ITunes Mints (political) Podcasting Stars

[Ian David]

ITunes Mints Podcasting Stars
By Steve Friess

02:00 AM Jul. 18, 2005 PT

Self-proclaimed tech geek Brian Reid got an MP3 player for Christmas and decided after fiddling with it for a while to start a little podcast called Sex Talk that focused on one of his passions: gender issues.

The suburban Washington, D.C., stay-at-home dad did a few broadcasts, touching on such sonorous topics as the Roman Catholic Church's stance on female priests, and then gave up back in April when his audience failed to grow beyond a few subscribers.

So imagine his surprise when, during the first week of July, Reid got an e-mail from an Australian reader of his blog congratulating him for having the 53rd-most-popular podcast on iTunes.

And so it went in the first fortnight after Apple Computer issued the software that turned podcasts mainstream. The upgrade to iTunes 4.9 on June 29 gave millions of iPod owners and iTunes customers a simple way to search for and subscribe to podcasts without any other software. Apple counted more than 1 million podcast subscriptions through iTunes in the first two days alone, according to a company press release.

More:
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68185,00.html