Podcasting in iTunes 4.9
At the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference, Steve Jobs tonight showed ipodder-like features in the next release of iTunes, supposedly available within about 60 days. I was glad to see this, since the “architecture of participation” has been the only one of the big Web 2.0 themes that Apple had seemed to be missing. He was slightly dismissive of populist podcasting, describing it as “Wayne’s World for radio”, and celebrating the arrival of professional radio stations into the market, but nonetheless, he was very high on the podcasting phenomenon, and the excitement that millions of users have displayed about it. In the Q&A, Jason Calcanis of Weblogs, Inc. asked if there was any possibility of using the iTunes music store for paid podcasting. Jobs replied that for the moment they were only considering it as free content, but that he was open to looking into it.
I see this as pretty neat. Not sure if it’s as world changing as some might say, but I know that I’d love to be able to cut out the middleware and gather podcasts directly in iTunes. Right now I’ve been using the new beta of NetNewsWire and that seems to be working fairly well, but it has problems with some casts getting them into iTunes. Losing that manual step would be very nice.
As well, I’d hope it’d make it easier for people to find, and hopefully listen to, my own content.