| Wednesday, June 29, 2005 |
11:10 - There's gotta be a Murphy's Law corollary about this
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Literally no sooner did this, the infamous Three-Week Book, leave the printing presses and get loaded onto the distribution trucks, than this—iTunes 4.9—got released.
Bah. I guess I should have expected it. And I did get a note snuck into it late in editing regarding the podcasting features of then-upcoming iTunes 4.9; but the editors have already contacted me regarding me writing some supplementary material to cover podcasting, so it can be posted on the Web and incorporated into the second printing.
And it's worth it, too, because this podcasting stuff is damn cool.
I've already been listening to the Governor Schwarzenegger podcast, where Ah-nuld rambles about energy conservation in Collyvohnia, and how he is always telling his kids to turn off the lights when they leave the room—and when they persist in leaving lights on, he stomps around the house unscrewing light bulbs. And that right there is a visual that keeps a guy giggling into the wee hours.
iTunes can subscribe to any of the featured podcasts that are navigable via the new Music Store section dedicated to them (it contains big-name stuff like the Bush weekly radio address and Air America as well as many small podunky audioblogs); not only that, but you can subscribe to additional podcasts directly by URL, if they're not in the Music Store directory. I wonder what the criteria are for being listed there. (Frank? James?) Podcasts can have internal chapter marks (each with their own album art, with links to purchasing pages or random websites) that you can skip to, and iTunes remembers where you stop listening to any podcast episode like with audiobooks. And, of course, the iPod is now fully podcast-aware, bringing the slang and the official terminology into sync at last.
It's a pretty slick implementation, and iTunes has just potentially scored big once again—this time squarely among the blogfan community, which will now find it all the harder to not use iTunes.
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Brian Tiemann
