Today I started dipping my toes into the chilly water of Podcasting. A Podcast, for those of you who haven’t encountered the phenomena, is a lot like a weblog, but done with audio, rather than text. One subscribes to a podcast, after which each episode of that podcast is automatically loaded as it’s released into one’s iPod (or PSP) for later listening. The technology’s still a bit clunky, but it’s rather nice to have regularly updated audio content for my walks to work.

The downside, however, is that because of the time-based nature of the medium, it requires fairly ruthless editing. I can’t skip to the next paragraph if I want to get through it quickly, nor can I skim. This problem is compounded by the fact that editing audio is harder than editing prose, which means that while it needs to be edited more heavily than text, it’s often edited less. No matter how charming Adam Curry is, one can’t listen to him ride the elevators in the Waldorf-Astoria for 20 minutes trying to strike up conversations with strangers and feel it time well spent.

Fortunately, there are a few out there who adhere to the “only talk when I have something to say” school of thought. As with weblogging, it will probably be a while before very much higher-quality content starts to emerge, but the promise of easily syndicated “radio shows” without the radio is too great for me to ignore.