I’ve spent the last couple of days looking into, or more like listening into, Podcasting; more on that later. However here is a really nice article on the iPod from Steve Gillmoor which has a few gems on design philosophy
“The dominant bottleneck in this digital communications fabric is battery life. By scoping the iPod to handle audio but not video, to docking instead of transmitting, to caching but not computing, the device’s designers match its use cases to maximum utility. In each case, the device turns a liability (battery life) into an asset (shifting information to a time and place where it can be consumed most efficiently.)
Audio blogs have been around for a while but PodCasting automates the tedious process of downloading to you machine and uploading it to your MP3 player (iPod or not).
