Doc Searls nails some of the key advantages of podcasting in his post DIY radio with PODcasting
bq. “The key virtue of traditional radio is its immediacy: the fact that it’s live. They key virtue of this new breed of radio is that it’s Net-native. That is, it’s archived in a way that can be listened to at the convenience of the listener, and (this is key) that it can be linked to by others, and enclosed in an RSS feed.”
bq. “PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”
Podcasting has changed the way I listen to “radio”. Years ago when I was a photographer I spent a great deal of time in the car going from assignment to assignment and commuting to work. I was a faithful listener of NPR and gravitated to some of the local AM talk shows mid-day.
After switching careers I started commuting to work on public transportation and I quit listening to radio. It just wasn’t as convenient as the newspaper and as Doc discovered much of the programming was just plain irrelevant to me.
I now get to choose what I want to hear and when. It is also being “‘casted” in an infrastructure that is important to me. The majority of information I consume today comes to me via RSS. If they don’t have an RSS feed I don’t read them (hint, hint Chicago Tribune).