I know that in the last three months alone I've downloaded hundreds of the things and I haven't listened to more than a minute or two yet.

Since my favourite radioshow is on podcasts, I have listened to them for many hours already, the last few weeks.
One might not be able to listen to a radioprogramme 'real time', and then podcast are very convenient, at least for me.

Well, my original criticism still stands: how is this supposed to be extensible to major audiences? There's nothing novel about podcasts: you have to download them from the internet just like leaching from an FTP server in the early 90s. It's not a broadcast medium, it's a peer=to-peer medium at best. Other than bittorrent, I don't see a good way to distribute podcasts to multiple downloaders without paying proportionately more for each additional subscriber.

Bittorrent could be a solution for many situations, but torrents tend to have limited lifespans, so they are much more suited for a breaking news cast than for more carefully constructed, long lived documentary material.

In a way bittorrent is inherently democratic in that only the popular things are easy to obtain, but this is unlikely to be material that I'm interested in.

My other point still stands too, which is that rather than wasting time on the things trying to be clever and new by calling themselves podcasts, you are still better off just downloading This American Life or Morning Becomes Eclectic and putting them on your mp3 player. Or buying a freaking book on CD and putting it on there.

Other than Public Radio Exchange and possible the new WGBH feeds you just pointed out, I don't think I'm too psyched about podcasts yet.