Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Yahoo introduces tools for podcasts

Yahoo is now getting into podcasting, that is, just searching, organizing and rating for now not creating. Yahoo is betting that users that are not familiar with podcasts (which still are not known to many web users) will become familiar through them, since many people use Yahoo. So far, finding podcasts is still not that really easy, unless you know of a podcast site or go to for example iTunes. By using a heavyweight search engine provider, then podcasts can be searched for much easier is what Yahoo is trying to do. I know personally when I started searching for podcasts, I did a google search for podcasts, but still it was difficult to find what I was kind of looking for. iTunes helped somewhat because it grouped into categories, and I knew if I wanted to look for Catholic podcasts, or technology podcasts, or Palm podcasts. But I still didn't find it that easy to do, it took some time, probably spent me about an hour trying to find podcasts to load up to my iPod mini.

You can see now that the major search companies are now branching off to various different aspects of search, since text-based search is pretty much covered. Google is into searching of blogs and video, and searching of mail in GMail. It won't be long till Google will be doing search of podcasts that's for sure, they probably have it in their Google Labs.

In fact, Google just recently released their Google Reader for reading feeds. So far, it looks pretty simple. What's neat about it, is that you can preview the paragraph of the blog entry, which in My Yahoo you can't really do and have to go to the blog entry on the web page itself.

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