Why podcast?  

Podcasting is an electronic form of convenience activities which we use every day anyway. If we want to read Daily Telegraph, Radio Times and Auto Express regularly we do not make separate trips to the publishers of each one: we expect to pick them all up in one trip to one newsagent and we expect the newsagent to obtain new editions automatically. The value of this convenience increases dramatically with the number of magazines we take on a regular basis.

Key point  

Some magazines include additional material on CDs; we expect our newsagent to supply such CDs with the magazines. This is a key point. A number of ordinary browsers, while they will get us a podcast eventually, are rather like a newsagent who stocks only the magazines—yes they will order the CDs when we ask for them, but we would then have to wait.

Back issues  

While we do not expect our newsagents to stock back issues of magazines, here at St. Paul’s we are currently holding sermons right the way back to August 2007.

Far fetched  

Beyond our everyday experience would be a newsagent who, not only gets the CDs for us without our asking, but also brings them home for us, unwraps them and loads them into our CD-player ready for us to listen to whenever we wish. As far fetched as this level of convenience might sound, it certainly works for the iTunes/iPod combination and should work for others although I have only tested with iPods so far.