On the Frappr map for our podcast, one of the contributors offered this comment: “Love the show! Thanks for including us in the conversation.”

A conversation in a podcast? Not according to Steve Rubel, who comments about the possibility that a product-focused podcast is co-hosted by two fictitious characters: “I feel this approach is suitable for a podcast but not for a blog because it’s unidirectional.”

I disagree on a number of levels. In a nutshell:

• Not all blogs are mutlidirectional.
• Not all podcasts are unidirectional.

You can find a variety of definitions for the word online. The one I like is the simplest: “Talk between people,” although “the use of speech for informal exchange of views or ideas or information etc.” isn’t bad. The best conversations take place in real time, face-to-face or, at least, voice-to-voice. Instant messaging and SMS also fit the bill for real-time conversation.

Beyond these approaches, however, every online conversation is asynchronous, which simply means not synchronized. Both dimensions of blog conversations are asynchronous. They do not occur in real time.

The first dimension is contained within the blog. I write my post, log out, then dash off for a client meeting. You decide to check your RSS feeds, read my post and, after deciding you want to comment, visit my blog and contribute your thoughts. I don’t see your comments until I return that evening and, because of time zone differences, you’ve already gone to bed by the time I get around to answering you. The second dimension is blogospheric. You write a post. I read it and write about it myself on my own blog. You check your trackbacks the next day and see that three or four of us have written about your posts. By tomorrow, 20 more people may have written about my original post. It’s easy to monitor conversation in the blogosphere with tools like Technorati and Blogpulse.

In both cases, a real-time (or synchronous) conversation would have wrapped up in anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours. In the online world, it can drag on for days. For all the discussion about the speed of the blogosphere, it’s relative. Compared to a real-time conversation, it moves at a glacial pace. Of course, the notion of drawing an audience the size of the blogosphere into a real-time conversation is absurd, hence the growth in the popularity of asynchronous channels over the last 20 years or so.

Once we understand that conversations slow down when they’re not in real time, the extent to which this channel or that one facilitate conversation is only a matter of degrees. Blogs may be slower than traditional bulletin boards as a conversation channel for a defined group of people, but they’re faster than podcasts. Podcasts are probably faster than other channels, like static web pages with feedback buttons. And where do wikis fall on the spectrum?

“The Hobson & Holtz Report” most definitely encourages conversation through a variety of channels, including the podcast blog and audio comments our listeners email to us. The pace of the conversation is slow—Monday and Thursday—because that’s how often we address the feedback we get. A-list podcasters like Adam Curry engage in even hotter conversations that transcend both media. Consider Curry’s current controversy over his efforts to alter how he was represented in the Wikipedia entry on podcasting’s history. The conversation about Curry’s actions began on blogs, but he responded on his podcast; his podcast explanation was a clearly defined element of the conversation. His earlier dialogues with listeners on topics such as biodiesel represent other examples of podcast-driven conversation.

Podcasts even spark conversations of the blogospheric nature, with one podcaster playing a clip of another’s show in order to comment on it. I’ve done this with Rubel’s show, for example.

To complicate matters, let’s consider blogs that are unidirectional. Randy Baesler’s Boeing blog comes to mind. Comments are turned off, and while other bloggers could certainly reference it, they don’t. It’s not even ranked on BlogPulse, and Technorati shows only 20 posts on other blogs in the last 241 days that reference “Randy’s Journal.”

One last consideration: Podcasting is 16 months old. Given adequate time, the medium will probably develop even more efficient means of building conversation.

Ultimately, it’s a vast oversimplification to suggest that blogs are multidirectional and podcasts are unidirectional. The notion of podcasts as a one-way medium is based on the the fact that they are recorded audio files to which listeners can only listen. But audiences can do more than just listen, and a blog post is, at the end of the day, nothing more than an archived bit of text that a blogger wrote and that readers read. The difference between them is based only on the sense (sound vs. sight) used to absorb the message, not in the audience’s ability to offer feedback to it.

Our listener who thanked us for including our audience in the conversation is exactly right, then. It’s not either-or; it’s just a matter of degrees.