While this post isn’t exactly about web comics specifically, listeners of our show and others like it might find it interesting. Apple has decided to fully embrace the concept of podcasting and has updated it’s popular music management app and online music store, iTunes, accordingly. If you update to the latest version of iTunes you’ll see a new playlist icon for podcasts and you can use that section of the app to subscribe to any podcast RSS/XML feed.

Another cool thing Apple is doing is managing a continuously updated directory of current podcasts where you can search for podcasts on any topic you can think of. Doing a search for “comics” reveals a list of shows our listeners may be interested in, including Digital Strips.

The weird thing is that we didn’t submit Digital Strips to the iTunes directory. Either Apple has come up with a way to automatically search out and add the podcast feed files from the web or someone submitted our show for us. Either way, thanks to whoever was responsible. Personally, I find using iTunes to manage my podcast subscription feeds really handy, especially since that’s where I listen to the shows anyway.

A detail in the service I find interesting is that next to the name of the show in the iTunes directory the word “free” appears. This implies there may be podcasts out there that charge for download or that the service will cost something in the future. I wonder what that will mean for future use of the iTunes podcast management service.