Doug Kaye, who knows what he is talking about, talks about the talk of talk:
Some have suggested that podcasted MP3s have the ID3 genre tag set to Podcast. Bad idea. Podcasting is no more a genre than is TV or radio. It’s a transmission mechanism: audio files as RSS enclosures. You can do that with music (of all kinds) speech, sound effects, and more. Those are genres. If you want to use a genre to idenfity things like Daily Source Code or Evil Genius Chronicles, you could refer to them as audioblogs, but even then it might be too much of a catch-all. In any case, podcasting is not a genre.
There’s also a lot of confusion about the definition of podcasting. Again, I say it’s no more (or less) than audio files as RSS enclosures. A podcaster is someone who sends audio – any audio – in this way. So what do we call the receiving end – the people who use iPodder, its derivatives, or (heaven forbid) copy the MP3s to their players by hand or listen to them on their computers?...
Sometimes the simplest way to talk about networks is to describe flows, as Podcast does. If you watch the way web-based news aggregators are now involving readers as raters, if now writers, the difference between sender and reciever becomes inaudible. Calling it a cast is fine by me, but my point isn't naming.
Jerry Michalski has been talking about the ability to transform media from flows to stocks. Like the difference between oil markets (storable commodity) and electricity (non-storable and consequentially volatile), turning flows into stocks via Tivo and Aggregators does more than fulfill consumer desires, it transformer consumers into something else entirely. Podcasting is an evolutionary step that in pace with other media has complex results.
The quality problem with Podcasting or audioblogging isn't better production, except on rare occasions. Euan Semple talks of how Podcasts need deep linking to ferret out quality. Doc points out Jon Udell's deep linking approach. Like I said the other day:
The problem with Podcasting is that it isn't micro-content yet. Audio posts are still like documents, but I am sure they will soon have granular addressability combined with discovery -- so the long tail will start to wag quality posts into view.
The point is getting to the point. Its all to new to call anything a genre, but my point to Doug is that Podcasting is more than a means of transmission. Some innovation happened on the consuming end and the demand side will supply itself both in production and search. The atomic unit of audio will be discovered. Production may include smaller meta-roles of rating and annotation. When remix becomes a group activity, and the tail starts to wag, Podcasting will then be a new cornerstone of remix culture.