In what seems like a weekly launch of a specialized search engine from the Yahoo! camp comes Yahoo! Podcasts.

While checking out the new site, might want to listen to Geoff Ralson, Chief Product Officer of Yahoo! talking with John Furrier of PodTech about Yahoo! Podcasts.

My Thoughts
- search results were returned very slowwwwly and/or timed out. I had trouble logging in on one test machine (login is not required to use the service). This reminded me of Friday with Google’s new RSS reader. What is up with these big search companies releasing products — even as beta — that have slow search? That’s what they are supposed to be good at doing. There aren’t zillions of podcasts out there so there is no huge index issue, er excuse. Yeah, it’s beta, but come on it’s 3am here … I can’t make excuses for this one. Plug in a few more servers, please!
- clicking “Listen” launches a popup to choose to listen in browser using Windows Media, Real or Quicktime in a wide variety of bandwidths (don’t forget to turn off the popup blocker).
- clicking “Subscribe” first goes to a screen to explain how subscribing to a podcast works. Very nice, succint walkthrough with small, relevant screencaps. I noticed that my (older) Yahoo Music Engine on my test machine was buggy (kept crashing and restarting Windows) so I went and updated the software. Be sure to choose “custom install” and uncheck the software you don’t want. Guess that’s at least one advantage of releasing new services that interact with each other.

[Unrelated Yahoo Music Engine note: I appreciated the first time how the Yahoo Music Engine recognized when I first started up that I was no longer a member and asked me if I wanted to resubscribe again. Good marketing, and not annoying — the first time. Where is the kill switch after that.]

- it’s important to have an image in the RSS feed so Yahoo podcasts can display something to go with the podcast title. For our Webmaster Cookbook podcast, they just served up a generic blue image. Add to my own t0-do list to fix that.
- How accurate are the podcast search results? As mentioned above, I was having trouble getting results to return so I really couldn’t run this through many tests, but I was easily able to find our Webmaster Cookbook podcast.
- How long does it take a new podcast to make it to Yahoo! Podcast directory? I’m going to test this today by publishing a new podcast and will report back here as an update how long it took later.

What others are saying about Yahoo Podcasts
Dave Winer says he had a sneak peak at this on September 21:

We talked about formats, protocols, how to work with the community at a content and technical level, and linking into the community directory. At this point, I’m not sure how much of this Yahoo did, we’ll be diving in over the next few days for sure. But they were the first podcasting network site to do this, Odeo didn’t do it, nor did Apple or Podshow. No matter what Yahoo did, at least they talked, listened and trusted, and that’s a start.

Ben Barren rants on some of the returned results:

But I just wonder how all the RSS, ratings, delicious like, Yahoo MyWeb, 360 etc elements can be integrated to make the podcasting ’selections’ smarter. Or hire a PHYSICAL PRODUCER who knows the target audience and likes podcasting. (dumb suggestion i know) Oh, and is it just me, but man Im sick of really bland, dumb, stupid blobby TAG CLOUDS. Enough already of the dumb directories built by the 4 users who tagged ’stripper’ on a podcast, image, video or weblink.

Conversely Alex Williams, the architect behind the Podcast Hotel, seems to like it: “Looks like Yahoo! is listening. Nice features that make the community the agent for strength. Staff picks, recommendations and how to explore on your own. This is the kind of thing that I expect is the new standard for community sites.”

Neville Hobson notes the format flexibility: “What will likely be appealing to many people is that Yahoo’s offering supports both the WMA file format as well as the MP3 file format (used by a wide range of portable digital players), and Apple’s AAC file format (used only by the iPod range). ”

Jeff Clavier: “Besides the lack of import functionality, this sounds pretty complete to me. The integration of podcasts throughout Yahoo is really what I find most notable.”

Update 7:18am PST: Yahoo Music Engine Podcast plugin

Did this post make you go hmm?

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