Does that sound like progress to you? It should.

That’s because Carolla’s old gig, which ended in late February when CBS Radio (CBS) pulled the plug on his show, made him just another guy trying unsuccessfully to fill Howard Stern’s shoes.

But the comedian’s podcasts are something else, and they don’t sound like anything else on the radio: Unedited, rambling conversations with a single guest that often sound more like monologues than an actual interview. They’re profane, they run an hour or more, and they make me laugh out loud. (You can get a small taste of what they’re like via the video clip at the bottom of this post. Be warned: There is a smattering of R-rated language in that one).

I’m not the only one. Carolla has been podcasting every weekday for the past month and a half, and an average show finds an audience of about 400,000 people. His most successful ones have nearly doubled that total.

That’s nothing compared to his last radio job, which was broadcast out of Los Angeles and syndicated in a dozen other markets. But in the world of podcasting, that qualifies as an instant hit, and it’s enough to keep his show at or near the top of Apple’s (AAPL) most popular podcast list at its iTunes store.

The other top podcasts, by the way, are all spinoffs or repackagings of shows made by big media companies–NPR, Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO and Discovery Communications (DISCA). But Carolla’s show is created from scratch: It’s just him and a handful of assistants who help him record the show and upload it to the Web. He started off taping the shows in his house in the Hollywood Hills; now he’s moved it to a garage he rents in an unlovely industrial stretch in the San Fernando Valley.

All in all, Carolla estimates he’s spending about $3,000 a month to produce the show, primarily on bandwidth bills. Revenue: Zero.

That’s primarily because Carolla can’t make any money from his show until the end of the year. He’s still getting paid–very well–by CBS, and his contract has a noncompete. But it’s also because it’s unclear how Carolla could actually go about making money from his podcast even if he wanted to.

The basic options: Try to charge his listeners or try to sell advertising. The former hasn’t been done before, and the latter hasn’t made other podcasters much money so far.

“I think that he’s going to have a tough time,” says Marc Horine, VP at ESPN Digital Media, who oversees a stable of podcasts that were downloaded about eight million times a month last year. Even at that volume, Horine says, ESPN has only been able to turn that into a “7-figure-plus” business–and that’s with a large sales staff and the ESPN brand name.

The problem is that podcasts are still considered “experimental” buys for advertisers. And until podcasts can aggregate bigger audiences–and provide marketers with better ways of tracking their ads’ performance–they are probably going to stay that way.

But I’m going to be slightly more optimistic than I usually am on this one: I think that Carolla’s profile, combined with a dedicated audience, could convince a handful of advertisers to take a flyer and sponsor the show. That still won’t come close to replicating his radio money or the money he’ll make if CBS decides to pick up the sitcom he’s working on for the network.

But as Carolla notes in the interview below, entertainers don’t have any choice but to be on the Web. And figuring out how to make good stuff people like is much harder than figuring out how to make money from it.

Apologies for my stammering and stumbling midway through this interview, by the way: Sounding cogent while you ask questions is a lot harder than it looks.

And here’s a sampling of what a Carolla podcast is like: A snippet of his recent podcast with writer Dana Gould. Again, be warned that there’s a light dusting of cursing here.

• Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
• Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
• An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
• Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.

a Web site at low cost, some analysts compared the moment to the invention of the printing press. Millions of Web sites were started, but only a small percentage attracted a significant audience. Now a second eruption of Web publishing by amateurs is under way. And this time, more people are reading and even subscribing to sites published by folks who’ve never seen the inside of the New York Times, CBS or any other media firm.

This latest phenomenon is built on a foundation of three new online-publishing mechanisms that didn’t exist the last time around: blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds. Here’s a brief primer that explains them.

Blog. A contraction of the term “Web log,” the word describes a personal Web diary, organized by date, from the latest to the earliest. Bloggers add entries, called “posts,” to their sites frequently. Posts typically consist of text and photos, with occasional links to audio and video clips. Some blogs are made up primarily of links to stories or commentaries around the Web. Others feature the author’s writing, supplemented with links to relevant material elsewhere.

High-profile blogs, like the sarcastic, raunchy political site Wonkette.com, compete directly with the mainstream media, known as the “MSM” in the blogging world (which refers to itself as “the Blogosphere”). But the vast majority of blogs are written for narrower audiences: family, friends, fellow hobbyists, or fellow fans of favorite TV shows, pop stars and sports teams. A key feature of most blogs is the comments readers are encouraged to post, discussing or debating entries.

You can find blogs by checking blog search and listing sites, such as Feedster.com, Bloglines.com and Technorati.com. Anyone can quickly create a blog with little or no technical knowledge by using templates at free blogging services including Blogger.com and MSN Spaces (spaces.msn.com).

RSS. In order to avoid the obscurity into which the first round of amateur Web sites fell, bloggers have invented a way to distribute their latest entries: RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology that allows browsers or other software to display a constantly updated “feed” of headlines and summaries of blog entries. The way it works is too technical to get into here, but basically, special code inserted in a blog’s innards gets queried by an RSS reader program, which pulls headlines and summaries.

With the right software, a user can subscribe to the feed of a blog, or of a mainstream news site, and receive headlines as they appear. Just click on the headline to read the full entry. All the modern Web browsers, including Firefox and Apple’s Safari, can display these feeds. The most common browser, Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer, cannot, although a new version due soon will be able to do so.

Podcasts. The newest personal publishing technology is the podcast, essentially an audio blog or personal radio show that can be played on a computer or downloaded to a portable device like an iPod (hence the name). Podcasts range from music programs to commentaries on politics, sports, technology, sex.

Podcasts are harder to create than blogs because you have to record them and then find a Web service where they can be published. Finding and subscribing to podcasts is much simpler because Apple has opened its popular iTunes Music store, on both Windows and Mac, to podcasters. They can register podcasts with iTunes, then iTunes users can download them just like songs, but free of charge. Also, iTunes allows users to subscribe to podcasts, so fresh episodes appear in your iTunes cache as they are created.

So get yourself some news-reader software and a copy of iTunes, and start sampling blogs and podcasts. Then do one of your own. Your public awaits.