, my eyes were drawn to a small screenshot of the “podcast” page on the website. The lead sentence reads “Podcasts are digital audio recordings made available over the internet.” I’m hoping that the audience of this blog does not need me to identify the shortcomings of this statement. Suffice it to say that making a digital audio recording and sticking it online does not a podcast make. Wanna read more about that? Check here or, better yet, here. Or the latter part of this post. And then of course, there’s the whole ALA 2.0 Bootcamp mess. I’ve been beating this drum since March of 2005.
There was a glimmer of hope as I returned to the article where I left off:
As we were making the files available simultaneously, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was not initially set up. However, we are now working on this in order to turn our digital audio files into true podcasts, which are files broadcast or published over the internet. This will also make our podcasts available for subscription using a podcatcher, which is an RSS aggregator.
Sigh. I enjoy the distinction made between podcasts and true podcasts. Why not entitle the article “Creating Communities with Something Like Podcasting but not True Podcasting”* or somesuch? But anyway, I was given some glimmer of hope that a “true podcast” would emerge from this initiative, even if it didn’t in the article.
Before I go on with my rant, I want to make sure you understand that the approach that UCOL is taking in their podcasting initiative, as far as starting modestly and soliciting feedback, is great. And the content, although I haven’t listened to it, appears relevant and worthy of production. I’m not intending to condemn their efforts here.
The real reason this irks me so much is not because this group of librarians doesn’t quite get it. It’s because a major library magazine devoted to technology initiatives in libraries fails to see the problem and thus disseminates piss-poor information throughout the library community. A magazine that lends its name to a conference where I’ve presented on podcasting multiple times. How does this happen and what can I do to prevent it from happening again? Your feedback is welcome.
And again, I don’t want to overstate my issues with the article on the whole. There’s a lot of good information about recording library content for distribution online from a beginner’s perspective. But the fundamental misunderstanding of what RSS brings to that distribution effort makes me shudder.
So, as I said before, I had a glimmer of hope that there would be a podcast in the end. So I visited the library podcast page pictured in the article. Sure enough, there’s a nice prominent RSS symbol on the site, leading to an RSS feed. Great!
Good news is that the feed works and, in the end, UCOL is in fact providing a “true podcast.” They haven’t updated it since January, which is a strange thing to do if you know that an article about you is going to appear in a widely distributed magazine in April, but hey, that’s not my call.
Bad news is that there’s no explanation on the page of the role of this RSS feed or anything about subscribing to it. So in the end, they really aren’t doing anything to highlight the very thing that allows them to properly call it a podcast. And thus, the diffusion of confusion continues.
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* It’s also worth noting that the article in no way, that I can see, discusses the building of a community through podcasting.
Update: My good friend Dgold notes in the comments that it is inaccurate to limit the definition of podcasting to content syndicated via RSS. He highlights ATOM as another specification that allows for syndication of media content. In this regard, he is absolutely correct and I thank him for pointing this out. I tend to use RSS as a euphemism for all syndication formats, but that’s kind of like referring to all online audio files as podcasts, isn’t it? Check the rest of the comments to follow the discussion.
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