heisel.org

Checking out Odeo

Thursday | June 23, 2005 | 9:51 am  

I just got my invite to Odeo, which is pretty sweet so far.

I’ll do a more detailed write up this week­end (sorry… my days belong to work and my nights belong to a Rails project for her), but here’s my first impressions.

What it is

The site promises to be a one-​stop shop for find­ing, sub­scrib­ing, down­load­ing, and cre­at­ing your own Podcasts.

At the moment, the Pod­cast cre­ation tools aren’t released yet, but it’s an early beta — no big whoop.

The design

I can’t say enough about the site’s design. It’s great stylelis­ti­cally and in terms of intuitiveness.

It feels like a more sub­dued, yet more hip, iTunes Music Store for Pod­casts (sans the mon­e­tary exchange, at least for now).

One stand­out fea­ture is the abil­ity to pre­view the Pod­cast with­out leav­ing the site or firing up an mp3 player on your desktop.

When a fea­tured Pod­cast is listed, or when you’re view­ing a Podcast’s info page, there are nice, unob­tru­sive con­trols that let you play, rewind, and fast-​foward a Pod­cast, as well as add it to your sub­scrip­tion list.

There are links to add your own Pod­cast to the direc­tory, but it’s down­played on many pages.

I think for Odeo’s direc­tory to become a suc­cess they need to play up the abil­ity to add your exist­ing Pod­cast to the site.

That, and a killer API.

The directory

The ‘listen’ sec­tion is a direc­tory of avail­able Pod­casts. You can view fea­tured Pod­casts, search for Pod­casts or browse by tags, pop­u­lar­ity, and recentness.

The tag­ging deci­sion is inter­est­ing as it’s the first time I’ve seen it applied to con­tent not cre­ated by the user.

With Flickr and del.​icio.us the end user is cre­at­ing con­tent (either photos or book­marks), and they have an inter­est in tag­ging them to orga­nize their content.

Though tag­ging a feed in Odeo is just as easy, I didn’t find myself tag­ging any of them while perus­ing the avail­able feeds.

Per­haps, like the Wikipedia, a core group of users will find them­selves tag­ging content.

Once you’ve found Pod­casts you’d like to sub­scribe to, one-​click adds them to your qeue for sync­ing with your desk­top com­puter / iPod.

The Odeo Syncer

It’s Python pow­ered, whoo-​hoo!

It breaks on my Pan­ther (10.3.6) machine at work, snap!

When I get a chance to try it at home I’ll give it a shot.

That’s all I’ve got for now… I’ll post a more in-​depth review once I can try out the syncing/downloading functionality.

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