In my September 18, 2005 post I decided to create a list of medical podcasts. At the time I found eight sites. I am in the process of updating that list and so far I have 34 sites! While some of the sites are like Nature and Science which covering medical and science topics, the vast majority of the podcasts I found were created in October and November of last year.

Things I have noticed while trying to update the list:

• There is no good central database/aggregator/collection point of medical podcasts. That means you have to scan through iTunes (and other aggregators) and do multiple searches on the search engines. Very time consuming process
  
• iTunes is horrible for podcasts. The software is designed primarily for listening to music and they do good job for that. But the design does not work as well with podcasts.
  1) They offer the broadest of subject headings for you to browse through
  podcasts (Food, Health, Science, Sports, etc.) and I have found that
  medical podcasts can be in either the Health or Science category.
  2) Name, Artist, and Album/Description are what is displayed and it is
  that information you see and evaluate as you browse through programs. The
  information displayed is dependent upon the creator of the program to
  provide iTunes as it is uploaded to the service. Some creators provide little
  information (which is not the fault of iTunes), but those that provide
  copius amounts of information have limited room. Many long podcasts
  explore multiple topics, and you are limited in the amount of information
  you can see in that program's description.
  
  Examples:
  The Harvard Health Letter ($7.95 to download) has this for its information in
  iTunes.
  
  Name field: Harvard Health Letter, April 2001 (Nonfiction)
  Time field:37:08
  Artist field: Harvard Health Letter
  Description field: Harvard Health Letter, April 2001 (Nonfiction)

Compare that with the information Nature provides iTunes

Name field: Nature Podcast: 1 December 2005
Time field: 24:12
Artist field: Nature
Description: Touch down on titan, the giant water scorpian, Ebola virus hunters
Stem cell controversies, and Chilling news on the Gulf Stream

The Harvard Health Letter does not give you any information to entice you
to plunk your money down to buy their podcast. Heck you have no idea what the
program is about! While Nature provides general titles about the topics they cover
there is no extra room to determine who will be talking about each topic, who they
are interviewing, or any additional information. There simply isn't enough room
within iTunes to do that.

• Sometimes there is little correlation between what is in iTunes and what is on the provider's web page of archived programs. Sometimes new content is on the provider's site and not in iTunes or vice versa. Sometimes it is more confusing, as the case with Audio Digest where content is listed at $17/program on their site, but free on iTunes.

Podcasting is exploding in popularity. After all, I found 34 programs and I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface. The quality and types of programs vary wildly in nature. It is something to definetly keep your eye on and to start getting your feet wet trying.

In the meantime I will still be compiling my list and I will post it shortly.