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I did think about taking it on (it would be a logical thing for the Podcast Asylum to sponsor), but, as I told the person who tried to volunteer me for the job, I’m already running another meetup and it was more than I  could take on.

I’m sure the other group members also have commitments that prevent them from volunteering, but I suspect there were other, more important factors in the demise of this meetup.

For one thing, the group hasn’t actually met for at least six months. I think the last time I attended a meeting was in 2008. There were not many people there, and we were in a cafe that was difficult to reach by public transport, not a good place to park even for those of us with magic blue placards, and had no projection facilities for speakers. The location before that was the back room of a restaurant, slightly more private and definitely more convivial (as well as closer to BART), but also not the best place to give a presentation.

So the closing of the meetup group doesn’t change much in the lives of Bay Area podcasters. We weren’t meeting in person, and we weren’t using the discussion group or mailing list features, either.

Does this mean podcasters have run out of things to say to each other? There was a time—before I ever joined the group, alas—when the San Francisco Podcasting Meetup met every month and had 30 or 40 people in attendance. Of course, that was back in the days when podcasting was fairly new, and most of today’s veteran podcasters were still figuring out how to do things.

It was also the era when many people seemed to think that podcasting would be a way to get rich quick, so they jumped on the bandwagon and showed up to learn about “monetization.” (It is definitely possible to make money from podcasting, but you need either a large audience or a wealthy and devoted niche, and you don’t get either of those overnight.)

It’s now 2010, and the earliest members of the meetup, if they are still podcasting, have solved their technical problems. They’ve chosen their microphones, their mixers, their audio editing software, their method of recording Skype calls. They’ve read—and sometimes written—books about podcasting. They’ve made their decisions about whether to have advertising or sponsorships or ask for donations or go with a premium podcast model, about where to host their files and how to generate their RSS feeds.

In other words, there just isn’t that much left to talk about for experienced podcasters. If you read the Podcasting News blog, you’ll see that not only don’t they post as frequently as they used to, most of what they write about isn’t podcasting. It’s WordPress, or blogging, or the iPad.

Innovations in portable media players in the past few years have focused on video and books, not audio—and particularly not on creating a device that makes it easier to find and subscribe to podcasts.

So what is a podcasting meetup to meet up to discuss?

There are still people who are just coming to podcasting, who don’t know about things like ID3 tags (and how iTunes changes them) or the Levelator. One option would be to re-focus the meetup around newbies and turn it into an informal podcasting course, with the more experienced members taking it in turn to present how-to sessions. That’s still an essentially finite project, but if you’re meeting once a month and going over, say, everything that’s in Podcasting for Dummies and Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies, you’ll get through a couple of years and you might build up some momentum.

Or you could survey those experienced podcasters and find out what issues still bother them—or what they’re running up against that wasn’t a problem when they started. There are still things to talk about, like how to know when to stop producing your show versus retooling it and how to handle increases or decreases in popularity over time, or the storage requirements you face after five years of podcasting and the question of what to do with your archives.

Now that the novelty has worn off and the hype has gone away, your members would be the truly dedicated and the newly starting. So what would you do with a podcasting meetup?

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Though I’m interested in all things podcasting at any time, the specific subject of the interview, “Podcasting for Business Communications,” was of particular interest because of a LinkedIn question I’d just seen: “What is the current state/future of corporate podcasting?”

One respondent said “Though there are some things to appreciate about podcasting, as a corporate investment it’s headed the way of the fax machine, but more quickly.”

None of the rest of the respondents agreed, though some of them (such as ”˜Professor’ Donna Papacosta here at the Podcast Asylum) might be said to have slightly biased opinions. Yet who would know, if not people who produce podcasts for corporations?

Steve Lubetkin certainly didn’t give the impression that his business was experiencing a rapid die-off. The quote Eric chose to highlight in his detailed show notes is

B2B podcasting is, for the most part, not about reaching large audiences. It’s about reaching individuals with an immediate need for the marketer’s product or service. So instead of getting in front of thousands of people who may or may not have a need, podcasting is about automating the awareness, consideration, research and evaluation phases of general buying cycles.

Which is to say, massive numbers aren’t even the point, never mind an indicator of whether the medium is viable. (Though I am taking this quote out of context.)

Eric’s rant about the number of Gold Quill entrants who claim to have podcasts and don’t (because there’s no RSS feed associated with their audio files) warmed my pedantic little heart. Indeed, I feel a syndrome coming on. I just can’t decide whether to call it “Podcastus Imitatus” or “Podcast Envy.”

Listen to the whole interview over on the OTRO website.

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If I had the Sansa in MTP mode, it would talk to Windows Media Player, but Windows Media Player is not a podcatcher. And past the point of some update or another to Windows XP, my computer no longer recognized the Sansa in MTP mode, and I had to switch it over to MSC mode anyway. That means that my computer looks at the media player as if it were any other external drive, so the way to get new podcasts onto it was to drag and drop them through Windows Explorer.

Now, I never really minded doing that; it’s not as though it’s difficult, and it doesn’t take very long. Automatic synchronization still seemed like a nice idea, but it didn’t seem as though anyone was going to bother offering the service without tying you to a particular product like the iPod or Zune.

And podcatcher development seemed to have pretty much dried up once iTunes became dominant. Nevertheless, I was in the market for a new one. I’d started using Ziepod rather than Juice once I became a two-computer family on a regular basis, because of the option to selectively download podcasts. But for the last month or so Ziepod has crashed almost every time I’ve started it, requiring  a restart, and development seems dead in the water. (Another one of those Windows updates?)

Then I read the Lifehacker post on the Five Best Podcast Managers. The top score went to gPodder, a tool I’d thought was only for Linux.

After reading the review, I hopped over and downloaded it, then unzipped it and tried it. (gPodder is one of those self-contained tools that runs right out of the folder it comes in; you don’t need to install it.) I then imported an OPML file (interestingly, it couldn’t read the one that Ziepod produced, but I had an older one sitting around), updated a few podcasts, and checked it out.

gPodder displays podcast album art, which neither Juice nor Ziepod does—a nice touch. You can mark episodes as old so that it won’t download them. It tells you how many downloaded episodes are waiting to be played.

And you can sync it. Once you tell it where to find your MP3 player and set a few more parameters, just select Device | Sync episodes to device (or press CTRL+S), and you’re off. I get a mysterious error message at the end of my sync process, but it still works.

I’m delighted. I don’t know that this will save me enough time to notice, but I’m still glad to be able to sync my podcasts automatically.

Now, if anyone is actually reading this, someone may write in and tell me that there’s something else out there that does this. In which case, I’m all ears, and I’ll be happy to test it and write about it.