If you find your podcast being listed on Creative’s new Zencast site, I would consider writing them an angry e-mail now as they are basically hijacking your feed: people who subscribe through the Zencast site get a subscription URL of zencast.com instead of your original feed. This means that they can track your stats, filter or modify your content and that your subscriber’s not only depend on the stability of your server but on the zencast site as well.
Really bad self-introduction to the podcasting scene, Creative. Better quit now before it’s too late. Nobody is buying your ugly players anyway.
Update: It seems as if they have given in and changed the behaviour. Zencast now hands out the original feed as it has to be. Good boy.
If you substitute ‚Creative‘ with ‚Apple‘ and ‚zencast‘ with ‚iTunes‘ your text sounds quite familiar and more correct.
Especially the last paragraph.
Well, iTunes does not hijack the feed. It delivers exactly the URL you submit to Apple. So I don’t understand your point here.
Creative is also quite let’s say „creative“ when it comes to evading the origins of the word podcast:
„Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer.“
Made me laugh at least… :)
Just to clear things up a bit:
I tried ZenCast this morning and it DOES subscribe to the ORIGINAL feed. Hitting subscribe button is only a call to action for the app but feeds are not re-published by ZenCast.
Subscribe to a feed and then look it up. It’s the original one.
I guess Podcast never was and still is not exclusive to ipods, so „Personal on Demand Cast“ makes sense to me. The term actually surfaced already in 2004, and Creative seems to just have adopted it. Have a look here for some reference:
http://www.bootstrapping.net/technology/001327.html
http://www.whatiwantpodcasting.com/Business_Podcasting.html