Great insight into what we should see in Podcasting for 2008.

We loved the strategies that were outlined by Alex and Paul on the different stages of marketing with Podcasts.

And we are in total agreement with you on the fact that Podcasting is about the content and not about the technology.

Very interesting and insightful.

Pat and Lorna Shanks
www.SpectacularPresentations.com

It's good to have you two back and always thought-provoking to hear what you have to say, but I did want to bring up some possible disadvantages of breaking up a 20-minute show into 4 5-minute shows.

1) Incomplete thoughts: if you're discussing a complex issue, it may be harder fo people to follow you if they have to wait until the next day/week to get step 2 in your argument.

2) Restriction on format: It's hard to have a meaningful discussion in 5 minutes, so that length really only suits one-host shows.

3) Signal to noise ratio: While your advertisers (including you if you have ads for your own products) might like the idea of having your listeners exposed to your ads several times more often, a five-minute podcast of which 2-3 minutes is intro/outro and advertising seems a bit unbalanced. This is especially true if point 4 is a factor.

4) Listening habits/context: I do a lot of my podcast listening while driving. While I do subscribe to some 5-minute shows (Grammar Girl, for instance), I rarely listen to those in the car, when I want to keep my hands free and not jump show-to-show-to-show for 20 minutes or longer. So I usually listen to the short shows when I'm cooking. But even then, I tend to save up a week's worth of NPR podcasts and listen to all of them together. When I get to the closing sponsorship announcement, I press the "skip" button so I can go onto the next. I really don't care to hear that 10 times in 30 minutes.

I have no idea whether most podcast listeners are like me, and I imagine that individual podcasters probably have to check with their own audience to see whether most of them listen on portable devices or at their computers. But I think these are factors podcasters need to take into account before dividing their shows into 5-minute chunks.

Everyones talking about the ipod and MP3 players. What about cell phones? Do you think it's important to make your blog mobile phone ready? I think the future of portable players will be smart phones.

I only just listened to this episode on my iPod (only found this podcast recently) and what Alex said about the ecommerce platform was like coming from my heart, but still not going far enough for me.

I am quite new to this whole arena of internet business and taking my first tentative steps towards producing and then marketing information products. And, folks, I am in Europe, Germany to be more precise. During the last few months I have started to look around for solutions. I didn't find any one that did what Alex talked about AND most of them are American, or for Englishspeaking people. THe non-English stuff I found was partial solutions, or cumbersome, or oversized, or I plain didn't like their website…

But here in Germany and Europe a great number of people do not have enough command of the English language to order an ebook, audio etc from an American/English system. So I need something international (because I don't intend to limit myself to German speaking countries btw) - language AND currency wise.

Ok, PayPal has some multi-language and multi currency capabilities, so does Kagi. But they have other limitations (at least that's my impression right now, and I could not name the details off the top of my head just now).

Well, long story short… What you guys said about (what I'ld call) an "Integrative Platform" is dead on for me, plus I would like it so customisable that every little piece the customer gets into contact with can be translated into different languages (if Xmas were coming up I would say, how about English, Spanish, German and French built in? Broadens YOUR market, too!!)

What do you think?