Let’s all send birthday wishes to British journalist-turned-speaker-and-futurist Ben Hammersley, who turned 49 this month and is perhaps most famous for coining the term “podcast” 21 years ago. Learn how the the word came about in this edition of Pioneers in Tech.
In a Feb. 12, 2004, article for The Guardian, Hammersley mused: “ … all the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio, but what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?”
The term, which Hammersley has said he “made up in about five seconds while trying to pad that article out to make it fit the page, very close to deadline,” went unused for several months. Eventually, influential early adopters of the medium began using the term, including Adam Curry, aka the “Podfather.” Curry worked with software developer Dave Winer to develop iPodder, software that allowed users to subscribe to audio files via RSS feed and download the files for later listens.
Winer chronicles the rapid spread of the term “podcast” in a detailed piece on his website. Long story short, by December 2005, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary had deemed “podcast” the word of the year. (Other contenders included “ICE,” for emergency contact; “lifehack”; and “rootkit.”)
Thank you to Hammersley for inventing a catchy term for “audio referenced by an enclosure tag in an RSS feed.” Thank you to Curry and Winer for adopting the term. Though admittedly, listening to “GuerrillaMedia” on your commute might have been fun.
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