I can see there being the desire of users in some instances to be able
to easily subscribe and get older posts/episodes/shows (what are we
calling these things anyway? How about pode or sode for short?) that no longer
appear on the rss feed. Right now if for example someone wanted to listen to
all the Daily Source Codes back to sode #1, they would have to manually
go through the archives and download any sodes not automagically received,
somewhat defeating the purpose of an ipodder. Not too much of a problem
now but...

I guess one could argue that this is simply an rss/server side issue, and that
the "podcaster" (yes, I like making up new words) should be responsible enough
to offer a page of seperate feeds of old sodes by month/year/season/etc.
However, if you have a site with many thousands of sodes this could be very
time consuming and awkward means of getting older content, with no standard
means of organization between different sites. In addition listing gobs
of old contnet could produce a tremendous load on the download servers
getting everything in large batches or all at once.

So first, do we need a more standard means of storing/retrieving older
content?

Second, how to limit the amount of data fed to the user at a time and
prevent server overloading? Is the communication with iTunes two way?
Is there a means of seeing which shows have been listend to by the user?
Perhaps give the user the option of starting where ever in the show's
history they like then only download x number of hours at a time till
they clean their plate. Then, let them come back for another helping?

--dannie