My friend Hugh McGuire and an A-Team of Montreal developers and designers have launched earideas, which is, “a collection of the best thoughtful audio available on the web” (in their words). Go now and take a listen, and then take the earideas audio challenge.
There’s news of a podcasting innovation
coming from Kevin Smith related to his upcoming movie, Clerks II. Through his official company site readers are led to a New York Times article in which Smith discusses releasing a podcast containing DVD-style commentary track that viewers can take with them to the theater just as they would replay the DVD with commentary in the home environment. It seems so simple that it could almost be a kind of prank he’s playing – but at the same time, I’m sure lots of people would love this kind of thing.
Wired News on
Apple’s introduction of podcasting to the iTunes store: ITunes Mints Podcasting Stars.
Well that was quick.
I got my invite to Odeo earlier this evening, and from my cursory look-see, the service looks pretty good. The site is easy to navigate and use, and is presented in a very straightforward manner. I downloaded the Odeo Syncr app and gave it a try, but I also was very happy to note later that you don’t have to use it – you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your subscriptions and use your normal feedreader to download the podcasts, which is probably what I’ll do.
There is an important feature that will likely be the next tempest in the blog-teapot – but that I think is totally cool and web-like. The site is to a great extent simply organizing links to podcasts that already exist elsewhere, so the original show stays only on the site it came from. At least that is the case for content that has not been expressly put into Odeo by its creator. You can be sure that there’s going to be some sort of outcry over this, but that will be misplaced to say the least.
Beyond that, the little inline Flash player is pretty good, and for some reason your subscription list is hidden and only accessible via the Sync section. It really should be a site-wide sidebar item or something.
Anyhow… I can’t wait to see the content creation tools, and maybe soon I’m going to have to motivate myself to do something in this medium. Or maybe I’ll just convince Nadia to give it a try – after all, she’s the all-pro radio host in the family. I’m sure her skills would translate very well to podcasting!
