Conduct just a cursory examination of the podcasting phenomenon, and there's no doubt it represents something quite special.

Heck, I've jumped in with both feet.  (See my podcast, Talking Communications with Farrell Kramer.) 

Today, FeedBurner -- a leading service I use that aggregates and tracks RSS feeds, including podcasts -- has come out with some astounding numbers on the growth of this new medium.  On its Burning Questions blog, FeedBurner reports: 

FeedBurner recently surpassed a major milestone of 44,000 podcast feeds under management which, according to the CIA World Factbook, exceeds the total number of radio stations worldwide.

That's a pretty significant statistic.  FeedBurner takes the analysis even further, though. 

Podcast listenership may have a long way to go before catching up to the U.S. radio audience, but while radio audience is declining, podcast circulation is consistently growing nearly 20% per month. Today, there are more than 1.6 million aggregate subscribers to FeedBurner-managed podcasts, and this number has more than doubled in the past six months.

And here's a very interesting comparison: 

Another promising indicator of the success of podcasting is its comparison to another media technology shift that received a lot of hype in its early days: The DVD. Back in 2000, the DVD format, just 3 years old at the time, was declared the most successful product launch in consumer electronics history, outselling the VCR five to one. Using these statistics as a benchmark, in less than two years, the number of podcasts available online is tenfold that of DVD titles in nearly half the time. In fact, at the 18-month mark for DVDs, there were fewer than 3,000 DVD titles available, and an install base of under 1.5m.

What does this all mean?  I believe it is telling us that the power of broadcast-quality audio combined with built-in time-shifting and the ability to listen on a number of devices (MP3 players, desktop computers, etc.) is a winning formula in the battle for media eyeballs and eardrums.

For communicators, it means we better be paying close attention to this medium.  Very close attention.