iTunes 4.9 is less than twelve hours old and already there's some folks wondering what's going on. As a podcaster, I looked for a podcast in iTunes that I co-host and was thrilled to see inclusion in the directory. I was not too thrilled, however, to find missing album art, a lack of artist information and various other ID3 tag data not appearing. It turns out that Apple has added some iTunes-specific tags in a specification for podcast RSS feeds.

Dave Winer created the RSS 2.0 specification and added the <enclosure> tag that we podcasters currently use to "attach" our podcasts to our feeds. His comments so far indicate that many of the iTunes tags are really just duplicates or reinventions of current elements in the specification. Dave does caution that Apple might have thought twice about using a trademark as a tag name. Every iTunes tag uses the following convention, for example: <itunes:element>. Let's hope that Apple never changes the name of their music store.

In a related note: any podcasters that utilize Feedburner's free service to burn RSS feeds for podcasting may want to tune in to the Feedburner forum on the iTunes tag topic. I expect we'll see some Feedburner news on the subject within a few days.