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Greetings, fellow net-heads. What follows is a short and vitriolic rant about how Apple has screwed the proverbial pooch with the whole bit about adding ’support’ for podcasts in iTunes 4.9. So, if you honestly don’t give a fuck about podcasts at all, feel free to skip it. If you are one of those folks who thinks Apple can do no wrong, you may also wish to look elsewhere. I’m not shilling for Microsoft, or even Linux, here. I’m just pointing out that Steve Jobs eats babies*.

Now, with that disclaimer safely out of the way, we can get to the meat of my argument: hey, Apple! Fuck you!

No, seriously. You’re not doing the podcasting world any favors. Here’s the deal: podcasting was doing just fine before iTunes came along and started peeing on the rug. It was a, dare I say it, community effort. We were still figuring some stuff out, but I think we were making good progress, all of us, together, without some company making decisions for us. Standards had been developed (especially RSS), basic rules were laid down, dsitribution channels were being hammered out, smart ideas were popping up left and right. We had ways of organizing, finding, rating, and sharing podcasts and information about podcasts (Podcast Alley, Podcast Pickle, the iPodder Directory). New ideas about distribution channels came up pretty much on a weekly basis, such as libsyn, Bittorrent distribution, Coralized distribution, ways to ease the bandwith load on podcasters. There were hierarchies, sure, the cool kids and the not so cool kids, but, you know what? They were hierarchies we made ourselves.

Then along comes Apple and iTunes 4.9. Podcasting support built right into it! It’ll bring thousands, hundreds of thousands of people into the world of podcasting! W00t! This is gonna be great, right? Yeah, I thought the same thing: Apple’s cool, Apple’s smart, only good can come of this. So the podosphere opened its arms to iTunes 4.9, opened the door, and smiled.

Just in case I forget to mention it again later: hey, Apple? Fuck you.

The phrase ‘bull in a china shop’ comes to mind. iTunes 4.9 reads RSS feeds! Hooray! But wait.. what’s this? Apple wants me to make all sorts of changes and additions to my RSS feed so it’s ‘iTunes compatible’? But.. but RSS is a standard. It works. It’s been working fine. And all of a sudden, just because iTunes 4.9 is on the scene, my RSS feed ‘doesn’t work’? Fuck that. It’s been working fine on iPodder, iPodderX, Doppler, and any of the dozens of online and offline podcast aggregator applications aready out there. As far as I’m concerned, it’s iTunes that’s broken, not my RSS feed.

So, okay, iTunes presumes they know how to make RSS ‘better’ so it’ll work with their over-hyped music store. Whatever. At least iTunes 4.9 is bringing lots of new people into the podosphere, right? Right. Except for a couple of minor hitches: iTunes makes no provisions for anyone who’s trying to use alternate distribution methods to conserve their bandwith. Bandwith is expensive, folks. And when you’re distributing 20+ MB audio files, even just a couple of hundred listeners can mean a serious drain on your economic resources. Well, iTunes has the potential of bringing not just hundreds, but thousands of listeners to you. On the one hand, this is great.. On the other hand, what’s the point of putting up a podcast if the moment iTunes notices you, you’re forced to re-mortgage your house just to pay your bandwith bills? So, some folk have been experimenting with Bittorrent to solve those issues. Great! Shares the bandwith out among all your listeners, saves you a bundle, everyone’s happy. And all the major podcast aggregators already support Bittorrent distribution, right? Sure.. all of them except for iTunes. So if iTunes notices you, boom, you’re fucked.

What really gets my goat is Apple’s attitude of “Oh, that’s a cute toy you have there, with your podcasting. Very cute. Now, give it here, we’ll show you how the smart grownups do it.” You know what, Apple? Again, fuck you. RSS is the standard, and I don’t have to change a single thing in my feed for it to work just fine across the dozens of aggregators out there. My feed is not ‘incompatible with iTunes’. iTunes is incompatible with my feed. Fix your goddamn application.

And show some fucking consideration for the people who’ve put your company on the map: the consumers who buy your overpriced iPods, who buy your overpriced machines, and spend hours bent over a microphone and a screen trying to get ther voice heard in this new medium. Add in Bittorrent support, cache and deliver podcasts from your own servers, do something to help the bandwith drain. Get your act together. I don’t give a flying fuck if I can see an ‘album cover’ for the Dragon Page podcasts on your app, if I can’t even get the damn podcast to download because you’ve overloaded their servers.

Unfuckingbelievable.

So, if you are out there using iTunes as your podcatcher, do the rest of us a favor: go download and install a real podcast aggregator, be it iPodder for Windows, iPodderX for the Mac, or Doppler, or any of the others. They’re much more full-featured, compatible with any MP3 player (not just the iPods), and they usually won’t fuck the rest of us over.

*Note: None of us here at Techgnosisweb Central have really witnessed Mr. Jobs actually consuming a human infant, so this statement is pure speculation. Please don’t tell Steve we said that about him. He may decide to slake his insatiable thirst for the blood of the innocent with us!