iTunes 4.9 To Support Podcasting 352
WaRrK writes "O'Reilly Radar are reporting that in a demo at D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs showed off iTunes 4.9, which has support for iPodder like functionality. Although, he was "slightly" dismissive of the phenomena, describing it as "Wayne's World for radio". Also, whilst currently only supporting free content, they are not ruling out paid for podcasting in the future. iTunes 4.9 should be available within 60 days." Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone.
Reality Check (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, somebody with a little common sense! Honestly, how many people out there actually use the internet to listen to people's podcasts? I surely don't. It's faster to skim through articles in a blog than to listen to some amateur whine about how he thinks Walmart is the ultimate evil in the world.
Maybe not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. They said the same thing about the common users being able to create their own web sites. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but the few quality content providers more than make up for it.
Sure beats the dross on airwaves... (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'long tail' of shows almost ensures that there is something out there of interest to everyone. And if I wasn't rushing out to buy an mp3 player before, I sure am looking forward to getting one now so I can fill my hour and a half commute each day by programming my own 'radio station'... commercial-free and chock full of content that totally appeals to me.
Why I like PodCasting (Score:4, Insightful)
Although Steve is right in the fact that, for the most part, it's the "Wayne's World" of radio. There are some good shows out there and I do enjoy listening to them.
technology changes lives .. (Score:2, Insightful)
i dunno, since the personal broadcast media revolution came along, i no longer feed off the general concencus being mass-produed for the hive-mind by "Big Media"
laders like jobs ridiculing this movement through generalities and slures really only shows that yes, in fact, putting mass-media broadcast tools in the hands of The People, instead of it being the exclusive domain of the vested interest/vaulted few, is a good thing
Re:This is huge (Score:1, Insightful)
NEWSFLASH (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a tech site, BY nerds FOR nerds. If you say that nerds should have a "neutral" point of view on a tech issue, then you're living in fantasyland. All nerds have a point of view, and the editors do too. This is a way that they can express that. We don't have to take what they say as the gospel truth. This is a discussion, not an effort to set the truth down in stone.
If you want journalism, go to nytimes or something (although it's rather hard to find good journalism _anywhere_ these days).
Re:Another person doesn't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, you can download stuff and listen to it later. How exactly is that different from Shoutcast with Steramripper?
So now instead of listening to what the Evil Corporate Companies want you to hear, you can listen to some random ClearChannel viral advertising campaign. Congratulations.
Podcasting is to radio as blogging is to news. Pockets of people think it's the greatest thing ever, but the vast majority of people have common sense.
Re:Another person doesn't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
I download the show at anytime, instead of having to have my PC on and running for the entire show's duration?
*forehead slap* duh! ??
Re:Wish it read "iTunes to use open formats" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Supporting DRM'ed WMA files would hurt their store. Supporting Ogg Vorbis would do nothing of the sort.
Re:Reality Check (Score:2, Insightful)
Podcasts are a special case of timeshifted radio: the special bit is that they were never broadcast in the first place. And timeshifted audio has a huge market: commuters who drive or go by train and have MP3 players.
Potential targets would include sports commentary, book club discussions, book readings, tech rants (I imagine Cringely'd be popular). Now, some of this may be available on radio as well -- that's irrelevant because the target market for podcasts are the people who can't, or couldn't, tune in. And why yes, there could be people whose individual podcasts become incredibly popular (how many'd have thought Belle de Jour [blogspot.com]'s weblog would have taken off enough to earn her a book deal?)
I can understand the average
I don't get it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, color me clueless on this one. What's the big deal about podcasting? As far as I can tell, it's just making audio files available via an RSS feed. Is that really so life-changing? Couldn't this have been done years ago without the RSS, just by listing the files as links on a web page or even by dropping them in an ftp directory somewhere? Heck, I even remember a little something [thesync.com] put out back before the turn of the millenium, definitely predating the iPod and almost predating RSS. There's nothing new here, except the name and the tangential link to Apple via the iPod. So really, what's all the fuss about?
Is Hemos the new Michael? (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear Slashdot Editor:
If I wanted your opinion, I'd read your blog. Or you could leave comments in the discussion that follows the article, and I could read it there.
Your job as an editor is not to use story submissions as a platform for your personal views. Your job is to evaluate a submission's potential interest to the community and then step aside.
(Making sure it's not a dupe and that it contains good grammar and spelling would be nice too, but we in the
Cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
As ever, Mr. Jobs is right on the money. But look at what he's doing rather than what he's saying. By providing RSS downloads into iTunes he massively raises the profile of what was previously a geek only market. If this feature is used, no doubt they'll introduce a market place on iTunes for people share and talk about the podcasts they like.
Podcasts are a mess right now. Even if you find a really good podcast [blogspot.com] there is no way to promote them short of word of mouth. This presents another problem, podcasts are too complicated. You can't email your buddy and mine, Joe Sixpack, a link to an RSS feed and expect them to know what to do with it. People struggle to wrap their heads around web pages, never mind RSS feeds and MP3 files.
Apple getting behind podcasts with iTunes offers this interesting technology its best hope of becoming useful - like the BBC looking at this as a way of dropping Real, infavour of freeplay
Re:well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but Ogg Vorbis has the inferior *name*.
Between Ogg, Lame, Gimp, recursiev acronyms, and all the cutesy Linux distro appellations, it's no wonder a lot of folks can't take open source seriously.
It's changed the way I use my iPod, Steve. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a change, Steve. I don't use iTunes anymore, which means you don't get any of my money anymore.
Forget for the moment about the quality of podcasts out there. It's no worse than the quality of your average blog was a few years back. It takes a little while for the good ones to distance themselves from the pack and define what quality really is all about in the first place. There will always be an audience for anybody that wants the soapbox, just like always. We just need to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Everybody will find their own favorites.
The power of podcasting comes from the same delivery mechanism that RSS brings us (it's the same thing, after all, with a different payload). "Here are some sources of regularly updated audio. Bring it to me to listen to at my leisure."
Not everybody wants to listen to music on their MP3 players. I find it boring, personally. Nor do I want to constantly go out and search for new sources of interesting audio files to listen to (a regularly asked slashdot question), or pay $35 for an audio book when I could buy the paperback for $7. Podcasting opens up the door for me to have an effectively infinite amount of new content dropped onto my ipod every day. Sure I won't like all of it. That's what skip buttons are for.
Content will come, I have no doubt of it. IT Conversations is already well on the way. I listen to every keynote of every technical conference throughout the year. Sure, I could manually go and get those as they are published, but why bother? Why not just have them automatically show up on my ipod for me?
re: Is Hemos the new Michael? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has been Hemos and Taco's "blog" since well before "blog" was ever considered a real word.
Real news sites don't publish readers commenary on the stories (or on which editors aren't doing their jobs).
changes (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think once someone has been a millionaire for 20 years or better they lose track of how much money a dollar is. Steve Jobs has that "no clue" syndrome, same as the hollywood movie guys and the record guys. "No clue" of what things cost because to those multi millionaires living in rich society surroundings on the left coast all the time most everything in the normal consumer appliance/do dad area is so cheap as to be indistinguishable from near free in their POV.
And the reason why podcasting is taking off is because people can actually create and share content, they aren't restricted to the blather the commercial entities spew forth-and it *really is* mostly blather.. Steve got no clue on sharing, hollywood got no clue on sharing, mainstream broadcasting is starting to get a clue but they will want to podcast 50% commercials like always.
Sorting the wheat from the chaff (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is the same problem mp3.com had (and Creative Commons/etc. music still has) -- when you've got a massive morass of mixed quality media, how is the consumer supposed to know what to try out and what to skip? With text you can skim-read, and sort that way. With audio, the selective process is more time consuming and pretty much impractical.
iPodder.org has a directory which has exactly the same problem as mp3.com. PodcastAlley tries to solve this by collating votes, but this just ends up promoting an "elite" of mainstream content, which only helps the mainstream consumer.
I don't know how to solve this, but there there is some promise: Adam Curry's show contains a lot of promos for other shows, and that's a good way to hear about podcasts you may wish to try out. I guess that's the next best thing to word of mouth.
After all, how do you decide what TV shows to watch? Trailers, reviews in the media, and word-of-mouth, right?
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Insightful)
You just don't get it. Podcasting isn't about blogging with audio, or time shifting radio programs. Its about distributing radio programs. If you think of Tivo as a hack that creates an on-demand system out of a streaming media, podcasting is the on-demand system that Tivo wanted to be. It's just a new buzz word for audio on demand. It is overhyped, but it isn't a fad. One day, this is how we'll watch the news on TV.
Re:Not very hard... (Score:3, Insightful)