Those types have done a lot of the same damage to the word "wiki". It blows my mind that Sourcehut of all places is a willing participant in debasing the term.
> Imagine you're a mathematician, and fellow mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals instead; that's basically how badly the term[] is being misused: it's being used to describe systems that are almost the _exact opposite_ of the concept.
The distribution model was a client subscribes to the RSS feed on their computer, downloads new episodes (from the publisher's website), and then syncs them when the "iPod" is synced to the computer. Many PMPs but the iPod especially defaulted to syncing your computer library when plugged in (to charge). So the iPod just received no episodes of podcasts when people plugged them in to charge at the end of the day.
When iTunes added explicit podcast support it became even easier to subscribe and sync podcasts. This was and remains a good distribution model but Spotify et al have done their damnedest to co-opt the term to mean content exclusive to their platform.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology
There was a minor movement to label them "netcasts", but it didn't really take.
The history was that "podcasting" was an open medium, "open" being the point. A "podcast" was a show (e.g. "Smartless"). "Episodes" were audio or video files combined with metadata that lived in the podcast's RSS. Anybody could play in that ecosystem.
Now "podcasting" means anything/nothing. "Podcasts" are shows. "Podcasts" are episodes. "Podcasts" are things that increasingly need a proprietary app to play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Trademark_applications
Imagine that shortly after the turn of the century, Adobe created a proprietary platform for delivering internet content and called it the "web". Viewers must use Adobe Web Reader to use Adobe "web pages", which are DRM-protected PDF files delivered using proprietary protocols. Adobe has done deals with several hundred popular sites to turn off their standards-based websites and deliver Adobe websites exclusively.
This is what Spotify and others are doing, and nobody cares. Apple is effectively the last media giant left holding the flag for standards-based podcasting, but how long do we think that will last?
What I just love is when people use this excuse to justify "borrowing" a clearly defined technical term, using it incorrectly, and then insisting that their incorrect usage of that term is entirely valid because "language and meaning change over time."
(Not saying you're one of those people at all but that is one of the most frequent uses of that phrase that I tend to experience from other people.)
