Hey Seth,

Read you every day!

So what are you saying? That this is more like a "Nike commercial" kind of investment? That they're paying him to be the Michael Jordan of Podcasting and hype it as opposed to an actually doing anything forward with the technology?

$9 million is a lot of money. Why would they need so much? I'm flabbergasted.

Liza,

Why did broadcast.com net billions of dollars (!!!) from Yahoo? Upon reflection, that site wasn't doing anything that revolutionary, more like repackaging existing streaming content and putting their frameset around it.

But good money if you can get it, I sure wouldn't turn it down.

PS: If you do something "forward" with podcasting, you end up with the traditional electronic media. Whee!

Ethan

A reader! Two readers!

Liz - I'm saying they want to get the investment payoff somehow, thus they need a greater fool, err, buyer, somewhere. So they'll have to puff up the topic overall, in order to generate the requisite frenzied hype, err, investor interest (i.e. create an impression that the company is valuable).

Three readers, although you already know about me I'm sure.

It occurs to me that this sum doesn't seem quite as large when one takes into account the larger amounts of bandwidth incurred by mass-distributing audio files. Bloggers can ramble on till the cows come home and go back and have it amount to no more than a few kilobytes here and there. That's one of the things that's always bugged me about podcasting - all that wasted bandwidth. We're already seeing some problems with simple RSS delivery, I'd hate to see what Podcasting catching on would do to bandwidth costs.

Luckily we'll have Mr. Curry picking up the tab.

I'm almost hopeful that rather than Michael Jordan, he becomes the MC Hammer of podcasting, so that we can all get back to Podcasting about how we love to Podcast and how Podcasting has changed the world.