I just finished Naked Conversations, very interesting book about blogging and business. If you blog, I would suggest reading it. I bought it yesterday, started reading on a flight to Chicago and finished it on the way back.
One of the things that I found interesting and guess never realized was that blogging is taking off at an incredible rate and the consumption of Podcasts is taking off at a even a greater rate then blogging. I think this is due to two reasons. The activity of listening to Podcasts can be secondary to what you are doing. When reading a blog you are pretty much single threaded, focused on the content of the blog.
The downfall to Podcasting is that it takes more investment to get into, both from a monetary standpoint and time. These factors limit the number of Podcasters, which if the demand continues to rise for Podcasts may create somewhat of a shortage… and may actually create a viable market for subscription based podcasts.
Blogcasting?? So this brings us to the next point. Why aren’t we recording blog entries and publishing them. Just recording what we wrote. Some would suggest this would be a great application for the Microsoft Speech SDK. The problem with this is the best digital voices still sound digital. Even the AT&T voices still sound too robotic in my opinion.