This accomplishment is amazing! Do you have any idea what 1% US radio share across North America is worth? How hard it is to earn? How many talk radio hosts would sacrifice their ethics on the air to get a national syndication contract? The barriers to behavioural change listeners have overcome? Congratulations, long tail!

I started blogging in 1998. It took eight years for bloggers and blog readers to experiment , evolve, and adopt the medium and its tools.  Give baby podcasting a break.

Despite this success I think podcasting is an interim form, with many new producers and viewers bypassing audio for video. Like blogging, the medium is full of every expression of humanity. Unlike blogging, there is low tollerance for poor production quality. And nothing like the hyperlinked mesh of the blogosphere to make podcasting into a social medium for listeners the way blogs are for readers.

Much of the grief seems to be about Forrester only including podcast feed subscriptions, not the more popular audio on demand.

The Skype story: While Skype Technologies S.A. was rumored last year to have queued up podcasting features, not likely happen this quarter. But Skype remains an enabler. It's driving people to buy speakers, webcams, and microphones for their PCs. Recording tools for Skype like Pamela, Skylook, and Hot Recorder are improving quickly, and morphing into quick conference-call-to-mp3 capture and and upload tools. Skype continues its infiltration of schools and workplaces, so conversation timeshifting and placeshifting makes podcasting and vlogging more relevant than ever.

See also: The Social Software Weblog, Kevin 2.0, Publishing 2.0, Mark Evans, Investor Relations Blog, Guardian Unlimited, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Blogspotting, Bloggers Blog, InterMedia, Barnako.com, blackrimglasses.com, SeattlePI.com Buzzworthy, Digital Inspiration, Texas Venture Capital … and John Cook's Venture Blog