And word of the year is… podcast

It’s official – in the same week that Stuff unleashed its first podcast into the wild [download here], the buzz word has been voted Word of the Year.

If anyone lesser than the Oxford University Press made the claim, we would’ve scorned them and thrown our heads back in laughter like the good guys at the end of a cartoon (we’re thinking Thundercats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles, Transformers; pick your own favourite).

A podcast is, of course, just a bit of jargon for an MP3 file that you can subscribe to using iTunes and similar software. OUP defines it as ‘a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player’.

The word was in the running for 2004’s accolade, but the dictionary publisher decided the word was too geeky. This year, Apple’s iPod and iTunes endorsement and the huge growth in blogger and media podcasts – the BBC and Guardian both launched ones – have pushed the word in to the mainstream.

That’s despite a September poll that said 90 per cent of mainstream Britain – hairdressers and taxi drivers are considered the barometer – didn’t know what a podcast meant.

Stuff’s inaugural podcast went live last weekend and features our first impressions of the Xbox 360 – we recorded it before our second model crashed – plus a heated debate on gaming and the verdict on the iPod with video. You can subscribe to it with your pocast software by copying this address:

http://www.stuffmag.co.uk/textfiles/podcast/podcast.xml

Or download the MP3 direct from here. The next one’s out 5th January 2006.