A special thank you from Coffee Break on International Podcast Day

<p>Every 30th September, the podcasting world comes together to celebrate podcasting on International Podcast Day. We're celebrating today by saying thank you to the Coffee Break community in this special podcast episode. International Podcast Day aims to raise awareness about podcasts and gives podcast creators and listeners a chance to&nbsp;celebrate the medium and the podcast industry.</p><p><br></p><p>But podcasting has been around for a lot longer than that! Back in 2004, broadcaster Adam Curry asked developer Dave Winer to develop an audioblogging system and without going into the technical side of things, or indeed who specifically “invented” podcasting, it was Curry and Winer who got the ball rolling. The word “podcast” however, was first mentioned in a newspaper article in the Guardian by technology reporter Ben Hammersley. It was declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary in 2005.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Of course, at this stage Coffee Break hadn't yet launched, but Coffee Break host Mark did start podcasting for an education project he was running at the time called Partners in Excellence or “PiE”, and The PiEcast was used to bring a community of learners together and help them develop their language skills. Mark quickly realised that podcasting was the perfect medium for publishing language lessons, and for sharing his passion for languages with a wider audience.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>Coffee Break Spanish was launched in October 2006. As the very first Spanish podcast for beginners on iTunes, it quickly gathered an audience and learners around the world started learning with us. Since then we’ve gone on to produce Coffee Break French, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish and English and we have plans to develop more Coffee Break languages in the future. We’ve also created shorter podcast series called One Minute Languages covering over 30 languages from Arabic to Zulu.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>We’ve published well over 1,000 episodes across the different languages and&nbsp;our podcasts hav