Over the past few weeks I have done alot of thinking about podcasts.  In reality, I've been hooked on something like this for well over a year now, as I have admitted my addition to dot net rocks long ago.  So as podcasting starting coming into the limelight, I was an obvious adopter.  The lack of an MP3 player made listening to podcasts a pain for a while.  I was burning quite a few, I mean like 7-10 cd's a week, to listen to on my commute.  I spend about 2 hours a day commuting. 

I turned to podcasting because our local radio.. well.. it's not good.  There are a few channels that play some interesting music and content, but for the most part the radio bores me.  It has for quite a while.  That's why DotNetRocks was a great thing.  Now I could fill otherwise mind numbing time with something I might enjoy, nerds talking about code.  And by golly I did.  I enjoyed it so much, that I ended up downloading and listening to every show. 

So, enter podcasting.  Podcasting is so insanely simple, yet so powerful.  Attach some audio to an xml stream, and you have some sort of makeshift radio where the consumer has control of the broadcast.  Think tivo for radio.  Think tivo for radio where the radio shows can be produced anywhere from a million dollar studio, to a 3 year old pc in someone's basement. 

So how is this a good thing?  Does anyone want to listen to Dave the Engineer talk about cleaning out his fridge tonight?  Probably not.  But, this opens up doors to having specialized audio and video content creation and delivery like never before.  Being a software developer, I am already interested in the different shows that are created on that subject.  This delivery channel is hardly limited to technical content, though.  It's conceivable to think that most knowledge based industries could use a channel of content delivery like this, since the passionate usually are both willing to talk and listen, no matter the audiance size.

I'm not going to touch heavily on the music side of podcasting, but will say this.  ipods (although not at ALL required to listen to podcasts) are in the hands of many, many young people, who embrace technology very quickly.  It will only take one or two good feeds of “new and cool“ music for podcasting to catch up with this crowd.

The problem, though, are the tools.  As with any technology when it debuts, the tools take a while to catch up.  The idea of delivering audio and video through feeds was coming at some point, the questions that remain are what do we do with them, and how do we distribute them.  Monetizing them is another issue, but for now lets say they take the blog route for that (although I doubt that).  Nerds that need something to listen to will support podcasting for another year or so, but for this idea to live up to it's potential it needs to move past that.  To move past that the tools need to be there, and easy. 

I'd like to see packages that record, and, and publish all in one.  Tie it to skype (or some open alternative), and then make it easy enough for anyone to use it.  How about a network of podcast torent seed servers, and have all the major aggregators support retrieving and seeding the files.  Wouldn't it be cool if your mp3 player could sync, and publish your podcasts remotely?  I could drop a message in my family feed and all of their phones could grab and play the feed.

Back to the point of the post title.  I think that I have adopted podcasting because I am a commuter.  I needed something to listen to, and this has filled the void.  I have spoke with some other techies who also read blogs, and many of them are not on board yet.  One thing I have noticed about most of them is that they do not have much of a commute.  Anyone else out there listening on your commute?  Any non commuters listening?