First of all I welcome Apple to the Podcast scene, second thing is it is obvious that they talked to very few people in the podcasting community in the way they have implemented things.
First of all if you look at the shows that are on the main page a large percentage of these are commercial radio station shows. They obviously are branding podcasting from the get go as some sort of commercial variant of regular radio. Their are a handful of traditionally podcasters in that list.
They are not pulling in meta data from the majority of feeds, I and many others have graphics and meta data but that info is not being pulled in.
I have been searching their site and have yet to find any info that shows me how to be in compliance with whatever standard they are trying to set.
When you play a show manually it plays from the oldest to the newest, and not the top down. it does not add my show to the playlist which is going to be a problem, listeners are going to have to add your show manually to the playlist.
If they had only joined the conversation and talked to people outside of the few people that had access to the team at Apple we could have helped them with the launch.
Here’s a link at Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes for the specs to feed podcasts from the iTunes Music Store
Well the interface is clunky. But immediately I find myself doing one thing with it. You can double click any podcast and you get instant streaming just like you would get track samples within itunes. Then if I like it I can just click subscribe. I don’t like how I cannot control the play list the casts go into. I have one podcast smartlist with play count =0 selected. This way I know exactly what is left to listen to.
Well, here’s what I think. First it’s sure nice to see that thier list isn’t the same old podcast alley top ten we have shoved down our throats, it gives those of us with less audiance the same chance to be heard as the old school podcasts that have their audiance.
I agree that the podcasts should have been brought in with the ID3 tags and graphics we set up, heck, they don’t even have my name on it, they call me unknown. :-)
The ability to subscribe to feeds and have them downloaded with the options of how many, deleteing the old ones, or heard ones, and where to place the downloads and when to check and when to sync with your iPod is very slick, I am happy with the way iTunes goes and gets the feeds and moves them to the podcast folder and then to the podcast folder in my iPod.
This is a major step for podcasting, something I expected from Microsoft already, but instead we got Longhorn RSS. I agree it’s not perfect, but boy does it place the term podcast in front of Millions of users that had no idea what podcasting was.