Podcasting is the trend of 2005.

It's driven by simple facts.

• 6 million iPods today, 2 million sold last year.
  
• The average music collection is 10 Gigabytes, total. Of this most people listen regularly to about 1 song in 10.
  
• Even the smallest iPod has 4 Gigabytes of space.
  
• We don't just want to listen to our own music, y'know.
  

The result is millions of units and millions of hours waiting to be used by someone.

What else is the result?

• Every radio station and network is creating hour-long shows for podcast download.
• Every blogger and his Aunt Sally is trying to create a Podcast.
• A shake-out is coming, fast.

Advice to Podcasters. You're doing radio. Radio has some very special rules.

1. Have a take and don't suck.
   
2. Move it along.
   
3. Funny and provocative are good. Anything else is bad.
   
4. Production values -- it costs more to create even a bad Podcast than a good blog.
   
5. We don't all have great voices, even the great writers.
   
6. It's not just the voice, but your ability to think on your feet, that turns you into a radio star.
   
7. If you're not on, even for a moment, the microphone knows it.
   

A lot of current radio programs are garbage, unlistenable. You're about to see that multiplied by a factor of several hundred, just this year.

So, if you really want to make money in this game, give me an online guide that will point me to good stuff, based on the type of content in it, the quality of the hosts, the quality of the choices being made. And update it regularly.

Not the best-sellers. The best.

We need good iPod blogs.