ONTARIO, CA -- The first keynote of the first Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference was given by Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc. Weblogs, which was recently purchased by AOL, is probably best known for sites such as Engadget. The title of Jason's presentation was "Podcasting - Huge or Hype? Handicapping the Business Models," and it offered a broad look at the current state of the nascent podcasting industry.

Before digging into the content of his presentation, Jason had to geek out and show us his latest toy, a JVC camcorder that writes directly to CompactFlash memory. He also polled the audience, asking how many were actually making money now at podcasting. A rough 5% of the audience raised their hands.

Jason put someone's picture up on the screen, and invited the audience to identify him. Amazingly, nobody was able to identify Josh Harris, the founder of Pseudo, a company that way back in 2000 believed in a new world where everyone could be the star of their own TV show, and that there'd be a network to distribute such content. It looks like Josh was right on the money, although we are currently at the point of audio instead of video.

He then identified the many factors that have helped fuel the popularity of podcasting. Among them are the fact that the receiver owns the downloaded content, MP3 quality is very good, RSS allows easy syndication, the plummeting costs of bandwidth and storage, the barrier to entry being below $50K, free and robust software for recording audio, users being more comfortable creating audio content, and over 10M iPods being sold.

Jason also speculated on the number of ways that one could try to make money via advertising in the podcast world. How about being the Yahoo (directory) of podcasting? Nope, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, Oedo, Podshow, Podcast Alley are already in this space. How about being the Google (indexer) of podcasting? Nope, Technorati, Feedster, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are in this space. Unless you get really lucky, going against these folks means you will get crushed.

He reflected on how the voice nature of podcasting helps create a deeper bond with the listener, but also makes the individual (talent) behind the podcast more important. If someone leaves a print publication, it is much easier to replace them than with a podcast.

Jason then touched on the podcasting tools universe, and how traditional audio tools are overkill, while new tools are currently inadequate. Although Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft and AOL are not yet investing in creating podcast specific tools, he saw this as a growth area. Some early players, such as Odeo and Castblaster, are worth watching.

To close out the presentation, he looked at the podcasting ad network space. He felt that there needs to be an automated, syndicated, audio-based network for supporting podcasts with advertising, and suggested something similar to the Google AdSense model. Fruitcast was mentioned as an early attempt at this, but they really need to get a better name.