[Update 5/27/05: Rob Hof set me straight, and BusinessWeek updated the directions regarding their podcasting. You can download, both manually and via RSS: they just didn't make it clear on the page with the podcast.]

So Stephen Baker and Ira Sager at BusinessWeek launched "podcasting" for the media giant this week (see A Podcast on Podcasting: BusinessWeek), with an ironic piece on podcasting.

Why ironic?

• First of all, there is no RSS feed for the "podcast" so there is no obvious way (short of hijacking the audio stream) to actually get the audio onto your MP3 player. Doesn't that mean, by definition that it is not a podcast? I guess they think that any streaming audio on a website is a podcast?
  
• Second, shouldn't there be a thunderclap when Ira Sager asked Steve about podcasting being coopted by big media or corporations? I mean, it's BusinessWeek (a brand of McGraw-Hill) trying to break into podcasting here, after all, not two guys in a garage arguing about open source, their wives, or the NBA playoffs. They are a media giant. They are talking about themselves in the third person.

[full disclosure: I did a bunch of consulting for BusinessWeek last month, helping them in a crashproject to (re)launch their blogs on a new technology platform. I even demoed my podcasting setup there a few weeks ago -- what I have used to podcast the True Voice shows -- but they decided to use Infoble's technology (who don't even position their solution as podcasting at their website), rather than typical podcasting stuff.]

[tags: Watching The Watchers, BusinessWeek, podcasting, blogging]