What's wrong with Podcasting?

dude, you are soooo wrong :) podcasts are just a special delivery method. that's like saying downloading with bittorrent is non-web. it's not non-web, it's just non-HTTP/HTML.

now, if you want to blog about podcasts, you face the same constraints as blogging about a part of a tv broadcast or a really cool riff in a song. what do you do in the case of TV? well, do an image capture and post it on your blog. with a podcast, just use an open source tool (audacity comes to mind) to rip that part of the podcast you want to refer to and post that. or better, make it a stream containing only the stuff you want to hear (you can bookmark inside a stream, no problems).

so? you say, it's still really inconvenient. sure, but that's technology catching up to the ideas. don't kill the idea by criticizing the technology, go and build better technology.

gottlieb daimler didn't say: this thing always breaks down, ergo i prefer the horse/carriage product bundle. so don't go and diss gottlieb, ok?

:)

Max

OK, so podcasting is new. Heck, I even own an iPod, I just don't seem to get hooked.

And yes, extracting audio out of a podcast *is* in theory possible and even simpler than converting some TV programming to web... but still. Maybe it's just me.

Here's a link to a page at WGBH where they have excerpts of specific things I have said in my podcasts.

http://streams.wgbh.org/technology

It's not nearly as impossible as you seem to think it is. I also include excerpts of other podcasts in mine and then comment on them. That too is far from impossible.

d

There's no need to get hooked - it's not intended as a replacement for blogging, it's just an alternative delivery method for audio content a la IT Conversations. Why the fuss?

I have been thinking about podcasting and trying it myself and I agree to some extent with you. Audio files are more linear then webpages, you can't scroll through it as easy as a webpage to see if there is anything that interests you. Either you listend or you don't. I wish there was a way to put bookmarks into audiofiles, then I could describe my files in the text attached to the audio blog post and put a bookmark in places where I change the subject. Thein it would be easier for the listeners to find the part that interest them without having to listend to the whole file.

Heiko, I think I made the same mistake for some weeks to (sorry, to imply that you're as dumb as me): i compared podcasting to weblogs and could only see disadvantages. there were some experiments with audio-blogging that showed these disadvantages very clearly.
audio-blogging may be nice for some authors but it is not nice for the readers. but podcasting is no audioblogging. i think it is a new way to distribute a kind of grass-roots talk-radio even music ...

otherwise i aggree with you and find it rather frustrating, that there is no "easy" way to cite or reference into an audio-stream. i don't think this is just a proiblem with the tools. audio is a different medium. better for some applications, worse (compared to text) for others. what i would like to have is a transcript of all interesting "talk-pocasts". BTW: some radio stations are already doing quite a good in that regard.