The much talked-about podcast version of iTunes has landed. The interface is rather slick. A big catalog of available podcasts has been added to the iTunes Music Store, all for free so far. There is single screen for viewing your list of podcasts and the available episodes.
The whole thing looks really cool until you try to import from your current podcast app… Apple has provided to support for importing or exporting OPML files, and thus sucking in data from iPodder and other tools. While I don’t subscribe to that many podcasts, it was still a pain to manually copy/paste each feed. Then I discovered that many podcasts were broken, even some listed in the iTunes catalog. It looks like these are all feeds that are distributed as torrents, which appareanly iTunes can’t handle. Nice.

This is a very cool story of a high school basketball player becoming a sniper when her Muslim family is trapped in Sarejevo, which was under siege by Bosnian Serbs. Though this is fiction, it’s a great insight into the ethnic cleansing and genocide that the rest of the world allowed to happened in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The author is NPR’s Scott Simon.


