Podcasting is hard

You’d think that with all the talk about the podcasting (or netcasting) revolution, someone would’ve made it easy by now– and with any MP3 player. Well, it’s not true. You can do it with an iPod and iTunes easily enough, but for other MP3 players, the market is extremely fragmented.

I started off looking for info on podcasting, which was almost all about how to publish your own podcast. I actually want to listen. So I looked for a tutorial or a guide, but couldn’t find anything. Maybe it’s just too easy that nobody has though to write about it. Or maybe because subscribing to podcasts doesn’t have a good, catchy name, that it’s just hard to find.

iTunes is pretty much the only shop in town, so I’m downloading it now, hoping that it will work with non-iPod MP3 players. I don’t know for certain whether this is the case, although it looks like it is  the case for the Mac version of iTunes– at least according to a CNET comparison of MP3 players.

TWiT.tv has all my favorite podcasts, so I went there to see if there was information on easily subscribing. No luck– it just refers me to iTunes and the Wikipedia article on podcasting, which isn’t very help either. That is not making it easy. It is still far too difficult for a normal person to get running with podcasting, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get them there. And no, “iTunes” is not an acceptable answer. Here’s the best thing I’ve found so far.