February 21, 2005

More on Podcasting

Here's a fantastic story about podcasting from the Detroit News.

It may sound like a fringe, geek hobby, but podcasting is actually the latest way entertainment is morphing into an on-demand, Tivo style of delivery. While it's a grassroots communication tool now, big corporations like General Motors are testing the waters. "The neatest thing about podcasting is that it takes you back to the pamphlet days of 1776 when Patrick Henry and those guys were doing all that 'Give me liberty or give me death' stuff," said Scott Westerman.

"In the 1770s, anyone could write a pamphlet," Westerman said. "Blogging is the modern version of that. But podcasting is better than blogging, because the spoken word conveys much more emotion than the written word."

... It's the democratic quality of the medium that most delights [Michael] Wiley, GM's director of new media. "People had such fear about the concentration of media ownership, with just a few major corporations owning much of the media," Wiley said. "But all of a sudden these two new ways of communicating, blogging and podcasting, have emerged. And it's more democratic than the media has ever been."