Apple announced its awesome iPod nano last week and the accompanying software, iTunes 5.0, has a great new feature that will make it much easier to include text with a podcast. It’s billed as a music feature, but I see lots of other applications. From the iPod nano review at playlistmag.com:

I’m particularly pleased that the nano adds a Lyrics screen to the iPod’s Now Playing area. In this screen you can view any lyrics that you’ve added to the Lyrics tab of a Song Information window within iTunes 5. Currently the only way to add those lyrics is by hand—songs sold by the iTunes Music Store don’t (yet) have embedded lyrics.

I doubt that I’ll spend much time pasting song lyrics into the ID3 tags for the thousands of songs in my library, but I’ll certainly start putting my podcast production notes in there. I can envision including transcripts of speeches or interviews, lecture notes, supplemental or background information about a speaker or topic, or anything else that would add value to the audio. Audacity, my podcast production software of choice, doesn’t support this ID3 field so I’ll have to import each podcast into iTunes to add the information.

Let’s gaze into the crystal ball. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a mobile device (maybe the new Motorola iTunes-enabled phone) that could display that “lyrics” text with hyperlinks that could be followed out to the Internet. Now that could be a pretty cool, interactive podcasting listening experience.