With iTunes going to be supporting podcasts in it’s next version (4.9), iTuners (heh, I thought that one up all by myself :) ) will be able to browse directories such as iPodder.org as well as podcasts that have been registered by Apple themselves. This will really bring podcasting to the masses.

So as an editor to some nodes on the iPodder.org directory and iPodder.org being a decentralized structure, I host OPML files for the directory. Every hour or half-hour iPodder.org pulls my files, checks for updates and updates the directory if necessary. However, applications such as iPodder and most other podcasting applications allow their users to browse the directory directly, which means that whenever a user opens their podcasting client and browses to the nodes I manage, I take a bandwidth hit.

My concerns revolve around whether iTunes will be doing the same. If iTunes allows users to browse directories directly will the browsing take place on their servers with a periodically updated offline copy or will it be a real time browse? I seriously hope that they will host an offline copy of the directories or the day iTunes releases; I will unfortunately have to stop hosting my nodes. :(

As iTunes 4.9 must be close to completion, they must have done some testing. Therefore some traffic is going to have taken place against my server by iTunes. So a quick look in my access_log reveals this:


17.201.36.13 - - [23/Jun/2005:10:35:04 +0000] “GET /opml/technology.opml HTTP/1.1″ 200 12677 “-” “iTunes/4.9 (Macintosh; N; PPC)”

As you can see, iTunes 4.9 is requesting the files. There are multiple entries going back some time and disturbingly, the entries are from different IP addresses and different IP address ranges. This does not make me feel too happy.

Is there anyone who can confirm how iTunes will be browsing the directories?