Aaron Brazell, of Technosailor fame, is participating in an Alternablog series on Pro Blogger. The Alternablog series deals with alternatives to blogging.While I don’t see podcasts as a type of blogging, there’s a fair number of people out there that…

Some observations:
1) Podcasts are intensive. We do two shows a week and there’s around 5-6 hours work per show, writing the script, recording and post-production.
2) 95% of our traffic is via iTunes which means very little traffic on the site – which means very little AdSense income! Although the site design is so bad this could be a contributing factor.
3) Tried Fruitcast, but they could not convert a standard Wordpress feed (I had to create a dummy Feedburner feed), had no ads to put on the shows and we had performance issues when downloading.
4) Don’t worry about bandwidth! We host with Bluehost and get 400GB a month for US$6.95 a month. We have consumed over 250GB in the last two months with no problems at all. One host I saw was offering 750GB/mth for $US16.95 a month.
5) Podcasts need at least 2 people – they need to be conversational with a certain amount of spontaeous comment. The script is just a guide – I don’t even show it to my co-host, so it’s fresh to him and that’s how it comes across (hopefully) in the show.
6) We don’t have time to blog as well!
7) Podcasts attract a different demographic. Reading a blog is generally quick and easy – listening to a podcast (in our case) is a 45 minute investment. We have found that very few of our listeners are from the UK, which is probably because there are so many other sources of information there and possibly because we are two ex-pats with Aussie twangs(!). We have a number of Australian listeners but the vast majority are from the US and most of the feedback we get is that we fill a gap bringing news and particularly views that is either not available or hard to find in the US.

We are covering the World Cup as obviously this is a once-every-4-years opportunity to attract new listeners and we are thinking of building some additional services almost entirely around user-generated content that might generate income.

So the podcast acts as our main promotional vehicle. There is potential for income for podcasts, the Fruitcast theory looks great, but I think we’ll have to sit tight until Google, Yahoo! or perhaps Feedburner launches an audio ad network.

With the new blog i’ve launched, DailyBuzzer.com , i intend in launching a bi-weekly podcast show that will mainly focus on music and unusual entertainment, i’m waiting for the blog to get a minimal amount of visits a day so i can make sure my podcasts are being listened to.

A.H

And you are right, it is best if more than one person is doing the podcast so that some discussion is going on. If it’s only one guy just talking I think I’d prefer a normal blog over that.

Regarding the bandwidth I don’t see that much of a problem nowadays. There are lots of services out there which let you host your audio (or video) files and bandwidth via DSL is usually quite cheap these days so downloading should not be a big problem.

But you might be right about the monetary things. I am myself just a rare video podcaster and it’s more for fun than for making money and thus I haven’t looked into the possibilities of getting money out. So the real podcasters might be able to tell you more about it (and haven’t there also been services out there which do automatically insert some ads into your audio?).

What I also do enjoy are actual video podcasts (or video blogs, vlogs, however you call it :-). I usually do watch some of them (like Rocketboom, Steve Garfield etc.) on my train travels to clients while I do listen to audio podcasts more while walking or sitting in a bus (where it’s not so handy to have a laptop on your lap as the time in the bus is usually not that long).

The benefit of video podcasts btw. is that you also can show more things like screenshots, little screencasts etc. The downside here is of course also bandwidth (but the same as to audio podcasts applies here) and the length, as it needs to be short IMHO in order to keep the audience interested and file size small.

So all in all I do enjoy audio and video podcasts as nice addition to normal blogs depending on the situation. A text blog is nice to read during work while audio or video blogs are nice to have for travelling or walking or just hanging around somewhere without laptop (at least true for audio, with video I found the screens of portable media players (I do use PSP) sometimes a bit too small, esp. for screencasts).