iTunes schmiTunes

Apparently the iTunes podcasting support is neither “all that” nor “a bag of chips.” For starters, so many new people found and downloaded the Little Gray Books podcast that our web host shut us down for the day. I know! And the same thing seems to have happened to a few other podcasts too. It’s a shame that the iTunes store doesn’t include support for Bit Torrent – of course it may never, because you-know-which organization (initials are RIAA) is a hulking, stinky, litigious monster, and even though Bit Torrent isn’t illegal as a technology, it sure does “induce” people to infringe on copyright. Meesa people gonna get sued.

And not everybody’s jazzed about the functionality or the mainstreamification of podcasting that ITMS brings. The Wizards of Technology had an interesting discussion about it with the makers of iPodderX in their most recent podcast. Seems that some rss details aren’t getting picked up right. And it also seems that the top 100 podcasts list on ITMS includes a lot of corporate stuff (some kind of deal with Disney) and not so much the indie-type shows. Is this the beginning of the end of free, amateur-produced podcasts?

All in all, I still think this is good for podcasting, even for us indies. It’s fun doing it for free, but you can’t really make a living that way. Just like blogging, podcasting is going to become one of the many ways we all get information and entertainment – just another medium. And some of it may cost money, and some of it will be done by companies instead of individuals, and that’s just the way it is. You’ll still be able to listen to what you want ,when you want, where you want (er, at least until they add DRM to everything).

Just, please lord, make sure Adam Curry’s OK.