The coolest things about the Itunes experience was podcasts. You could subscribe
to a wide variety of sources from news, religion, tech, sports, etc. Then get
them to play with a Smart Playlist that gave you the unplayed ones in reverse
date order.   So you could always just plug in and you'd hear the newest ones
first, effortless mixing daily & monthly feeds, keeping track of where you were
in a podcast.  Who needs radio or TV or the rest of the internet when you have
this, essentially for free?

I'm imagining that only extreme idiots, and by that I mean no one, likes to
listen to podcasts in alphabetical order. You'd hear the three in a row from
source Alpha, then two in a row from Beta, etc.  You might get to source Kappa,
but only if no new Alphas are released by then.

I just tried to put some podcast-containing playlists onto an Ipod Touch.  I
could create playlists with music and get them onto the Touch.  I could create
playlists with podcasts in Itunes, but not transfer them to the Touch.  I even
tried a playlist with two songs and 25 podcasts, and it did transfer, but only
with the two songs!

I may have failed to RTFM, but here's how I read the signs. The free podcast
experience gives you complete internet satisfaction with no cost, no
subscription fee. And that is a threat or a disincentive to one possible way to
monetize an ipad, one where you have a constant stream of credit card
micropayments on a locked-down device.  That's my take, unless someone can show
me the setting I forgot to click.  :"-)

Unfortunately, Google seems to be hiring idiot savants who can find large prime
numbers, but are unable to create a useful podcast playing service.  I cannot
get Google Listen to function, at least with my refusal to listen to the first
alphabetically sorted source.

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Hmm, after more reading, I saw some make reference to a known Itunes 9.x bug.
That may make my previous post a bit paranoid, but in the same forums I saw
something worse.

I saw two cases where folks ridiculed post writers for asking questions about
this same problem, insulting intelligence, using word "SPAM" and implying an
inability to RTFM.   Fascinating. Sort of a knee-jerk assumption that Apple does
fine by everyone.  I think that I've seen analogues in political debates, where
someone doesn't even know the facts behind a situation, but starts dissing the
complainer out of a default assumption that Civilization does fine by everyone.

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