This iTunes support of podcasting thing is slowly sinking in. Since almost the beginning here, I could make the assumption that the vast majority of podcatching clients supported Bittorrent. Unless some heroic Apple engineer puts in support and quick, that assumption is going to change when iTunes does their thing.

Everything I've seen has unquestioningly been on the side that this is good for podcasting, but I'm not sure that it will be. Over and over, almost since the very beginning people have been making these statements that "what podcasting needs to be really popular is X". That's not been my focus. Like I've been saying in the podcasts, explosive growth just for the sake of it is not a good thing in my opinion. I've never felt that we had to be in a hurry here. While there is a coolness to the notion that my listenership might go up in a big hurry, it also has the potential of being an unintentional denial of service attack. I've liked the pace things have been growing at, which allowed the tool creators and the podcasters and everyone to build and figure out how to do things.

I've built up the Bittorrent infrastructure because of its sustainability and ability to grow over time without killing the server box or using too much bandwidth. Putting out a tool that can bring in an assload of listeners but without using that infrastructure is not necessarily doing me a favor. If it goes like I think it might, I'm going to be including a short MP3 in my feed begging iTunes users to get a tool that supports Bittorrent like every major one has up to this point.