It's an era of podcast revival.

This article, compiled from Chris Dixon's blog, is a well-known technology entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley, and Hunch was bought by EBay at about 80 million dollars. As an investor, he has invested in Foursquare, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Dropbox, Skype and many other star companies, and is now working for the top VC company Andreessen Horowitz in Silicon Valley.

Kevin Roose recently wrote an article about the revival of podcasts.

In 09 or 10 years, podcasts seem to fade, and some good programs (such as this Anglo Life, Radiolab) are still in the top of the itunes rankings, but others are not. The number of downloads in podcasts is dwindling, and people are losing interest in podcasts and passing time through online video and streaming music. But now there is another problem: there are so many podcasts, some of them too late to listen.

The reason, he argues, is that more and more people are connecting smartphones to cars:

The increasing number of people connecting smartphones to cars is a boon for the entire streaming audio industry, especially for podcast makers. These podcast programs are ideal for listening to cars. TV viewers can now opt for Netflix or Amazon's online VOD service, no longer needing to change channels, and broadcast listeners have many podcasts to choose from.

I agree with his point of view. But I think there is another reason behind the revival of podcasts, which is that as other social media mature, they become less free and less interesting. Take my most familiar technology class Twitter account, before, they are very frank and direct, as if the people in the circle chat. And now their tweets are carefully elaborated, want to have more forwarding, and can not get themselves into trouble.

The podcast is not so, its overall feeling like other social media 5-10 years ago appearance, the atmosphere is very fresh. Because no one knows what the podcast should be, the audience is not much, and people's expectations are lower. The host keeps fresh, dares to try most of the time will receive good results. This is the beginning of a new media, there is no fixed rules, which is why the podcast is so interesting, and it attracts a lot of good host reasons.