Thanks for the comment. Like you, I listen to podcasts when I’m driving or (as is the case these days with Zend) flying. I do however, listen to some podcasts as background noise. I’m listening to one right now, trying it out to see if I want to add it to my iTunes.

@Ivo,
Thanks so much for taking the time to comment. I understand about not knowing which ones are interesting. I listen to a lot of podcasts when I working out and have dropped several just because they aren’t interesting. One that I dropped last week was by an expert in his field but his podcast was rambling and honestly, boring. So while I still respect his opinion, I won’t listen to his podcast. I’ll wait for someone to summarize it. :)

@John,
Thanks so much for the comment and the podcast. I’ve been a fan of Marketing Over Coffee for a couple of months now. It’s always nice when I get up and see a new episode on my iPod.

@Jay,
Oh man, we think so much alike. However, to those who don’t learn from audio, podcasting can still bring a lot to their lives. A lot of podcasts don’t teach but entertain and recap. For example, EscapePod is the second podcast I subscribed to and I’ve been listening since July 2005? (And Feng Burger is still one of my favorites!)

I want to start teaching people that podcasts are out there. Forget teaching them to podcast, most people won’t and the ones that will won’t need to be taught, they will catch the fever when they understand what’s out there. I know every podcaster does their part to bring more people into the podcast generation and I’m not trying to take anything away from their efforts., I’m just trying to do my part as a podcaster. :)

Subscribing to your podcast, not because you poster or because I hope you subscribe to one of mine but because it looks interesting, and that’s really the only reason anyone should subscribe to a podcast. (Except for my mom, she should subscribe to all of mine, even if she doesn’t understand any of it!)

As with an unconference though, the law of two feet applies to podcasting, if yours is not for me, that’s not saying it’s bad, it’s just saying that it’s not for me.

Again, thank you all for commenting! Make sure that each of you tell someone about a podcast today. (Bonus points if it’s one of mine!) :)

=C=

Great post, I promote podcasts every chance I get and in presentations all over the world! I have down loaded your cast and the others I hadn’t heard before.

I share your frustration… ‘Why doesn’t everyone LOVE this medium?’

I have two theories.

1. People learn different ways. About 20-30% of people are auditory learners, they learn well from auditory sources, they learn better with background music on etc. I believe that auditory learners are likely a big part of the podcast fishbowl.

2. Once a podcast clicks with you, you’re converted. For me the ‘tipping point’ came from listening to Jaffe Juice (Across the Sound) and Mitch Joel’s brilliant Six Pixels of Separation. When I found entertaining podcasts that were in my area of interest I became a massive podcast convert and all I wanted to do was find more great podcasts.

I listen when I drive, I listen when I work out, I listen when I walk my dog.

I have a podcast called The Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing http://podcast.tengoldenrules.com , we’ve had some great guests including Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig’s List, Tim Westergren the founder of Pandora.com and Google’s Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik. Please send me your feedback if you get a chance to listen.

There was a period I was listening to podcasts a lot, but now, it’s just a few (one music show and php|abstract basically). The reason is: I don’t know which ones I find interesting. Many are boring, and after subscribing to some and unsubscribing again after 2 episodes, I kind of stopped searching for them.

I do like smaller podcasts. 5 to 10 minutes is a nice length that I can keep focussed on; anything longer and my mind tends to wander.

And sometimes I’m just not aware of a podcast; when I saw 60sec-tech in your list I thought ‘huh, they have audio too?’ (I read it in a feed reader).

The iPod has an annoying thing regarding podcasts; for some reason, after a podcast, it alsways stops and goes to the main menu. This makes it annoying to navigate to the correct menu again to start the next podcast. Especially when trying to pay attention to the road too.

Unfortunately I live in a small country called Belgium (comparable to the state Maryland) and the distances I travel are too small to completely listen to long podcasts, so I tend to stick to the smaller episodes of php-abstract, geekbrief and 60secondtech.

So, I rather have more small episodes (30minutes to an hour) then very long episodes, covering a specific topic at a time. But even with this limitation, I still consider myself to be a part of the “podcast generation”, because without it I would loose touch with the community from which I can learn so much.

Just my vision on this topic.

Michelangelo