In 1993, America Online jumped into the Internet with both feet, and the waves took an awful long time to subside. A huge influx of new users discovered Usenet, and thanks to AOL's poor stewardship of the situation, the newsgroups were overrun with newbies who thought they were merely an extension of AOL. The phenomenon came to be known as "Eternal September," since it came in like the newbie college freshmen, who were suitably chastened by October -- only the freshmen kept coming, month after month, year after year.

Eternal September is a valuable lesson in corporate responsibility. AOL didn't pay the least bit of attention to the existing community on Usenet, who had built its value steadily over the years. As a result, the community was altered forever, with long-time users disappearing, and a flood of bad feelings toward AOL for letting the horse out of the barn. Some of that bad blood continues to this day.

The lesson that every corporation should take away from Eternal September is this: beware the unintended consequences of introducing dramatic changes in existing communities. Podcasting is not just TiVo for radio. It's an independent medium consisting of thousands of producers who, rather than spending their energies to compete with one another, have instead pushed each other along. It's the social aspect of rough consensus and running mouths that make it what it is.

Apple has had its blockbuster hits over the years, with the iPod itself likely to go down as its biggest. I'm a huge Apple partisan, myself, having seen them time and time again make it easier for any old user to do what they couldn't before, like make DVDs, arrange music, or buy shape-shifting blue-and-white polka-dotted computers. And Apple absolutely deserves credit for integrating podcasting into iTunes a scant 10 months after it started rolling. Podcast producers will benefit greatly, over time, by having one fewer application that users need to download.

Maybe Apple is losing out in my view because I grade them at the top of the usability curve among software vendors, but the part that pains me about the iTunes 4.9 release is knowing how much better it could have been. As the first exposure to podcasting for many, I think they could have made things a lot cleaner and more comfortable for those users. For example, the Podcasts section could be much more effective if it were an integrated aggregator and marketing tool. It doesn't make sense to shop the iTunes Music Store for free podcasts, leaving users with two disjointed interfaces to navigate.

As I said in an earlier post, there's time to fix all of this, but the iTunes developers have to break themselves of their innately secretive nature and actively engage those folks who have been doing it. Take the built-in RSS aggregator. Its performance, according to people who know, is, shall we say, suboptimal. Sam Ruby, who does know, has been gathering detailed research on iTunes' RSS parser, outlining its limitations based on black-box testing. These limitations hurt end users by degrading their experience. But because Apple is not communicating, Sam has had to beg for links to try to make sure someone gets the message through to them. Again, this would have been a lot easier if Apple had come out to the syndication community a week or two before hand and let them mess around with the parser. We'd have known a lot more about what we needed to do, and they'd have had a chance to fix what is now, after the fact, seen to be broken.

AOL erroneously believed that paying for the connection to the Internet gave them some sense of ownership over the community that was already there. It's a lesson that Apple can take to heart when trying to parlay ownership of the iPod and iTunes into ownership of the content community. Right now, many of the people adding value in this community aren't happy.

A few readers have ascribed my criticism of iTunes to sour grapes for not having been included in their directory. That doesn't bother me: I don't deserve any special privileges simply because I have a mic and a mixer. Really, the only thing that bugs me is that I don't know why I'm not listed. There are dozens of podcast directories out there, and my show usually appears in them from day one, by virtue of its presence in the iPodder directory, and some number of listeners who submit me where they can. It wouldn't hurt my feelings to hear that someone at Apple listened to one of my shows and didn't like it; that information alone would be enough to keep me from having to check the directory every so often to see if I've been added.

It's not hard to put out one sentence explaining how shows are added to the directory. Here, Apple, pick one of these and add it to your submission page:

"Apple manually reviews each submitted podcast to ensure that its content is appropriate for our audience."

"Apple manually reviews each submitted podcast to ensure that it is of suitable quality to our audience."

"Apple manually reviews each submitted podcast to ensure that it is not using unauthorized copyrighted content."

"Apple updates its directory with podcast submissions every (n days|x weeks|y months)."

"Apple will notify the owner of the submitted feed when it has been processed."

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: communication. Not hand-holding, not operators standing by, and not handwritten letters from Steve. All I'm asking for is some participation in the community, at ground level. Podcasting is not something that can be "owned". Podcasting is an organic, collaborative medium, where a large number of players share largely common goals. It's social media. And those players will not respond well to what is perceived as pressure from an external force. Smart people work in Cupertino. Let us talk with some of them.