"Is it just me or are all the bubbles in the podcasting lather turning into a thin layer of slightly manky detergent on the surface of Internet pond life?"

Beatiful, just beautiful.

"Is it just me or ..."

It's just you.

The past year in podcasting was the overture. Now that we understand the technical capabilities, more and more are building more and better infrastructure to support podcasting - ESPECIALLY in education. See www.classcaster.org where 50 law faculty are podcasting their courses (recording the classroom or creating weekly summaries). None of these folks knew much about blogs or podcasting before the project started.

As for reasons to love podcasting? See my post on this very topic ...

caliopolis.classcaster.org

Regards,
John

I'm with you on the murkiness of the podcast soup. Last November, I wrote about my problems with Podcasting -
http://newmediaworkshops.com/telblog/?p=64
and felt I had yelled the emperor has no clothes! I mused, "Is anyone listening to this stuff?" You've helped to answer that question!

Generally, I've been pleased with the quality of the podcasts I've found time to listen to - most in the Education Technology genre (you can review a sampling of my feeds here: http://www.gigadial.net/public/station/22554 - just to add to your unlistened to collection ;-)!! ) but I'm still frustrated by the inability to capture the thoughts or links whizzing through my ears on these things since I'm mostly listening to my podcasts while I walk or drive.

Happy swimming in the podcast lather on the internet pond (I love that!)!

Thanks to all concerned for their comments.

Just to be clear — particularly in respect of John's comments — I was not meaning to make a sweeping rejection of all podcasting as over-hyped. I was just meaning that, if the hype has died down a bit, perhaps we can reach a more sober assessment of what podcasting is well-suited to.

John, I can't reach your sites at the moment, but I will check back another day. It sounds to me like your educational applications may well fit what I said in the last paragraph of my post about "getting niche content to people who are committed to that content". That assumes that your students are committed to their course work, obviously (if they're not committed then automatically filling their hard disks with MP3s of educational material isn't going to help them become committed).

But what you're talking about is professionally prepared material targeted at a small, tightly defined audience — which is quite different from cut-up radio shows or comedians being less funny than they usually are.

I think you made the point.

Podcasting works fine for training (there's people successfully using it for language training and probably should work for doing soft-skills) and I think works pretty fine too as on-demand radio.

In Spain it's working nice with thousands of downloads for late-night radio shows... perhaps podcasting is the future of radio in the same way as TiVo could be the future of TV.

Great Article! I am an indie musician and love meeting like minded folks. Music is my passion in life and it reflects in my work. I will be back here often to read your new posts!