Audio vs. Video podcasts

I am a very visual learner. I know others have learning styles where they can just read or listen. So as I was trying to get my mind around podcasts, I tried to sample the content in both audio and video podcasts.

Just the idea of presenting information as a series, rather than stand-alone incidents like in YouTube, seems fundamentally like it would be more useful in a library setting for information dissemination. Obviously tagging any of this media makes it more accessible, but I believe that designing content in a series would be ideal.

Adding podcasts into my Bloglines account was very easy, so I can now be made aware of new content is these series. Even links to preview podcast content were listed beautifully there.

However, launching some content was problematic. I do not seem to have a Quicktime viewer on my library workroom PC. Thankfully, I could view the most current podcast on CaliYoga.com, as it was embedded into the website page. However, I was disappointed that I could not launch preview podcasts, since they were in Quicktime *.m4v format.

Also, I noticed that some podcast directories were better than others. Yahoo Podcasts was by far superior to Podcastalley and Podcast.net in terms of the interface and the detailed information provided about each podcast. It's no trivial matter to me whether a podcast is 2 minutes long vs. a half hour, and depending on my search, I want to know that at first glance, without having to click deeper into my search results.