I regularly use my iPod to listen to a number of podcasts and have been looking for an easy way to be able to play only the recent ones. I tried using the iTunes Smart Playlists feature and it appears to do what I want without me having to manually find them. The Smart Playlist allows a rule to be created which defines what you want in the playlist. The rule that I have defined includes anything that has not been played and was added in the last 7 days. An example of what the rule looks like follows: An advantage of using a playlist is that I don't have to navigate through the UI on my iPad. Instead I just start the playlist and it moves through each new podcast.