I think for Rss feeds to take of it will be the successful seamless integration in applications like Blue Dot. Through this you can keep track of what your friends write about. The reason why mentioning this is because by definition this is what makes a podcast ,it not just posting up audio, but the ability to subscribe to shows this via a RSS feed.

This comes as new Pew Report was made available. In the Report the key points are below.

• Some 12% of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast so they can listen to it or view it at a later time. This is a 5% reported growth in downloading compared from a February-April 2006 survey.
• Just 1% overall report downloading a podcast on a typical day.
• 15% of online men say they have downloaded a podcast,
• Compared with just 8% of online women.

This report would suggest a failing on the part of RSS feeds for subscribing to podcasts. Perhaps Rss aggregators aren’t good enough yet see blastfeed or threz. Both of these tools help organise and prioritise feeds. But how about including like podzinger into a feed,or a better ranking system in podcasts. Something where you can distinguish between the content you want to hear, and the stuff you want to ignore. Perhaps some visual representation might help. I have noticed over the year of listening to the more popular podcasts, more advertising, and myself having less patience for unrelated content. I think improving the current consumption mechanism will encourage more people to listen.

How do you consume your podcast?

If the content is good enough, and supported on the blog or website, with good links from the show I would tend to stream the audio from that site.

The other interesting point from the report was internet users for six or more years are twice as likely as those who have been online three years or less to have downloaded a podcast (13% vs. 6%).This statistic would again suggest room for more growth. I believe there will be more adopters with a growing infrastructure and distribution mechanisms.

What is not to surprising both from the Washington report below is that people like digesting there content generally from there pc, What would be interesting would be to know the percentage of students utilizing the feeds as way to get there podcasts. I would think that RSS feeds would lend themselves particularly when digesting something like a module in college. Perhaps there would be more involvement if it where more of a collective contribution. See Podserve where as a contributor you might be more inclined to subscribe.