Hi folks -- Wired News had an article yesterday entitled Podfading Takes Its Toll, about how even popular podcasts can fade out of existance just as quickly as they pop up.
If you're not familiar with the term, a podcast is an audio show that's "broadcast", not over the airwaves, but distributed over the internet using RSS feeds.
You can subscribe to a podcast's feed and have it download automatically to your computer, and then have it also automatically load onto your MP3 player (the "pod" part of podcasting comes from iPod, since that's what helped popularize the format, though it's not exclusive to the iPod.)
As with blogs, there are all kinds of podcasts, with subject matter on anything the creators care to talk about, ranging from wine, sports, commentary tracks to TV shows, news, politics, and of course, music.
Many are done by regular folks, though more and more are professionally done -- there are networks of podcasters, and iTunes has a whole podcast directory.
The Wired article posits that podcasts are more vulnerable to being abandoned, simply because they require more work than blogging -- if you do a 15 minute podcast, you're going to be talking for 15 minutes, combined with all the time you need to do prep and then actually produce the thing, which can take many times that.
Generally speaking, that's also a problem I have with consuming audio or video podcasts -- time. While it's relatively easy to skim a whole bunch of blogs (especially if you're a fast reader), you can't really skim a podcast -- you kind of have to pay attention to the whole thing, which can especially be a problem if you're just browsing around trying to find something interesting.
I haven't dipped my foot into the podcasting waters yet (on the producing side, that is) -- I have a face for radio, a voice for print, and too much on my plate as it is. But just some food for thought. Thanks -- Joe
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