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A lot of speeches begin with someone introducing you to the audience - reciting your background and qualifications, and then encouraging them to greet you warmly as you head to the microphone.

And once the applause dies down, you're looking at a sea of people who are probably as unfamiliar to you as you are to them. Your first few lines not only have to launch your speech, but establish a rapport and some degree of trust with your audience.

Speechwriting is a notoriously solitary profession. You might have a few conversations with a client, their staff or — if you're writing for yourself — a mirror. But a lot of your work is going to be just you, a keyboard and the unforgiving blank screen.

At least, that used to be the case. But when you're crafting a social speech, speechwriting can be a team activity. And even though you still have to do the actual writing, you can draw on the ideas, experience and ingenuity of a large networked audience.

Podcasting, as any social media guru worth her or his robes knows, is dead. Like so many social technologies, it failed to jump the adoption gap, break the hype cycle or clear the Great Hurdle of At-First-Raving-and-then-Dismissive Punditry.

Except that the common wisdom - that podcasts are the 3-1/2" floppy disk of the 2000s - has been lost on one group of people: listeners.

According to a BBC story from the summer,

[P]odcasting has continued to grow and grow.