I saw this article on Cult of Mac about saving podcasting.

I remember Steve Jobs introduced the “new podcast” feature in iTunes back in 2005. He was thrilled that people had started creating their own content on the Internet and were essentially broadcasting their own radio and video shows via RSS feeds. Before iTunes, you had to purchase a third-party app and it was difficult to figure out where the best content was on the Internet.

So Jobs saw it as a opportunity to further promote iPod sales by making it much easier to find and subscribe to these podcasts. Plus, once these podcasts were accessible on iTunes, it had a very positive effect on reaching a much broader audience. He was excited about it.

But it looks like recently Apple has dropped the ball. Might be because Apple doesn’t care much for ipod sales anymore. But I think that’s very short-sighted because whoever finds a way of curating the best content on the internet is going to make a ton of money. The problem with the Internet is that there is way too much content to sift through and most of it is junk.

Whoever finds the answer may well be able to kill the cable companies and TV stations for good. I hope they do. Bring on a new era of content distribution and excellence in programming!

I think the Internet is an incredible accomplishment, but it may end up being the greatest distraction ever devised to keep us focused on the trivial and the inconsequential instead of what’s most important.

Someone has got to figure out how to use it as a tool to improve us, to make us better people. Otherwise, it will be used much more often for the meaningless and the superficial. Then it will waste us all.