Russell Beattie’s discovered PodCommuting, and he’s had an epiphany or two, and he’s onto something with his closer: “On-Demand Audio is the killer app for commuters,” but I suspect that’s just commuters with a car.
I’ve been listening to a few podcasts, but since I walk to work, anything that’s less than 15-20 minutes in length kind of gets lost on me the same way it does when I’m listening at home. I’ve yet to try bookmarking my iPod, but I suspect the problem is more with my attention span. A longer trip to the office would get me a lot further into the podcast swing of things, but it’s not just the trip time that’s a factor.
A lot of the spoken word I’ve downloaded is below radio-quality. That might change, but just as blogging doesn’t seem to have made a vast improvement in the world’s spelling and grammar, there will likely be podcasters broadcasting things I want to hear about at lousy audio levels for quite some time to come. When you’re walking through a busy intersection past a bus, the bus is pretty much all you hear. Ditto for some parts of mass transit. In a car, you (hopefully) don’t wear headphones, so you can adjust the audio within a wider range that’ll let you hear the message during the valleys without blasting your eardrums out on the peaks.
Podcasting is ultimately going to reinforce something Zed said awhile ago:
But your car’s an isolated bubble — wholly autonomous. It provides shelter, entertainment, a comfy chair. And you’re in control. There’s no one to tell you what you can play on the stereo, or how loud. No one to make you pick up your trash. You can smoke cigars, stay up late, sing out of key, pick your nose, or scratch your butt without anyone’s judgement or criticism. It’s an embassy of the self within the foreign land of society. Driving’s the only time a lot of people have to be alone, or to be in charge, or both.
Going further, the car is pretty much a private office for a lot of people, but there are some semi-obvious limitations to what kind of “office equipment” you can install within reach of the driver’s seat (does anyone understand how DVD players facing the driver are legal?) A mobile podcast downloader might fit in well here, possibly some kind of Bluetooth-equipped radio that talks to your cell phone and downloads your feeds on the fly, or a stand-alone solution that downloads throughout the day. We already have radios with Bluetooth that are designed to talk to your phone for handsfree operation, so this would largely be a software solution. Satellite radio is already taking off, but if the barrier to entry can be overcome through EDGE, we could see an interesting shakeup in the broadcasting world.
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