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Monday, 18 July 2005 |
ITunes
Mints Podcasting Stars
Wired News -
USA
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.
Still, the switch came suddenly and without warning, turning a long list of
mom-and-pop online audiocasters into overnight sensations, crashing servers
across the nation and minting new internet stars in a way not seen since the
early days of blogging.
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