I listen on my busted up 1st-gen 5GB iPod, mostly while I’m driving to work, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn or walking. I don’t tend to listen at the computer.

I subscribe in iTunes. I’ve used other podcatchers in the past and though iTunes has its problems, it’s mostly pretty good.

I do visit podcast websites, especially for fiction podcasts — if I really like (or hate) a story, I like to see what others think. I often visit the sites of the tech podcasts too, for further information.

I’m not sure what product advertising would work for me, although I guess the best thing would be products that closely map to the subject of the podcast. For example, .NET rocks and Hanselminutes advertise .NET controls. Perhaps the magazines could place ads in fiction podcasts?

The quality of the audio and narration are critical. I will stop listening if it’s hard to hear or the reading is flat. Other than that, as long as the subject is interesting I’ll listen, even if I know nothing about it (for example half the stuff on In Our Time).

I listen to them while I do the washing up or some other mundane task and also on public transport.

I occasionally go the the website afterwards if there’s talk of extra video or images of something that I found interesting. THe geekson Forum is the only forum I routinely hang around anymore.

It doesn’t matter what products I find interesting. If the host doesn’t convey an excitment about what they’re pimping I’m going to skip over it or zone out. On TWiT they discuss Audible picksof the week and they sound like they love it. On Smodcast they were pimping ‘ThinkGeek’ and they sounded completely disinterested like they’d never been to the site.

When I record my podcast about Improv theatre I make sure there’s a lot of laughing. It’s an aural medium and you can’t get by with just smiling with delight. You’ve got to make some sound. This may not be so helpful in a short story podcast, but I guess you want people who sound like they’re having a great time.

Slice of Sci Fi, SciFi Dimensions, Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing (going away),Writing Excuses, Escape Pod, Podcastle, ClonePod, Pseudopod, The Acapodcast, ACapella Originals, and Grammar Girl. There’s more, like Mr. Diety, but I’m not sure they fall in the scope of your question.

I listen to most of them on my iPod while commuting to work, but the musical ones I listen to at home. I subscribe through iTunes and get the appropriate news feeds with Google Reader

What kinds of products advertised in a podcast via sponsorships would you actually find interesting?

Sponsorship… important, but I usually just ignore ads. Let me explain: Go to My PC is advertising a lot, but I don’t have the kind of job that would require me to use my work machine remotely. If I need email I log in through a web site. I usually don’t need access to my work email.

I also hear a lot of ads for books that are essentially self published through podcasts, Scott Seigler, JC Hutchins, Mur Lafferty, etc. I didn’t like the samples I heard of their novels, and felt that the business model they are following isn’t the one I want to follow, so I stopped listening to them.

For news related shows, I want to hear facts and the hosts have to be enjoying themselves.

For stories I want to have good narrators. I really hate to say this, but I don’t like Steve’s voice on Escape Pod, but the stories are usually pretty good. Of all the narrators I’ve heard, Christiana Ellis and Tina Connolly are some of the best I’ve heard. Ellis’s narration of MK Hobson’s God Juice was so good I could almost convinced I was listening to Hobson read the story herself.

I am a writer, and I do send EP stories, but I don’t worry about the response time because I sent it when Steve said “I’m months behind” and before you came on to the team, so I’m being patient.

and as we all know, this kind of thinking inevitably leads to great things!

(but seriously, you may want to watch out for such notions.)

I have nothing useful to say about podcasts — when I remember to download them I enjoy, but I am not int he habit of routinely hooking my MP3 player to my computer.

Quite honestly, I don’t generally look at the web sites because I consume podcasts at a non-sitting-in-front-of-a-computer time. I subscribe via iTunes, and then scroll through and see what I want to listen to when the moment comes. It’s a very rare occasion that I later visit a site mentioned in or associated with the audio portion.

Personally, I listen in roughly half-hour chunks. Whether that’s all that my caffeine-addled brain can handle as far as attention span, or whether that is the time after which my ears get tired of the work, I can’t say. Longer podcasts are listened to over time, though only if they’re compelling enough for me to come back to them.

Generally speaking, my brain turns off when the ads come on. The kind of advertising that would be interesting for me on Escape Pod would be genre-related — conventions, book signings in my area (hah), new releases, ToC’s of the major publications, etc. etc. Frankly, if it’s just plugging the latest Hollywood blockbuster or reiterating an ad I’ve already seen as a banner somewhere else I’ll almost certainly ignore it.

A good podcast is no different for me than any other media; it’s just another way of delivering content. So that means clear sound, good reading/voice acting, and words worth listening to. Though it might be fun once in a while to do a real old 50’s radio show, complete with special effects à la Gerald McBoing-Boing.