First came the GM podcast, essentially a five-minute commercial for a new car. Now Volvo is sponsoring something they’re calling a podcast over at AutoBlog. The recording itself is fine, and the comments posted to AutoBlog are lavish in their praise.

My problem comes from calling it a “podcast” when in fact it’s just an MP3 file housed on a server and made available for download. Nothing’s wrong with that, but to qualify as a podcast, it needs the syndication element. There’s no RSS feed allowing you to subscribe so the file is delivered automatically whenever a new one is uploaded. You may argue that this is a nitty little argument, but podcasting didn’t exist until Dave Winer came up with the idea of an enclosure in an RSS file to enable syndication.

You can get the feed for the GM podcast, but who would want to? Given the hockey-stick growth in the number of podcasts available, who would want to give up some of their limited time to listen to five-minute car commercials when they’ll be forced to sit through the one-minute versions while watching TV? (Well, some people will be forced to watch them. As a die-hard TiVo users, I’ll fast-forward through them.)

And why are the first business blogs all coming from the auto industry?