The Boston Globe has a podcasting article up today. The negative spin of the headline (“Podcasting faces growing pains”) is curious. It’s true, having a popular podcast can lead to expensive bandwidth bills. But for their trouble we’ve given the podcasters an outlet for their passion and, for some, a bit of fame. I’d say that’s a net positive. In any case, I think the economics will work itself out. Podcasting is different for so many reasons. “Tivo for sound” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s because podcasting is a child of the Internet that we can build participative systems like GigaDial that allow us to program the content for one another. Podcasting takes not only the communication channel, but also the content, the marketing, ratings and programming out of scarcity and into the commons.