iTunes does podcasting... will anyone care?

This has been rumored for some time now and was also rumored to be tied to a Big Corporate Partnership. I don't see any such partnership just yet but maybe that's yet to come. Doh! The partnership is obviously with The Mouse. Lots of ABC/Disney content.

On the one hand, this is probably good in that it will bring the term "podcast" to the lips of millions of iPod owners. That, of course, could be a double-edged sword. If any of the podcast publishers out there who are still on metered bandwidth and they suddenly get hit by a couple thousand iTunes experimenters ... could be a real problem.

On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much compelling content out there for the average pop music listener. So it may all just be a flash in the proverbial pan.

On the gripping hand, iTunes can't be much worse as a podcatching client than anything else out there. The software I've tried (all the most popular ones for Windows and Linux) has sucked. It's sucked so bad that I have been using a simplistic script called bashpodder while I slowly write my own podcatching client.

Bottom line: I don't think it can hurt but content is king and, aside from people like me who like the "geek radio" stuff that predominates the podosphere, the content is still weak.