I agree that a feedback loop, especially one that links ideas and responses directly is necessary to keep podcasting from becoming merely another way of doing internet radio.

Somewhat related to this is the question of how to find the ideas that are relevant and interesting in the first place. I’ve tried listening to some of Dave’s podcasts, and while there are interesting sections, sometimes there were multiple topic that I could care less about. On a related topic, what if I only wanted ‘casts that only discuss a certain subject matter. I’d love to be able to tell a podcasting tool: “tell me about iraq today”, and have it dump the interesting posts to my audio device. Something like news.google.com, but that searches podcasts. Somehow I think that this is going to be a google-level problem ( a lot of technology required).

I’ve been following Russell Beattie’s blog for a while. He seems fairly convinced that high-speed wireless data, coupled with very capable devices, is on the verge of taking off in the states (how many times have we heard this before). Recently, he (I’m pretty sure it was him) made an interesting comment: If you’ve got enough bandwidth to your phone, you don’t need amount of memory for mp3s, etc: just stream them to the phone.

One of the problems that I see with the whole podcasting meme, which is very related to the points you raised, is that it is a passive, offline activity, with very few opportunities for feedback. Imagine this scenario: say you download one of Dave’s podcasts, and go for a walk. What happens if, while you’re walking, Dave mentions something that you’d like to respond to? Do you glance at your audio device & record the time offset? What about the idea? Do you you write it in a notebook?

What about if you had device that actually gave you the ability to annotate/record your responses on the fly. And gave you the ability to upload those responses. And found other responses in real-time.

Cell phones are starting to have the rich interfaces & CPU power that make such things possible.

This also raises the question: why just audio? What if you could stream audio, pictures, and/or video? What would the impact of such technology be on events such as the 2004 Republican convention? How would it have changed this report

Society-wise, we’re just starting to adjust to the implications of every cell-phone potentially having a camera. What about when cell-phones have the ability to talk to the internet in real time?

Tom

PS: I just noted that Russell has some more thoughts on podcasting today.