Podcasts: lifelines or isolation units?

Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix: Feed your head. Podcasting is DIY radio for programmers and listeners alike. Will it save us from corporate radio? Or further isolate us inside our own miniature media worlds?

That's an easy one. Anything that advances the cause of personal media and individuality at the expense of mass-taste, mass-market, lowest-common-denominator media is a good thing.

Excerpt from Dan's article:

WGBH is actually something of a pioneer: its weekly Morning Stories, a seven-or-so-minute slice of life produced by Tony Kahn, was one of the first public radio programs offered for podcast. Kahn is currently recovering from emergency coronary-bypass surgery, and was unavailable for comment. But his associate producer, Gary Mott, is convinced that podcasting, or something like it, is the future of radio. "I think the next generation of media consumers — i.e., our children — are going to grow up in an environment where they’re not going to be making appointments to watch television shows and listen to radio programs. They’re going to want content on demand," he says.

I met Tony Kahn at BloggerCon last month and had planned to contact him about getting some of WGBH's podcasts onto Ourmedia (even posted video of Tony on the Internet Archive site). Sorry to hear about his hospitalization.