Self-proclaimed tech geek Brian Reid got an MP3 player for Christmas and decided after fiddling with it for a while to start a little podcast called Sex Talk that focused on one of his passions: gender issues.

The suburban Washington, D.C., stay-at-home dad did a few broadcasts, touching on such sonorous topics as the Roman Catholic Church's stance on female priests, and then gave up back in April when his audience failed to grow beyond a few subscribers.

So imagine his surprise when, during the first week of July, Reid got an e-mail from an Australian reader of his blog congratulating him for having the 53rd-most-popular podcast on iTunes.

And so it went in the first fortnight after Apple Computer issued the software that turned podcasts mainstream. The upgrade to iTunes 4.9 on June 29 gave millions of iPod owners and iTunes customers a simple way to search for and subscribe to podcasts without any other software. Apple counted more than 1 million podcast subscriptions through iTunes in the first two days alone, according to a company press release.

Still, the switch came suddenly and without warning, turning a long list of mom-and-pop online audiocasters into overnight sensations, crashing servers across the nation and minting new Internet stars in a way not seen since the early days of blogging.

And, of course, it left folks like Reid scratching their heads. Reid has no idea how his defunct podcast ended up listed in the iTunes directory -- and with an "explicit" label no less. He assumes that label and the Sex Talk name explain how he scaled the charts alongside such brand-name talkers as Air America Radio's Al Franken, Nightline's Ted Koppel and Z100 radio's Elvis Duran.

"I have entirely disappointed all those folks who expected to hear Jenna Jameson's voice and instead heard me," quipped Reid, 30, a freelance writer who has no plans to resume his podcast unless he can make it profitable. "It's very bizarre. The only reason why I found this funny was because I have unlimited bandwidth in my server package. If I were some of the others who got caught unaware, I would probably be apoplectic."

An Apple spokesman did not return several calls for comment.

Few podcasters are angered by the inconvenience -- they have, after all, gained hordes of new listeners -- but Apple's rollout had many wishing they had some notice beforehand. Paul Saurini, whose Denver-based Barefoot Radio podcast focuses largely on news items with some white-trash element to them, had to suddenly upgrade his server bandwidth package from $25 a month for 100 GB to a $300-a-month package for 1,200 GB after the new traffic exceeded his limit.

"I'm really grateful for what they're making happen for me, so I'm not complaining, really," said Saurini, 31. "I just wish I had been forewarned so I could be prepared to take full advantage of it."

Other problems abound. Several podcasts were listed multiple times. Yeast Radio podcaster Madge Weinstein, a Chicago drag queen, griped on one recording during that first week that she wasn't listed under "comedy." Rob Glenn, whose ilovebacon.com podcast is a discussion of news articles and websites he likes, complained that podcasters who weren't in the initial iTunes database had to create full-fledged iTunes accounts complete with a credit card number on file in order to be listed.

Andy Wibbles, whose Andymatic podcast deals with gay issues, agreed that Apple's rollout method led to "a lot of technical glitches."

"They added a whole bunch of data to the podcast format that's Apple-proprietary," said Wibbles, 30, an online marketing instructor in Chicago. "There are a bunch of tags that are only for the iTunes feed. They made up their own tags. I think the Apple thing is going to be great -- it's going to get the software installed on thousands of machines. But it's a double-edged sword."

Wibbles said that some of Apple's tactics favored big, well-known media outlets like ABC News, National Public Radio and Newsweek, all of which are fixtures in the top 100 list.

Yet while podcasts like Reid's Sex Talk and other early listers have dropped back from that pack, others have remained perennials in the rankings despite no prior following.

One is Cinecast, a movie show by a pair of Chicago film critics, only this time instead of Ebert and Roeper it's 30-year-olds Adam Kempenaar and Sam Hallgren. The show by Kempenaar, a web producer for the Chicago Blackhawks, and Hallgren, an intern at WBEZ-FM, was recommended on ex-MTV veejay and podcast pioneer Adam Curry's influential weekly Podfinder show in June and now has an estimated 50,000 subscribers.

Kempenaar credits their show's clear organization with its success. Unlike many podcasts, which feature stream-of-consciousness ramblings from hosts, the duo start by reviewing the latest movies, read some listener mail, offer their competing top-five lists in whatever the week's film category is and conclude with a Massacre Theater contest in which they read some dialogue and let listeners guess what film it's from.

"I sampled some other podcasts and decided we needed to do a show that's formatted the way you expect on the radio," said Kempenaar, who started the podcast in the spring as a hobby that gave him an excuse to tell his wife he needed to go to the movies with pal Hallgren. "We just hoped at first someone would hear it and like it."

The switch has also been a boon for folks who don't even see themselves as podcasters, like Las Vegas-based Daily Noise hosts Jimmy Diggs and Kaan Soler.

"We're doing a live show, but podcasting has created an archive for us," said Diggs, whose two-hour show includes interviews and Howard Stern-like shtick. "Now more people are hearing us whenever they want."

Podcasters aren't the only ones with issues. Now that podcasting is hitting the mainstream, listeners are realizing the limits of the current technology. There's as yet no way to bookmark content of podcasts so listeners can bounce to the part they're interested in as they do on blogs, and the iPod's forward button is notoriously slow and unreliable, critics say.

And, like in the blogosphere, much of the content is amateur and mediocre.