Robert Scoble comments on Peter Davis's post claiming that podcasting is inefficient and agrees. This has been my response to podcasting since it first became the next big thing.
A commenter hits that nail on the head (or at least very near the head) when he says that podcasting (of both the audio and video variety) is only useful to those that commute often. There are surely lots of those. I guess that is one of the reasons why it is of no interest to me -- my daily commute is from the upstairs of my house, to my kitchen coffee machine and then to my basement office. I rarely have business outside of my office that requires a commute, my airplane trips are are at most 1 or 2 times a year. I don't own an iPod or mp3 player and rarely even have a use for a cell phone.
I would go further though and say that audio/video blogs are inefficient even for commuters - at least in their current form. One of the problems is that they are under produced. Too little editing, too little production planning, too little media talent. I can only take so much (in fact only once) of somebody going to their coffee machine in the middle of their podcast, wasting my time before I tune out and never come back. I suspect many commuters are the same.
Robert talks about all the places that you can listen to podcasts (exercising, while in the car, walking). The problem is that you need one of two things to have those happen -- internet connection everywhere you are, or some sort of preplanning to get the podcast from the internet onto your portable device. Complicated -- but I guess there are those that can deal with those complications (and there are some geek tools for managing the process).
The production tools and talent have to be upped so the material is not a waste of time, there has to be some sort of post production indexing functionality that helps me find stuff that interests me and more user friendly delivery tools have to be developed. Until some or all of these happen, I think podcasting will continue to be a waste of time (at least for me).
"1 million Channels (and Nothin' On)" seems like an apt description (with apologies to Bruce).
