Yahoo Expected to Unveil Podcast Search Site with RSS Capabilities

October 10th 2005

Yahoo is expected to join others in the podcast Search business.  Podcasts are streaming audio files on the Web and can be loaded into iPods, digital music players, or just played over your computer.  America Online and Blinkx already offer podcast searches.

Many radio shows are stored on the web as a podcast.  Listeners can download the broadcast and load the programming into their music player for listening at a later time.  One of the more popular podcasts is Leo Laporte, the “tech guy”. 

The Yahoo podcast search will allow users to search podcasts via keywords, categories or tagging.  Tagging is a user generated topic code.  PC magazine reported searchers can listen to or subscribe to RSS (really simple syndication) feeds for individual shows or episodes of programming or even the entire series.  This is according to Geoff Ralston, Yahoo chief product officer. 

Few people are aware they are using RSS when browsing their MyYahoo, but RSS is slowly being adopted as a productive way of generating user defined information.  For instance, may websites breakdown their news feed (or pod-feeds) into categories, i.e. news, business, science etc.

According to ZDnet, users who listen to podcasts through the Yahoo Podcast Search site can increase their playback speed by up to two times the actual speed without making the speaker sound like a chipmunk. 

Ralston also told reporters that Yahoo will eventually offer users the ability to create their own podcasts.  Think about it, you can have your own radio show!

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By Dan Wilson
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