Yahoo! is working on a podcast development tool. The news came at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. The show was also rife with talk of similar development efforts from Google and Microsoft.

In the background of all this is hosting, which is changing dramatically now that audio and video are taking a bigger slice of web traffic. Hosting companies are adjusting, upping the amount of bandwidth and storage space to accomodate podcasters and videobloggers.

Winer links to Netcraft, which sums up the situation, again looking at giants like Google, which looks to be making a big play, recently with the lease of 270,000 square feet of a telco hotel in New York City.

On another stage, a firestorm of posts blew over the blogosphere in reaction to Audible's announcement at the Podcast Expo for its news service, which it calls Wordcast. The service is all about the business of podcasting, claiming it allows podcasters to build multiple revenue streams "around capabilities such as advertising management, dynamic ad-insertion, underwriting and secured transactions.." As part of the service, Audilble's fees cover bandwidth, hosting and reporting costs.

Since the announcement, a firestorm has erupted with a hot point sparked with Mitch Ratcliffe's long post on the future of podcasting, in which he argues that Audible's effort is advancing podcasting and that they seek to engage in converastion with the community. Ratcliffe, a consultant to Audible, lites a match to the debate, with not always ingraciating references to Winer and Doc Searls, two firm opponents to DRM, which Audible does use to protect its revenue stream. Read reaction to Ratcliffe's post at Tech.Memeorandum.

We're in the next wave and it appears that podcasting is simply the catalyst, with the bigger story being the morphing amount of audio and video on the web.