bennybox

About half an hour ago, I got my Beta account for Odeo. One of the founders of Odeo is Evan Williams, who of course was a co-founder of Pyra, creator of blogger.com which I used to use in my blogging baby-step days. Evan left Google-aquired blogger to explore and do something new.

Odeo has been in the pipeline for a while now. Announced for a few months now, but today was the first time I’ve seen a working product (you can sign up online and you may or may not get an invite).

Essentially, Odeo is a three-part product.

Listen
Odeo features member created podcasts as channels. You can log on and see popular podcasts, and leave feedback.

Sync
Subscribe to podcasts and have the mp3s downloaded to your computer, and if you’d like, auto-magically loaded on your mp3 player.

Create
Be your own radio station. Odeo helps you create your own audio production and helps you publish it online. All you really need is a microphone.

What Odeo does isn’t new. I’ve been listening to podcasts for a while, and already have them synced to my iPod. But what Odeo does well is it makes podcasts easy.

During the beginnings of blogging, most blogs were operated by the geeky/technologically inclined. With user apps like blogger, soon everyone and her mother had a blog. The same was with podcasts. The most popular podcasts were tech news, gadget talk. Certainly not enough content to interest the masses.

But podcasting is coming to the mainstream faster than blogs. Most of the major media outlets have heard the buzz, and people have started to do great things with podcasts. Food podcasts make me happy.

To me, podcasts are about Radio-On-Demand. Listen to exactly what you want to, when you want to.