Remember Steve Martin in “The Jerk”, working in the gas station when the phone book arrives? He flips to the page where he hopes his name will appear and, when it does, runs screaming for his gas station boss, “I am somebody! I am somebody!“.

I promise I won’t do that but I still feel like a jerk who is self promoting (but who else will, heh?).

It’s fun to be one of the few (actually, several thousand!) whose podcast is live on the Apple iTunes Music Store podcasting section. I’m in the Technology section and (if you have iTunes) you can go directly there and subscribe if you’d like…or just double-click on one of the podcasts in iTunes and it’ll stream.

When I was at the University of Minnesota, I headed over to Brown Institute (now Brown College) since *all* the local Minnesota broadcasters had attended there and I had a pent-up urge to get in to broadcasting. After discovering the tuition was three times the UofMN (and I was paying my own way) I never did it. I’ve had a nagging notion ever since that if I’d pursued it (or a journalism degree vs. business at the UofMN) I would’ve been closer to my passion. Blogging, and now podcasting, has gone a long way towards filling that passion. [Read more...]

UPDATE: 7/15/05: It’s live. Click here to go to the iTunes Music Store, podcasting area.

UPDATE 7/14/05: It’s now Friday Thursday…nearly ONE WEEK since I submitted my podcast and it’s still not there!

Must admit being quite enthusiastic when Apple released iTunes 4.9 with support for podcasting. As someone who *has* been podcasting and has published to Podcast Alley, PodcastMN and other directories without a problem, I thought Apple’s ease-of-use would extend to those of us publishing and not just the listeners…and that publishing a podcast to *the* creator of the iPod’s digital audio hub called iTunes would be the best possible experience.

On Saturday I published my podcast to the iTunes podcast portion of the Music Store…even after adding support for the special Apple XML tags. I’ve been dismayed that — 50 hours after posting my podcast feed — it still doesn’t appear in the iTunes directory listing and, of course, there is no way to contact anyone to ask “So what’s up?”.

I’ve heard from others in the PodcastMN group that there have been issues of some shows showing up in the directory while others don’t; significant delays in publishing like one week after submission; and content (like SexandPodcasting…which, BTW, has *nothing* to do with sex) showing up in the wrong category…without recourse by the podcast publisher.

Maybe this is just growing pains and Apple ensuring they can preview every show, but the company needs to address this immediately. My concern? Apple may very well turn off the indie publisher like me and focus only on mainstream content providers (with the same drivel that have forced most of us away from mainstream radio). Those of us building an audience (and arguably building podcasting itself) will be left twistin’-in-the-wind or will flock to other directories like Podcast Alley. That would be unfortunate for Apple too since the thousands of indie podcasters will buy a lot more Mac’s, iPods, Garageband accessories and Apple Loops than will ABC News, Al Franken or Disney.