An entirely new Odeo
Odeo used to be a place to find podcasts. You could search them, grab their feeds, or create a custom feed consisting of your Odeo inbox. It was cool, but it wasn’t that cool. I never got in to the habit of synching my iPod to iTunes frequently enough to be able to really listen to all those podcasts. And since the FM transmitter that supposedly lets me listen to my Nano in my car is a complete piece of crap, I never really got much mileage out of the podcast experience. Eventually I stopped downloading them in iTunes.
But Odeo has really transformed itself. First off, it’s really no longer necessary to download podcasts directly to the hard drive, since they’ve basically perfected Flash-based playing and recording[*]. So rather than being subscribing to the podcast in iTunes and messing with automatic downloading, deleting, etc., you can just keep an eye on your Odeo inbox (you can subscribe to the feed if you want) and listen to everything online. If you find something you really love, you can download the mp3. This method makes Odeo more effective as a directory, too, since users are encouraged to visit the website, therefore making it easier for them to tag and star things, making content easier to find for others.
The podcasting creation and distribution center (Odeo studio) has been turned into a (mostly) separate service (now at studio.odeo.com). This is old news, but I haven’t been paying attention for a few months. There was always a quick, web-based recorder, but I think it only held 1 minute of audio. Now you get an hour. Plus you can call a phone number to record a message, or upload an mp3 (as long as you have rights to it, of course).
Basically, Odeo has evolved to make a lot more sense as the meaning and purpose of podcasts have changed. They are now much more of a web application than a directory, and offer features that you can’t find anywhere else.
[*] Funny, they’ve finally found real uses for Flash. It used be a splash-page inducing bandwidth hog, now it’s used very effectively to play and record audio and video.
