Update: 10/10/06: The management over at Underheard.org dropped me a line recently and took exception with my characterization below of the likely legality of the operations over there. Briefly, it stated that they had sought legal counsel prior to putting up the site and believed that their operations were legal, and that this legality required that the shows they highlight be archived in full - challenging three of my points below.
I responded with a request for permission to post their response in full and the offer for them to give additional input but I have received no further response. I accept their word that I was wrong in my characterization that they had not seriously considered the legal situation in creating their site, and for this I apologize. I have no idea whether what they are doing is in fact legal. As they've elected not to respond I'll consider the subject closed.
I was dissing the podcast the other day, and Underheard.org kind of puts me in mind of my, let us say, doubts about the form. This is an aggregator, basically, they have collected links from a bunch of podcasting alternative radio shows and put them in one place. Obviously I'm in no position to badmouth aggregation. But there are some issues. This is yet another place (and I'd planned to be more circumspect about this to start with but it's just so prevalent) where the basic legal attitude is, hey, that's their stuff, we sure hope it's all basically legal, but. And what the hell, I link to it so no I must by necessity adopt the attitude as well... but I can't shake this feeling that this sort of laxness is going to bite the whole enterprise repeatedly on the ass as time goes on, and ultimately either choke it off via legislation/litigation or simply limit it to the DIY boho pomo yoyo brigade - not that that's the worst thing that could happen to it (the free software movement, by contrast, has at least in principle positioned copyright legality and intellectual property traceability as central concerns from the start... (Hmmm, who's running the Phree Sophtwhere Blog?)).
From a purely technical sense downloading a whole show just seems like a waste to me, you probably aren't going to keep the thing, so it's work, it's clutter to maintain it. The 'Pods maybe need to get a little Tivo going on, gain the ability to sort of choose and archive from the stream, make suggestions and help you manage the housekeeping of more ephemeral species of content like a podcast show. I downloaded an hour long show, about 53 MB. With good broadband and say a 20 gig HD player, this is a pretty manageable wodge of data. That's a hefty barrier to entry there, though. On accelerated dialup, with a 1 gig flash player, if you're off to work the next morning and you decide the whole thing sucks, you might just feel resentful about your time. Right now, for example, I'm enjoying this podcast I downloaded okay. But it's a total craps shoot, beyond a paragraph or two of description you just control click and see what happens. It would not take too many misses for me to give up on the whole enterprise. (And I'm pretty damn certain, now, that it's in no way legal. But sorting that out is Prodigy's problem, I think. But I won't be keeping a copy, the first Phree Musique download I won't have held on to).
What I really feel like is that this simulation of a broadcast is inherently regressive. What's really interesting to me is what comes after. A package as portable, useful, intuitive as radio is yet to come. Yes, radio is totally limited - a choice of streams, essentially. But how much different is a podcast aggregator, really? A lot more channels, theoretically infinite channels. That, of course is both the danger and the opportunity of the new form.
Scrivener downloaded...(as noted above the download link is now defunct).
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