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An ODEo to Podcasting
24 Feb 2005 by Jason Fried
Well, the news is out [NY Times], Evan Williams is on his next journey: Odeo aims to make it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content for your iPod. Basically Ev and Noah are trying to do with Podcasting what Ev (and the rest of the Pyra crew) managed to do with Blogging, except this time the self publishing is audio, not text. We wish them well and can’t wait to see how it all shakes out!
BTW: What is the deal with the New York Times? They write an article about Odeo and they don’t link them up? They link up Audible, Google, Apple, eBay, Yahoo, and TiVo, but they don’t link up Odeo.com? WHAT??
Side note for the marketing inclined: Isn’t Apple the big winner with all this Podcasting stuff? It’s not called iRivercasting, or DellDJcasting, or Zencasting. It’s Podcasting. Not a bad position to be in.
Side note for the technically inclined: Odeo is built on Ruby on Rails — the web application framework that we developed (and open sourced) when we built Basecamp. Ruby on Rails also powers 43 Things, Ta-da List, S5, Instiki and many more to come.
15 comments so far (Post a Comment)
24 Feb 2005 | rabble said...
Thanks for the post. And more than that, thanks for rails, it's a wondeful framework to use. It's been nothing but a joy.
-rabble
25 Feb 2005 | Adam Michela said...
Hmm. Zencasting... that's not a bad name either ;)
Not only does the NYT link-up the wrong sites... I hardly see why they needed to mention those sites at all. Half of the analogies seem out of context.
Anyway... the Odeo screen capture looks good. Clean. Reminds me of SimpleBits.
25 Feb 2005 | rabble said...
Dan actually did do the odeo design, so it makes sense that it reminds you of simplebits.
25 Feb 2005 | Adam Michela said...
ah! ;)
no freakin' idea how i picked that up out of that little shot in the NYT article.
nice work Dan!
25 Feb 2005 | Adam Michela said...
... suppose I could of just checked out the splash screen's style sheet. :| doh.
it's killin' me that you have all these (i'm imagining) sexy background images all over your style sheet but their not actually on the server :[
25 Feb 2005 | rabble said...
The odeo blog is now online: odeo.com/blog
We were expecting the times article to come out friday morning so we didn't have it online.
25 Feb 2005 | Adam Michela said...
Great work rabble! Looks plenty fine.
25 Feb 2005 | Jamie said...
Does anyone else feel like it's time to party like 1999?
25 Feb 2005 | Anthony Baker said...
Man, this is cool.
As Ev noted in his post: "It's about personal media, time-shifting, and the long, long tail. And I love that shit. Amazing things are going to be created." And that's all really cool.
And if Apple releases the AirPod (as rumored) that will be really cool. Can you imagine being able to share podcasts wirelessly via Bluetooth?
And another thing that would be cool would be able to share not only the audio files themselves, but perhaps hooks to the web for them -- your audio bookmarks. Perhaps hooks into iTunes Music Store, to some of the podcast directories, etc. With an ability through iTunes or some other app to then manage them or learn about them further with additional metadata or whatnot.
Like del.icio.us for the iPod and podcasts or music.
That's one thing that I'm kind of down on about iTunes to begin with, is that there's not enough tools and functionality for learning about what others are buying, listening to, rating. These are all killer features of Amazon, Flickr and del.icio.us to some extent, and would be wonderful to have added to iTunes and podcasting specifically.
As with RSS, maybe someone could come up with a standard for rating and tagging items like podcast files or music. Something flexible enough so that tags can be as customized as you like it, but so that other applications (through APIs or whatnot) could use the data.
I don't know too terribly much about it, but how is CD data handled? Seems to be one or more major databases for album info, yes? Perhaps someone could create some kind of clearing house for individual info, or at least a place to aggregate this from multiple, individual sources -- similar to what weblogs.com and others were about.
25 Feb 2005 | Anthony Baker said...
Man, I can't believe how many times I said "cool" or "really cool" in that post...
25 Feb 2005 | Jason Fields said...
yeah. thats really cool!
25 Feb 2005 | One of several Steves said...
BTW: What is the deal with the New York Times? They write an article about Odeo and they dont link them up? They link up Audible, Google, Apple, eBay, Yahoo, and TiVo, but they dont link up Odeo.com? WHAT??
All of those mentioned are publicly traded. Odeo.com is not. If you actually followed the links, you'd see that they don't link to their sites, but to their NYT stock/business info/news page.
25 Feb 2005 | Dave Hoffer said...
They should call it Verbalogging or Audi-blogging.
25 Feb 2005 | Dave said...
Re: Aple sidenote. What is *really* interesting is that Apple has done absolutely nothing to let the podcasting community it wants anything to do with this. They've been so silent I'm curious as to whether employees can even utter the term in the hallowed halls of Cupertino . In fact, they even passed on exhibiting at the Podcast Expo in November (http://www.portablemediaexpo.com/index.html): a show dedicated to the practice named after their flagship consumer product.
If this is a great position for Apple to be in, maybe someone should let Apple know.
01 Mar 2005 | Jake Nickell said...
Nice, Evan is wearing a Threadless tee :)
