Is Podcasting any use?

I can understand that when something exciting comes along, you're likely to throw caution to the wind. By now everyone in the technology industry knows the whole spiel about not touting the technology for its own sakes, yet it still gets done. Some words of caution about podcasting. Of course there is value in podcasting, but the focus should be on that value, not on the medium of delivery. And if the same value can be provided in some other way, so be it.

On a related note, we recently interviewed and focus-grouped a lot of ordinary people (i.e. not immersed in this industry) about blogs. Not surprisingly, most of them had not heard of blogs, or thought blogs were weird websites written by geeky anoraks (heaven forbid!). None of them saw any unique value in a blog, which again shows the focus should be on the value, because the end user does not care what medium is used. What was also interesting is that once we probed them, it turned out most of these people had read blogs or found information on them - they just didn't know it was a blog rather than a run-of-the-mill website.