Podcasting

With iTunes bringing podcasting mainstream, as Jobs has promised, I am personally wondering why podcasting is so popular. Perhaps the article below will provide some answers.
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/07/podcasting/index.php

To add on to the article, I should say that it takes quite a while to download an ipod and also quite some time to listen to it (in a suitable environment). In fact, my own experiment suggests that it is far faster to scan/read a full text of page on FireFox than to listen to a length of text being spoken out (e.g. an interview).