I'm always faintly embarassed by the word "podcasting". Like "blog", it's always felt a little self-consciously cute, its phonemes precision-engineered to stick in your head and Go Viral. (That on-line "grassroots" movements seem to spontaneously co-opt corporate branding techniques might deserve an entire post of its own sometime.)

Broadcast media's attention to podcasting was officially kicked off last month by the perpetually buzz-starved Wired, which declared "THE END OF RADIO!!", and then added-- in tiny parenthesis-- "...as we know it". Coy, Wired. Very coy.

The meat behind the media is this: There's now a new infrastructure for distributing audio, and the "podcasting" buzz may be the first wave of a cultural change brought on by a change in how we, as a culture, can receive and send information.

I.J. Hudson gets it. He's a reporter for the DC-area NBC-4, and he decided to do a segment about podcasting for his trendspotting technology program Digital Edge. Thanks to Eric at Development Seed, he wound up chilling in the EchoRadio studio last week discussing the new medium with Ed and me.

I.J.'s been producing news radio and television since the 1960s, so he has a solid perspective on podcasting and its ramifications. I tried to spin the show as "Old Media vs New Media" but had trouble finding much we disagreed on. Maybe the Old and New aren't as diametrically opposed as Wired would like us to think.

Our podcast about broadcasting is now live on EchoRadio-- download it any time. NBC 4's broadcast about podcasting is live on DC-area television tonight at 5pm.