The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Today Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Podcasts (beta), a visually cluttered website that aims to help you find, organize and rate podcasts. There are currently no tools for creating podcasts on Yahoo's site, but there are plans to add them in the future, according to Joe Hayashi, Yahoo's director of product management.

Yahoo is certainly not the first to see the value of a searchable online podcast directory, but they are the most significant and "mainstream" player to date, excepting Apple, of course. I expect that Google will follow suit in the not-too-distant future - although I'd like to see them make Google Reader usable first. With an estimated 5 million people already listening to podcasts, Yahoo has the heft and the potential to double that number without even breaking a sweat.

Lee Ott, a member of the Yahoo Podcasts team, says: "Our web-based player makes it simple and painless to listen right through your web browser. An accelerated playback feature (IE only) lets you "scan" a program at 2x speed to get the gist of it faster. You can use Yahoo! Podcasts with aggregators like iPodder (thanks to Andrew Grumet), with desktop media players like the Yahoo! Music Engine (the integration is beautiful!), iTunes, and with the latest version of iPodder, the Windows Media Player and even Winamp. Or, you can download the shows you want to any mp3 player, such as the iPod, iRiver, Dell DJ, Creative Zen, etc."

It's too early in the morning for my eyes to deal with the light blue text on the white background and the buttons and tags all cramped together, so I didn't stay too long on the Yahoo Podcasts homepage, but I did click through to a few NPR podcasts to see how it works. Clicking "Listen"  launches the online player, which worked well in Safari. Already I like them a little more than I did when I saw that light blue text. Clicking the "Subscribe" button sends you to a page that explains exactly what happens when you subscribe, how to download Yahoo Music or iTunes if you don't already have them, and offers other useful tips. When I subscribed, iTunes launched automatically for me and NPR's Story of the Day was automatically added to my Podcasts playlist. It just worked, and that's becoming a rarity these days. I'm still not all that into podcasts, but I'm not unimpressed with what Yahoo is doing with it. I'm looking forward to seeing more.