iTunes and Pod Casts Revisited – A Love Story

Okay fine, you win.

In the past I have blasted both iTunes and Podcasting for various reasons, but I have finally come around to their respective awesomeness. Let’s address each individually.

iTunes

iTunes still completely rots if you wish to copy your files from your iPod to multiple computers. It just can’t be done (out of the box). If you can get over this limitation, a new world will open up for you. It took me a while to accept this, mostly on principle. But I’ve decided to embrace it and just go with the flow. Now I realize what I’ve been missing.

I still don’t buy music from iTunes, but I now use it exclusively for iPod library/playlist management and podcasts. I never realized how deeply iTunes supports podcasting! They have thousands of FREE, high quality podcasts available, and iTunes makes it extremely easy to subscribe, obtain, and upload them to your iPod.

You can see that I’ve gone podcast crazy:

I freakin’ love it. NPR, BBC, science stuff, funny stuff, niche stuff, kid stuff. It’s all there for the taking. Which leads me to my next issue.

Podcasts

My main argument against podcasting has revolved around the single-threaded linearity of the medium. To understand what I mean, consider this example:

You have some information that you want to publish. There are two ways (in our example) to accomplish this.

1. Type it out and publish it on a web page
2. Speak it and record it digitally

Which medium more quickly and easily gets the information into the mind of the user? Which method is more portable? Which method is more enduring? It should be obvious. Web page content is automatically indexed and made available via search engines. The user can scan a web page of text in mere seconds and focus instantly on the desired information. The user can skip to any word on the page instantly. The page can be printed and carried.

Podcasts may have some of these features, but they are pale expressions of the true objective. They are like cassette tapes. You can fast forward and rewind within them, but you have no way of knowing where your target information resides. Pure pain.

And early podcasts mostly sucked. They were packed with non-essentials such as lengthy introductions, music, “in” jokes, etc. It was just like going to an early flash web site with a non-skip-able intro. Everybody hated that. Remember how awesome it was when you first started using Compact Discs and you could instantly skip to your desired track? Podcasts are a step backwards!

But I digress… because modern podcasts are awesome. I don’t know what “gen” they are, but it’s obvious that people have learned how to control the medium. Most of the high profile podcasts I listen to are devoid of the problems that plagued the early adopters. You still can’t access targeted information directly, but that’s just something I have learned to live with. I can live with it because I have come to appreciate podcasts as entertainment that is slightly better than radio drivel. Radio is so incredibly bad that the slight enhancement is enough for me to call podcasting “awesome”.

Understandably, the car (or mundane travel in general) is the proper venue for podcasts. They shine in this realm… enhancing the experience beyond recognition.