Granted, “podcasts as mainstream medium” is a bit ambitious, but to write it off entirely as a medium without an audience or without any growth or traction is probably not right, either. The interesting bit about podcasting is what was interesting about blogs–which took a “confusing and a techie only medium” like web publishing and made it easy, enabling millions to write about politics, sport, knitting, and what have you. Maybe not “mainstream media” either, but certainly not one to ignore. Podcasts and podcasting are/is a natural extension (via enabling technologies, of which iTunes certainly wasn’t the first) of the sort of revolution of personal publishing as a new medium. The barriers to publishing are falling left and right, and content is springing up everywhere as a result. Web publishing first, audio now, video next.

And to be fair to Apple they’ve been great ambassadors for the podcast. But in effect all they are doing is providing a single site for downloads.

However, podcasting has been overhyped as a medium and a cursory glance at the iTunes top 20 podcasts shows it is a medium dominated by old school radio broadcasters.

And it took iTunes to simplify the process enough to make it easy for the average joe.

Which makes the process popular enough to make place-shifting this content worthwhile enough for content developers to jump on the bandwagon and repurpose their content.

Which makes iTunes even more worthwhile for the average joe.

As they say, rinse, repeat.

So whether Apple started it or not, they deserve a lot of the credit for creating an environment in which place shifting can reach critical mass …

My $.02.