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Apple’s iPod is a closed environment. Unlike radio, the music on an iPod is limited to the owner’s music library. Personally, I’ve hit the “2,000 songs and nothing’s on” wall.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been looking for a solution. Is it digging into MixMatcher or picking up a Sirius Receiver, like Jen?

Ultimately, I’d like the iTunes Store to have a streaming, new cool music feed, where I can the best tracks. I thought this was pipe dream. Until now…

Enter the podcasting.

A podcast is most simply a mp3 wrapped in a RSS 2.0 feed. Subscribe to a podcast feed in a RSS newsreader, say iPodder and the latest mp3s are automatically downloaded to your music library.

Think Tivo for your ears.

New music, new opinions, at our convenience.

By far, the relative ease of production is the most intriguing aspect of podcasting.

Hugo Schotman has a great series of articles on setting up a PodCast ‘studio’ with applications on your OS X box.

Adam Curry in his Daily Source Code show akins this podcasting to pirate and college radio broadcasts as well as weblogging. Adam’s pushing the limits of this technology by conducting talk show-esque interviews using the cross-platform Skype.

Curry has taken the helm and is maintaining ipodder.org, as a resource for all things podcasting including a living directory of shows.

I also see podcasting very similar to text-based weblogging. Just as weblogging (and web publishing as a whole) gave every computer ‘user’ a newspaper, Podcasting gives each of us our own call-in radio show.

“Six weeks into this experiment”, as the Evil Genius persists, Podcasting applications are not yet as mature as Blogger, MoveableType or my preferred WordPress.

Though like the early days of text weblogging apps, time will soon enough fulfill the promise of connecting iTunes, NetNewsWire, and Skype.