Podcasting slowly crept into the vocabulary and the internet marketplace in 2004 as the birth of the home radio show, where people can play music and talk about any subject they want with no rules and no regulations.

Later in 2005, Jeff Mills, author of the popular e-book, Podcast Secrets Revealed predicted Podcasting would be the most popular trend of 2005, just like blogging was in 2004.

As he was sitting in a Burger King restaurant, in late 2004, he first saw the word podcast in print in a USA Today newspaper.

It was an article about the GodCast Podcast, and how people were taking the messages of the Scriptures and sending an audio mp3 through the internet in an RSS feed that could be downloaded with enclosures and automatically put into your PC or favorite mp3 listening device, ALL AT ONCE.

For the non geeks, what that means is that audio files were automatically able to be downloaded and listened almost as easily as downloading mp3 files from any popular mp3 music site. Cool stuff!

What happened next was that in 2005 EVERY major news program, talk show, or superstar musician got into podcasting, or sending their audio content through their own home grown RSS feeds right into people pcs and mp3 players.

Then iTunes and Yahoo got into the podcast business over the summer of 2005 and podcasting went main stream.

Users mp3 players were suddenly filled with Rush Limbaugh, ESPN, Tech TV, talk shows, new music shows, even porn/sex shows, and many other mainstream media programs were sending out audio mp3s to their loyal fans for free and people were filling up their iPod gigabytes faster than you could say podcasting revolution.

It has been a wild year for the word podcast and when you type it currently, at the time of this writing, into Google.com, podcast now has over 81,300,000 sites linked to that word.

Because of this the popularity of Podcasting in 2005, Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, said: "The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon."

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, Podcast is now the word of the year!

Right on the heels of Podcast making the word of the year, Yahoo quietly launched a new search function to try to corner the AUDIO search market.

As people were doing their last minute shopping and frantically getting ready for the holidays, Yahoo added a new search tab on their popular search menu called, Audio.

A Yahoo spokesperson said, I wanted to spread the word that we're turning up the volume a bit on audio search by adding a new "Audio" tab to the Yahoo! Front Page. Since launching Audio Search in August, user response has been great; proving yet again that the Web wants its audio. So, it is time that a larger audience gets to enjoy the sound

Whatever Yahoo isn't indexing with its Audio Search can be submitted by the creators of audio files, so podcaster, you may want to quickly get your shows listed in there, and gain top spots, while the gettins good.

The company wrote a Media RSS specification that accompanied the debut of Audio Search. This spec better supports multimedia content; Yahoo also uses it for Video Search.

What is already on the radar for 2006?

Self produced video shows, like TV stations, will crop up all over the internet, as people begin to broadcast their own video/tv shows and play them on media players like the iPod Video Player and other devices. Google is paving the way for video, by allowing people to do searches for videos right from their search box.

iTunes is coming along quickly too, with Video Podcasts which might be a misnomer, but the arrival of the video podcast show is now here too.

Video Blogging or Vlogging is my prediction for the most popular word in 2006.