The search engine company has just launched the beta version of Yahoo! Podcasts, a new portal entirely dedicated to podcasting and podcasts.
Lee Ott from Yahoo! Podcasts Team announced late yesterday on the company’s blog that, “Yahoo! Podcasts offers a comprehensive directory of podcast series and individual shows from across the Web, complete with detailed search results, most popular and highest rated lists, editorial picks, and a full collection of tools you can use. These community tools include ratings, reviews, and the ability to tag audio content, or view the tags that other people add. Why waste time on noise instead of signal -Yahoo! Podcasts can help you discover tasty stuff to feed your ears.
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But wait, there’s more ahead… We’re already working on personalized podcast recommendations and friendly, easy-to-use tools so that anyone can create and publish a podcast or audio blog and share it with friends, family, coworkers, and the World Wide Web.”
With its colorful design (on a blue background and not the traditional plain-vanilla white one), Yahoo! Podcasts not only offers a search engine and a directory, but also some educational pieces about podcasting (“What the heck is a Podcast?” or how to publish one).
Quick searches on “university” or “college” result in lists of interesting podcasts about or from higher ed institutions such as the University of Florida’s Update Weekly or Research Report.
Listening is breeze (you just click on the “Listen” button) – just like downloading (“Download” button).
Want to subscribe to a podcast? Again, just click on a single button, “Subscribe,” to add the feed to your Yahoo! account (if you don’t have any, you can create one, on the spot).
Once again, Yahoo! has made sure this new portal is easy to use. If podcasting has any chance to become mainstream, this will be achieved with this kind of tools.
So, how do you make sure your university/college podcasts are included in the directory?
Easy, again: just submit your feed in the top right box titled “Already have a podcast?” on this page and hit the “Add RSS URL” button.
