iPods and podcasting - current phenomenom

Lucy Mangan rails amusingly against iPods in today's Guardian. I think she misses the point. It's not so much the hardware but the changes in listening behaviour that are interesting (since I don't like wearing earphones I have some sympathy with her distinctly off-bandwagon position about the hardware).

And French MPs have backed a draft law, targeted at Apple, to eliminate proprietory protected music downloads. If successful the law would mean that people are no longer locked in to specific download channels (i.e. Apple's iTunes store to use iPods). It will be interesting to see how Apple respond.

See also, the stats from Wikipedia article on the rapid development of podcasting (posted by Dave on Infodesign-cafe Vol 4/Issue 9):
"Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google found for the word "podcasts" on September 28, 2004. On that day, the result was 24 hits. There were 526 hits on September 30, then 2,750 three days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18. A year later, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word".