Ben Hammersley Suggested Podcasting While Padding a Newspaper Story on Deadline
The earliest print use and the word's adoption by audio makers have different trails, including a mailing-list suggestion months later.
Ben Hammersley needed to fill a little newspaper space. A whole medium eventually moved in.
His February 2004 Guardian piece proposed three names, with podcasting between audioblogging and GuerillaMedia. The spare option got quite a career. GuerillaMedia sounds as though it would require a meeting before you could subscribe.
Hammersley later explained the moment directly to Podnews, saying he made it up in “about 5 seconds” while padding the story near deadline. I can appreciate a naming process that finishes before somebody has ordered conference-room sandwiches.
But a word printed once still needs somebody to repeat it. Podnews traces a separate September 2004 mailing-list suggestion by Dannie J Gregoire to Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Whether Gregoire independently arrived at the same name or had encountered Hammersley’s article remains uncertain. Keeping that uncertainty makes this a better history than handing one person a giant imaginary patent on talking into a microphone.
Apple gives us a useful dated example of how a name becomes a menu. Its June 28, 2005 announcement put podcast support inside iTunes 4.9 and advertised a directory of more than 3,000 free programs. New episodes could download to a computer and synchronize to an iPod. By then, the noun had somewhere obvious to live on the screen.
Apple called this taking podcasting “mainstream.” That’s a company’s announcement of its own ambitions, with the customary helping of Apple sauce. The concrete change is more useful than the adjective: discovering a show, subscribing and receiving subsequent episodes happened inside software listeners already used for audio.
I’d borrow that distinction when judging a new media tool. A catchy name helps somebody tell a friend about it. Automatic delivery gives that friend a reason to keep listening without remembering to revisit a page every week. I’d want both before treating the number of launch-day mentions as proof that a habit has formed.
There’s also a little relief here for anyone naming a project. Hammersley offered alternatives and moved on. The community had time to find out which word worked in an ordinary sentence. You can spend weeks polishing a name and still need the people using the thing to finish the job for you.
My bet is that the history will keep getting shortened to the five-second anecdote because it’s easy to retell. I’d keep Gregoire’s part beside it. The unresolved connection between those two uses is a reminder that people can improve an idea without leaving a perfectly documented trail back to the first person who typed it.
The deadline passed. The word stayed on air.