I listened to my first podcast on the plane to Cleveland two weekends ago. For those of you who don’t know, podcasting is the latest techno buzzword, right after RSS and blogs, which most of the population still don’t know. Podcasting is basically a delivery system for audio. You sign up for someone’s podcast and whenever they have new content it’s immediately downloaded to your iPod and ready for you to listen at your convenience.

And it’s launched a college radio renaissance. Everyone and their brother thinks they can be a podcaster, much like everyone and their brother thinks they can be a blogger. And I don’t get it.

All podcasting has done for audio is deliver it to people. It’s RSS for audio. Audio certainly existed before podcasting, and anyone with enough know-how could make an audio show. An Internet radio show could certainly exist without podcasting, in the same way blogs existed (and thrived) before RSS. But somehow audio didn’t thrive until that automated delivery system came along.

And now everyone has their own podcast. What kills me is that blogging is fairly simple. If you can type, you can blog. It doesn’t mean your blog will be brilliant, but it doesn’t take much to do a blog. A podcast on the other hand (and really all we’re talking about is an online radio show–why do we refer to them by the delivery system? It’s like calling a blog an RSS??) requires a lot of technical know-how. You need equipment to record your voice, to edit the audio, to drop in music and mix the whole thing. You need a little more than Blogger.

In college I had a radio show. It consisted of me and a roommate talking to each other between songs and doing strange, random things (like Randomally Selected Hallway Person, an interview with a random stranger unfortunate enough to be walking down the hall when we did the segment). Our between-song banter was sometimes funny, but it usually worked because we had a purpose: playing music. We could yuk it up for a few minutes, but then we got on with the business of playing songs.

Podcasts it seems, are often made up of yuking it up. A person talking, maybe with someone else, maybe by themselves, occasionally interrupted by a clip of a song. Yikes. Sorry, but most people just don’t have the radio voice to make that interesting. Good radio requires editing and very few ‘ums’. Imagine if blogs were like podcasts (“So, um, today we’re going to uh… talk about this really cool thing I saw the other day, um, when I was out with my friend–a good friend you should check out his blog really, it’s good stuff. So anyway, um, where was I? Oh yeah, today we’re going to talk about this cool thing…”).

Nevermind the question of where all these podcasters are getting their music. Certainly some of them are using royalty-free music or they have the artist’s permission, but a whole lot of them are just bootlegging music. I’m sure no one thinks it’s a big deal, since it’s just a small-time podcast that only a handful of people listen to. But again, we get back to the issue of intellectual copyright. Something tells me U2 wouldn’t agree to their music being used in as many podcasts as it is.

Can we please talk about podcasting for what it is: a unique delivery system that gives the power to the people. That’s what it is. The plethora of online radio shows, well, most of them aren’t worth talking about.