Podcasting rocks. Podcasting is fun. Podcasting is important enough that it will affect politics and democracy in unexpected ways. It could, in fact, turn out to be huge...but first it needs one more genius.

As a technology, podcasting is no big deal. But, neither was blogging. To make a podcast, you create a file -- typically audio, but it could be video, images, or anything else -- and post it on a site. The site creates a small file (known as an RSS feed) that contains a brief description of the contents as well as who made it, the date, etc. People find the feed and download the file. They can then listen it to it on their computer or move it onto their iPod-like listening device. Couldn't be simpler.

And simplicity is at the heart of this particular phenomenon's early success. Just about anyone with a microphone and a computer can create an audio file and post it on her blog. That's the sort of simplicity that made blogging so popular. But with podcasting, the breakthrough simplicity is on the receiving end. Aggregators assemble the latest podcasts from the sites I have "subscribed" to. I can then listen to the audio at my leisure: topical commentary, music, humor...whatever sounds people are making available. My aggregator becomes, in effect, a broadcaster -- more like a broadsucker -- creating my own personal station.

Apple reported in July that it had sold 3.7 million iPods, and the market is full of competitors. In fact, podcasting provides lower- priced, diskless portable playback devices with a reason to live: A $100 player with 256MB of RAM storage is enough to store about four hours of music but about seven hours of, say, Adam Curry's podcasts -- not enough storage for a music library but plenty for drive-time or jog-time listening.

So, a new infrastructure that can make every citizen into a webcaster is on the verge of arriving. A single event could kick the adoption curve to near vertical: Someone will capture vote-tamperers on camera, a political anthem will sneak its way around the broadcast filters, or someone will give a speech that stirs our hearts. It's bound to happen, and probably sooner rather than later.

Sure, we can already spread provocative media files around the Net without podcasting. And we have: Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire was seen by more people via Web captures of it than on CNN. But capturing or creating video or audio, finding the channels for distributing it, and making it easy for people to experience it when they're not tethered to their computers has been a pain in the butt. Making it easy is a big deal, just as blogs took off because they made what used to be called "updating your home page" so simple that you can do it five times a day without spilling your coffee.

But, just as the toppling of Trent Lott doesn't get at what's really important about blogging, podcasting the next Rodney King-ish video isn't what's so exciting about podcasting. More important will be the emergence of voices outside of the broadcast media. Podcasting enables us to find audio and visual commentators who will become a part of our lives. It's easy to imagine broadcasting losing some of its drive-time to podcasts by people who come to us live from the grassroots. Indeed, as broadcasters provide RSS feeds for their content, we will mix and match across channels and across domains, so that our personal stations will feature a BBC report on the Sudan, the latest song by BradSucks, the latest from Tech Chick Weekly, pygmy lullabies that Ethan Zuckerman found on the Web, and the latest entry in Mom's daily diary.

Audio has shown itself to be a particularly potent political force, especially when it comes to creating leaders, from FDR's fireside chats to Martin Luther King's prophetic voice. It's been the medium for insurgents: Both Ayatollah Khoumeni and Newt Gingrich used audio tapes to build and maintain their movements. The human voice is an intimate instrument, and intimacy is usually more inspiring than policies. Of course, voice is also the preferred medium of the demagogue. Will the many-to-many nature of the Net make it harder for demagogues to establish the one-to-many relationships that traditionally have propelled them to prominence? Will the "long tail" prevail over the left side of the power law? It's too early to tell, but not too early to worry, and never too early to hope.

Even so, it feels to me like podcasting is one genius short. And not just because podcasting is still pretty geeky; I'm sure the technology will get even easier and more pervasive. The real problem is that because it's easier to skim print than multimedia, aggregators are going to have to get much better at helping us find what's worth listening to. As podcasting spreads and more people create multimedia files, the situation will become more acute. Solve that piece -- social software to the rescue? -- and podcasting can begin to shake apart the broadcast networks. With a rearrangment of the means of multimedia production there surely most come at least some rearrangement of the political order as well. For the better, we hope.

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Related Links

Articles:
Excellent article on politics and podcasting
Jon Udell on the mechanics

Tools:
The best-known podcast aggregator is iPodder, a free, open source program available
for Windows, Mac and Linux, created by Adam Curry. (Some other podcast aggregators are listed here.

Sources of podcasts:

OpenPodCast.org - Podcast collection anyone can contribute to
Podcasters
Podcaster
IpodderX
Podfeeder
Podfeeder's political podcasts