Those who don't know about what I am going to talk about, please read this post from me first. Malayala Manorama claims that their podcast is the first in Malayalam. They had also put it in their advertisement in the first page of Manorama Online. I had written in a post that it is a false claim because M-Pod, the Malayalam podcast, is the first Malayalam podcast and it was started way back in 2005.

Kannuran, a Malayalam blogger has also written about this in his blog and also sent an email to the folks at Malayala Manorama. Given below is the reply that he got from them:

"Thanks for your valuable inputs. However, we would like to inform that there are difference between voice blogs and podcast.

Please refer IFRA web site nad NY TIMES podcast sections

Regards"

What they said is correct. There is a difference between audio blogs and a Podcast. And this major difference is the RSS syndication. As per Wikipedia article on Podcast, the definition of a podcast is this:

A podcast is a series of digital-media files which are distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and computers. Though podcasters' web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.

So it is crystal clear from this article that it is the RSS Feed that differentiates a podcast from an Internet audio content. M-Pod has been providing the RSS feed syndication right from the beginning. That is why I said in the earlier post that M-Pod is the complete Malayalam podcast. Because there has been voice-over audios distributed in the Internet before M-Pod.

BUT, the so-called 'first Malayalam podcast' of Malayala Manorama doesn't have any syndication or subscription option in their podcast page (I don't know if they will add it immediately before some of this blog readers get to their page, but they don't have the feed links in their podcast page as of now). And the funny thing is the "subscription" link at the top of their page leads to the newspaper/weekly subscription page of MM. Had the folks at Malayala Manorama bothered to check out the websites that they asked Kannuran to check out, they would have noticed the "subscribe" link with each podcast episode at NY Times and IFRA podcasts.

So going by the email from Malayala Manorama itself, the following has been proven now:

• That Malayala Manorama's podcast is not the first in Malayalam
• That M-Pod is the first Podcast in Malayalam which was started 3 years before MM Podcast
• That Malayala Manorama's podcast is incomplete and they do not know what a podcast is

I would like to know what they are going to come up with now. :-)