Here at Corante, we’re getting heavily into Podcasts.

But there’s more to podcasting than just iPods.

I learned this today talking with Hank Lynch. Hank runs two neat podcast-related sites, Podcastmania and Podrazor.

At Podcastmania, Hank has slipped podcasts into Windows Media envelopes and enabled people to stream them to their desktops. This means you can enjoy podcasts at work, or at your desk, and the files will die a natural death in your Internet cache, without cluttering your hard drive.

While Podrazor doesn’t look like much, behind it is a database of roughly 20,000 shows, Lynch says. He has personally vetted them, checking them for technical quality, even spent time on the phone with producers. This means you can search for podcasts that are actually worth listening to.

There’s a lesson here that goes beyond podcasting.

The lesson is we’re short of entrepreneurs. (This statue, titled simply Entrepreneur, is on the campus of Upper Iowa University, a private college in Fayette, Iowa.)

In the open source world we’re creating new technologies, techniques and choices faster than we can monetize them. That's what entrepreneurs do -- they monetize things.

We first saw this in blogging, which still lacks proper business models. But a lot of people have already gone on to podcasting, to open source software, to whatever strikes their fancy. Creativity is racing ahead of the economy.

The challenge is to find ways to bring in enough advertising, sponsorship, event, and subscriber revenue to turn hobbies into careers. Without fertilizer, plants die, and money is fertilizer. Volunteers will burn out without it, some quickly, some more slowly, but all surely. Or, as entrepreneur Max Bialystock says in The Producers, "Money is Honey."

That’s really what entrepreneurs do. They use their imagination. They bring buyers and sellers together. They turn what’s neat into something profitable. They create value where there were only flowers before.

Entrepreneurs wanted.