Podcasting, Incorporated

from the incorporating-the-trend dept

The amount of hype that's gone into the whole concept of "podcasting" lately is a bit scary. Whether you believe that podcasting represents the next great revolution in personal expression or simply a retread of earlier ideas with a fresh coat of enthusiasm (and, honestly, you can make reasonable arguments for both sides), there's no denying that the idea of people making their own audio recordings about anything and everything and letting anyone easily download it to a portable audio player is catching on very quickly. There has been some talk about companies springing up around this space, and the first to make a major splash appears to be Odeo, a company founded by Evan Williams (one of the original creators of Blogger) and Noah Glass, who created the Audioblogger offering. If you read through the details, it sounds like this is really just an effort to reshape Audioblogger for a Podcasting world, while trying to create a comprehensive set of tools to make it easy to create, find, and get podcasts. To their credit, it appears the Odeo guys aren't totally jumping on the "podcasting" bandwagon, but appear to have come to a similar conclusion as others did at about the same time (funny how that always seems to happen). Again, it's not entirely clear where the business model really is (though, they clearly have a few ideas), but it's yet another way for just about anyone to create content -- and that's a good thing.