Yahoo launches podcast search site

Yahoo launched on Monday a podcast service that offers access to much of the streaming audio on the Web and features user reviews and other information about the programming.

Yahoo Podcasts is intended to enable people to easily search podcasts through keywords, categories or user-generated topic tags. The beta site also highlights podcasts of note, those that are particularly popular and user recommendations and ratings, said Geoff Ralston, Yahoo's chief product officer.

Searchers can listen to or subscribe to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for individual shows or episodes of programming or entire series, he said.

Users who listen to a podcast through the Yahoo site can increase the playback speed to hear the audio at up to twice the actual speed, without the voices sounding like chipmunks.

Yahoo plans to eventually offer tools that will enable people to create their own podcasts, Ralston said.

America Online and Blinkx also offer podcast search services.

Message has been deleted.

My Yahoo & Podcasting

It would be great if they integrate it into My Yahoo. There aren't
many personalization tools in podcasting now.

Podcast Shufle

Please post a link!

Your news alerts concerning web-entities are just clutter if we have to go and search for web-links to the mentioned item on our own!

[pfmahoney]

The link is in the story

It's the end result of the link that's under "Yahoo Podcasts" at the top.

For a more direct link, it's http://podcasts.yahoo.com

[TV James]

Tastes Like Apple

I thought it was interesting to notice that they require at least one non-standard iTunes-specific tag, and recommend others.

I'm not suggesting collusion, but Apple can take a little pride in knowing they're shaping the world of podcasting. Minor grumble.. if it were Microsoft-specific tags, people would be all up in arms about them trying to take over the world. But simply put, Yahoo! probably recognizes that the structure that Apple has added to podcasting, most obviously in the "album art" is really smart and already has a large enough installed base that why should Yahoo! invent its own mechanism?

I'm looking forward to the day that Yahoo! or iTunes or Odeo offer you the ability to record from your own microphone directly into a podcast without any fancy software or uploading or anything. Odeo is the only one I know that's working on that, but Yahoo! and Apple tend to wait until something is done to announce it, so who knows?

[pencoyd]

Story was updated with a link when the site went live

At the time the story was posted, the Yahoo Podcast site was not live, so no URL was provided. Once the site was available, a URL was added to the story.

Thanks for reading.

John Roberts
CNET News.com product development