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Two things will accelerate the uptake of podcasting. One is ease of use. The other is innovative podcasts to which people will want to subscribe.

From the second category, I'm anxious to see more services like PodBop.

The idea behind PodBop is simple. Type in the name of your city and you'll be presented with a list of musicians who are playing live there over the next week or so. You can listen to MP3 files of each band. Better yet, just subscribe to the RSS feed for that city and each week you'll get a sampling of music from bands playing locally in the days ahead. You can listen at your leisure and decide if you want to take in a show.

According to the site's information page, PodBop works using the API from Eventful, pulling tagged events into its own database. As for the MP3s, "They are direct links to MP3s hosted on band and record label websites. Much like music blogs do. We can't imagine why they would have a problem with us using their file sources (they are available for download anyway, plus it's free promotion)." Well, that could be a problem, I suppose, if the RIAA decided to make an issue out of it. The site does have a link for artists to request links be removed.

But conceptually, PodBop (no pun intended) rocks. The idea of a weekly sampling of music available live in your town fills a need that no technology accommodated before podcasting. I've subscribed to the San Francisco feed.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.