End of the day iTunes podcast review
Now that we've all had some time to get cozy with iTunes+podcasting, it's time to look at what's really going on here. I really like the idea of incorporating podcasting support directly into iTunes. It's a neat feature to have so many casts all in one place, and to be able to subscribe to the directly from within iTunes; this really streamlines my audio management. My eyes and my ears are very, very happy.
My heart is a little bit more foreboding. iTunes 4.9 doesn't support the increasingly popular bit torrent casts. We can hope this functionality comes along later, but if it doesn't, a lot of little guys are going to get forced out. Commercial sites will be unaffected, but people paying monthly badwidth fees out of pocket aren't going to be able to handly the kind of traffic the iTMS is capable of delivering. Of course, no one has to opt into the iTMS in the first place, but the setup is, shall we say, somewhat less than egalitarian. More troubling, as Kevin Tofel over at Droxy pointed out, is the fact that people who don't do podcasting according to Apple's Podcasting Specification sheet* are cut out of the iTMS.
Dave Winer, the creator of RSS has taken issue
with the duplication of tags already included in the RSS 2.0 standard,
and the inclusion of trademarked names in the in tags specs. What this means for individuals who would like to make use of these trademarked podcasting tags remains to be seen. Ed Durnbill has also done a nice run-down of the various features of iTMS podcasting and I think his conclusion is well worth repeating:
What could have been a useful and reusable addition to the world of RSS
is really rendered only fit for the single use of adding content into Apple's own iTunes store. Apple prove they know how to be cool, but they've got no idea about making friends on the web.
From the point of view of XML and the web, iTunes RSS extensions are somewhat disappointing. From a professional point of view, I'd say this looks rather embarrassing: Apple clearly don't have enough people who really understand XML.
All of which is to say that, while I'm digging on podcasts in iTunes, I hope iTunes 5.0 makes some radical changes.
*
Warning: it's a PDF. And no, no one knows why an internet-savvy company like Apple consistently publishes its most useful specs in non-hypertext formats.