As always, iTunes giveth and iTunes taketh away. So what am I getting at? Recently my New York Minute Show video podcast has shown up on the front page of iTunes. It's been a boon for my subscribership, pushing my numbers well over the 5,000 mark. Truth be told there's not much of a point to the videos. I just thought it would be nice to take little videos here and there as I'm going around the city and recording stuff for the New York Minute Show audio podcast.

Some folks have been nice enough to give me kudos on the accomplishment. Namely, Mark Tafoya, Hilary and Frank Edward Nora. I thank those folks for being so gracious.

The increased exposure has lead a few more people to comment on my feed in the iTunes music store podcast directory. Two of the comments are positive and two are negative. One person doesn't like the fact that there's no point to the videos. That person is right. I'm just giving folks little glimpses of what I see as I hardly have time to conceive, product and edit a TV show. The other negative comment is downright nasty. The person goes as far to call me "lame" and "a 35 year old retard." Ouch!

If someone doesn't like what I'm doing then that's fine with me. I'm open to all sorts of constructive criticism. But the aforementioned comment is downright nasty and meanspirited. Evidently, the commenter doesn't like my narration, including a reference to a restaurant reminding me of a Billy Joel song. Whatever. That certainly doesn't warrant a ridiculous personal attack. I've notified the iTunes music store to let them know that I object to the comment. We'll see what happens, but I'd certainly like the comment removed as it's of no real value.

So what's the moral of this story? First off, I think that podcasters should keep an eye on places that solicit comments on podcast episodes. Second, I think that whenever you put yourself out there in the open there's always a risk of people slammin' you down. Maybe it's jealousy. Maybe it's just anger at the world. Either way, I'm not going to take it sitting down.

It's worth mentioning that Kevin Smith and Co. have been maintaining a blog and video podcast during the production of Clerks 2. I'm sure that this is old news to many but they're doing some good stuff here so I thought I'd mention it. They have to video podcast feeds. One specifically for iTunes and and one for Video iPod compatible files. I guess they had the original videos in non iPod format since they started this thing before the announcement by Mr. Jobs. I checked out the first installment and it was pretty good. I'm going to get caught up over the next couple of weeks.

This is something that just sucks, but you knew people would figure out a way to do it. Several podcasters are spamming the recently published podcasts list over at http://audio.weblogs.com. I noticed the first one doing it a few weeks ago and now a couple of others have followed suit. I know they're doing this because their podcasts show up as "new" in just about every single hour of the day even though the enclosure files are the same. As of this writing I spy three podcasts doing it. And I'm sure that more will follow as long as Verisign allows this loophole in their newly purchased service.

I subscribe to the latest podcasts RSS feed as a way to find new and interesting stuff at random and it definitely takes away from the service to see the same shows over and over again. The people who are doing it should be ostracized by the community and the folks at Verisign should get off of their asses and stop it.

Like it or love it, Howard Stern's replacement David Lee Roth has a podcast. It's not a true, dyed in the wool podcast. It's simply a re-purposing of some of his morning show audio from the radio. But you can catch snippets of the David Lee Roth morning show if you slap this RSS Feed into your podcatcher. Infinity Broadcasting has been dipping their toes into the podcasting waters for a while now. They started KYOU Radio last year to provide a broadcast location for podcast content.

Sirius Satellite Radio has been ferverently against podcasting any of their content. But with pressure on Sirius to ramp up subscribers in the first month of Howard's tenure, can a Stern-cast be far behind?

A few weeks ago I realized that Blogger was unable to publish to my web host Namesecure via FTP. I don't think that Blogger is broken and my web host said they can't do anything about it. So if I want to publish new content or change templates I have to redirect people to a blogspot page. The issue is with FTP protocols. Evidently my host switched protocols. Hard to believe that they wouldn't support the largest free blog service on the planet. I've been happy with Blogger because they support multiple blogs from one dashboard and the price is certainly right. I can't ditch my webhost though since I've got a few sites running on them.

So what's the point? I guess this is a warning to any Blogger users thinking of publishing via FTP to Namesecure.