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Rex Hammock puts it very eloquently

Podcasting does not want to have a “central place.” The web hates central places. I use eBay as both a buyer and seller and believe me, I hate that it’s a central place as it is now a monopoly. Knowing what we know now, would early adopters of eBay say I want there to be a monopoly running the online auction market? I wish an open, distributed alternative to eBay existed.

I think I feel a similar uneasiness at announcements like Odeo and The Podcast Network. It’s the same old argument over and over again. It’s easy to make money if you have a stranglehold on something. But people who have experienced freedom of choice find that difficult to swallow.

The particular example is the world wide web. There are a lot of people who prefer to talk about it as if it’s all about big, corporate, worth-paying-a-premium-for, servers. But the web is actually a peer-to-peer system. Any machine with an IP address can be a server. Blogs, podcasts, and the like are part of this distributed peer system. To publish a website, blog or podcast, all you really need is a computer, an IP address and some bandwidth.

Sure, it’s nice to be able to find stuff. But if the content you publish is worthwhile, it will spread by word of mouth (or at least by word of link and blog). Blogs and podcasts especially can do this, because there is very little requirement for trust. People use eBay rather than some random website, because the consequences of a breach of trust could be quite severe (credit card fraud, non payments, etc.) If I read a blog I don’t want it’s usually no big deal, I just unsubscribe.

I predict that eBay will start to decline as soon as a popularly-acceptable, distributed, secure, trust network is in place. Consider web directories. Who uses the once-mightly Yahoo directory now that searching works reasonably well? The contrast the monolithic Amazon.com with a collaborative network of independent sellers like Abebooks.com.

Read more at rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s Weblog