ETech: Podcasting with Odeo
Went and saw Evan William's (Blogger co-founder) presentation on his new venture, Odeo.
Odeo aims to be two things: first, a site that aggregates podcasts, and provides mechanisms for podcast storage, discovery, subscription, and delivery.
Second, Evan has not forgotten his personal publishing roots, and has implemented a very slick web interface through which anybody can record and post MP3s to the web. I was surprised at how nicely it worked--as he was talking about the recording feature, he clicked record, then stop a few seconds later, and then play. What he had been saying several seconds earlier played back through the sound system, crystal clear. The audience met this with a beat of silence, digesting how easily Evan had recorded and played back a podcast, and then a burst of applause ripped through the room. It was pretty compelling.
Anyways, the site is very clean, the product is very Web 2.0--it's democratizing audio publishing, uses RSS extensively, is built on Ruby, etc.--and the audio recording functionality is especially quite slick.
You can read more about the beginning of Odeo on Evan's blog, and keep track of the product on the Odeo blog.
Update: There are a couple of pics of the UI from today's seminar over at Flickr.
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