Tried several podcasts in the last several days, using iTunes as an “aggregator.” Had only listened to a couple podcasts before iTunes 4.9 (first version to support podcast).
Interesting concept, some amazing possibilities. For someone who doesn’t like radios for many reasons (time-specificity, homogeneity, advertising…), am finding some of these things surprisingly enjoyable. Yes, some parallels with blogs, with community and pirate radios, with push technologies, with commercial broadcasting, etc.
One well-known issue, at this point, is lack of bandwidth. Adequate peer-to-peer technology exists to alleviate this problem (e.g. BitTorrent) but iTunes doesn’t support such technology and many sites have been having problems because of extreme numbers of access.
More surprisingly, some of the so-called “professional” podcasts have been unavailable or incredibly slow.
The RSS format used by iTunes has also been taken to task.
Yet overall, there seems to be something happening in podcasting now.