Today doing my Blog Explosion surfing, I stumbled across modern marketing by collaborative marketing services These sort of ‘blogs’ are one of the things I dislike most about Blog Explosion. Generally, they are poorly constructed advertisement for web hosting, web design, or some sort of online marketing expertise.

However, this one had an article about Podcasting. It is a simple introduction to what podcasting is and it has a few interesting links. One is to a blog entry by Steve Rubel in Micro Persuasion about Pondering Possibilities in Podvertising. This is a good article about what is going on with podcasting. To me, it feels a little over optimistic, based on what I’ve seen for podcasts so far. It does note the trend of mainstream media to adopt Podcasting. There is quite a discussion and set of trackbacks there.

In terms of advertisements, Coverville, which is my current favorite podcast, always has a pitch for iPodderX, so the ads are already out there.

As a side comment, recently, I saw the new advertisement for the Citroen C4. This is an ad everyone is talking about online, and I suspect is probably being podcast by some fan somewhere. (For details, check out this, this, this, and this as examples). The last one also references the famous Honda Ad that everyone talked about for so long.

One person who commented on the modern marketing entry was Charlie Quidnunc. Charlie does a plug for Podcast Bunker as well as for his own podcast blog, in which he offers ‘political readings from the blogosphere, with a conservative perspective’.

He points to David Weinberger’s post on Personal Democracy. David writes:

“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.”

I believe David has a few important points. You can’t scan podcasts easily. However, I’m not sure that is the point. What you can do is download the podcasts to your ipod and listen to them when you are in the gym, on the road, etc. Because of this, the reputation of a podcaster is likely to be much more important than the reputation of a blogger. Charlie is doing some interesting work, essentially reviewing blogs and making the blog reviews available to people when they are away from their computers.

John Patterson is proposing doing something similar, perhaps with a slightly higher production quality, with a show called The Midnight Blogger. I put up a promo for that on DeanPort, in part as a way to test if I could really podcast with Drupal.

So, we have advertisements and politics on podcasts, now all that we need is a good reputation system so we can find which podcasts are really worth listening to.