Last week I mentioned Audible was launching Wordcast, a podcast measuring tool that would enable advertisers to get complete and auditable data on podcast audience numbers. Well, Staci at PaidContent has rounded up some of the reaction by the higher beings of the blog/podcasting world. Much of the criticism of the system seems to lie in the fact that it relies on a closed technology such as Audible's or Apple's AAC format. Indeed, both Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer - one of the fathers of podcasting - feel that the closed formats won't work because they stifle the innovation and openness that podcasting has tapped into. It might be true that MP3, the audio file most commonly used for podcasts, is a tad inflexible, but that's a challenge for those trying to design a measurement technique to work around. It's not an excuse to create a measurement standard that disallows anyone not willing to ante up for the DRM equipped formats.