Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

podcasting

Last week, Apple released iTunes 4.9, offering built-in support for podcast subscriptions via the iTunes Music Store. It’s a huge step forward in simplifying the process of distributing and subscribing to the audio feeds, as it offers a central podcast listing and download interface from within the user’s existing MP3 music software. (Up to this point, podcasting has mainly been the provenance of third-party shareware and word-of-mouth recommendations.)

Ease of subscribing aside, though, I’m still getting a handle on just what podcasting is and how I might make use of it. There’s not enough there yet for me to jump on the bandwagon.

What I really want are podcast feeds for my favorite public radio programs on NPR ("All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition"), WAMU ("The Kojo Nmande Show") and PRI ("Marketplace" and "World"). I usually catch random segments of these shows on the radio while I’m in the car. If I’m feeling particularly industrious, I might go to their respective Web sites to get the streaming Internet audio, but those occasions are few and far between. I’m lazy, and what I really want is a simple ideal that, if more content providers were on board, podcasting might offer: Subscribe once to a given program, and all new episodes are automatically saved to my hard drive until I’m ready to listen to them. It’s just like TiVo, but for radio.

For some professional and a good number of amateur outlets, this ideal already is a reality. But I don’t think podcasting will truly take off until major audio content providers like NPR take the plunge and offer feeds of their own content (with advertising, if they must).

In the meantime, in terms of podcast "keepers," I’ve found a feed of the weekly NPR program "On the Media" (all 60 minutes of it!). I tried some of ABC’s podcasts, but I found the announcers were either too exciteable ("Welcome to our podcast! We’re cutting edge! We’re hip! Our theme song is way cool! We can’t stop talking in exclamation points!") or too inexperienced ("I tried to do all this … in one, um, take. And it shows.") I can’t fault them for trying, though.

And other people are exploring the podcast concept, too. According to news reports, traffic to feeds listed in iTunes went up dramatically. I hope they found something interesting to listen to.