RSS can be considered a syndication protocol, or a 'standard' if you want to be strict with the term protocol, but nothing about those distinctions is pertinent to the point I was making.
Podcast can refer both to individual episodes or to the series of episodes, neither usage is more correct than the other, it's your responsibility to interpret words in good faith in the context in which they're used. And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making.
RSS is not the same thing as podcasts, because while generally all podcast feeds are distributed via RSS/Atom, they aren't necessarily, and moreover not all RSS feeds are podcasts.
And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making. To reiterate, Apple, with the iPod, was instrumental in elevating podcasts to a mainstream medium of content distribution. It's by analogy to this that I make the point that Google could have played a similar role in facilitating the mass adoption of RSS.
I'm not interested in any further exploration of the conceptual differences between RSS and podcasts unless you believe it has an upshot that's relevant to the original point I was making.
Well, yeah. Not only is it not the same thing, the concepts aren't related in any way.
A podcast is an audio file. RSS is a format for publishing the information that you've updated your website.
>>> With podcasts, we now have an entire universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company, which is a miracle.
We had that before podcasts. You go to a web page, and you download a file. The protocol is called "HTTP", the HyperText Transfer Protocol.
Podcast can refer both to individual episodes or to the series of episodes, neither usage is more correct than the other, it's your responsibility to interpret words in good faith in the context in which they're used. And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making.
RSS is not the same thing as podcasts, because while generally all podcast feeds are distributed via RSS/Atom, they aren't necessarily, and moreover not all RSS feeds are podcasts.
And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making. To reiterate, Apple, with the iPod, was instrumental in elevating podcasts to a mainstream medium of content distribution. It's by analogy to this that I make the point that Google could have played a similar role in facilitating the mass adoption of RSS.
I'm not interested in any further exploration of the conceptual differences between RSS and podcasts unless you believe it has an upshot that's relevant to the original point I was making.