A quick and interesting article from NewsFactor here that briefly examines Podcasting for Business. The part that gets my attention most is

But because it takes longer to listen to a podcast than to read the same material online, it might be difficult for IBM and other companies to woo customers into giving up their free time, especially when they can skim through the material more quickly on their own.

Agreed. It’s quicker and easier to skim text than to listen. In fact I’ve often been frustrated everytime I try to listen to a podcast (or a recorded call for that matter) that has awesome information. When it comes time to refer back to that information or review, it’s almost impossible to find. There’s no ‘search’ feature in an audio.

This is one reason why I’ve emphasized to people the importance of shownotes. It’s too bad the popular podcast receivers don’t show you text but many others do. Shownotes – basically highlights of the show help give people an idea what each show is about and helps them determine if they should spend time listening or not. Hey, not everyone is interested in every show you have.

The other idea – though it may be much more work is maybe give people a quick table of contents e.g. How to get your site listed starts at 3 minutes 15 seconds or something to that effect. This way people can quickly forward to the section they want to listen to. What do you think?