Today’s Podcast

Building on the positive comments I received regarding my first podcast today’s word is interstitial. Interstitial is one of those, possibly pretentious, specialized jargon words.

The straight literal definition is the space between two states.

In the context of the web it refers to the page between pages. Two great sites that frequently use them are Yahoo! Games and
Salon. They use them to show you an ad before you get to the stuff you want.

In the case of Yahoo! Games you get to see an ad before you get to play a free game of backgammon. Salon uses them the same way- “You want to read this article? Watch this ad.” The Salon interstitials, because of their high-concept multimedia content, are usually entertaining. The articles are great too.

There are many other contexts where the term interstitial is used. Like TV for example. TV usage is pretty similar to the web- a little content before the stuff you want to see like segways between stories on Entertainment Tonight and the brief network plugs after the ads but before the show.

The medical community uses interstitial to describe unimportant parts of the body that are in between the important parts.

Thanks to Gordon Smith for commenting on my Soliloquy podcast. Gordon, I think you are right. A lot of podcasters are using Soliloquy tongue-in-cheek.

Gordon has a cool bog. “A pictorial journal of life in rural Australia.” Some stunning, beautiful pictures of nature and the mundane, also beautiful. He also has an audioBlog that accompanies and comments on the photos. His site is provides all the content you need for one of those new photo iPods.