Nearly 1 am here but I wanted to get this on the street before I went to bed, I went through the Yahoo Podcast site for about an hour tonight, here are my conclusions. From a listeners stand point it will be a very good resource, people will be able to search and find specific topics they are looking for. This is based on info that is contained in show notes and how a site is tagged as Yahoo will rely on search heavily for people to find shows..
Podcasters are increasingly going to need to be very clear in their show notes so that the Yahoo Podcast site and others like Odeo will be able to index the material. One thing they have done very poorly though is they are stripping any html formatting and removing the html links from our show notes, even though people will be able to listen to my show on Yahoo they will not be able to click on the links I am referring to in the show.
As near as I can figure it anyone can add tags to a listing, I do not like this one bit, this will give people the ability to tag your site with inappropriate tags Sadly there is no way to claim your podcast. Podcasters are going to need to make sure they ping Yahoo, as the feeds I was looking at were really out of date.
The directory is pretty sad, finding a show in their directory by drilling down to it will be very painful. You are going to have to search for a site you are listening to. Finding sites in the directory will be a challenge. Yahoo has already made there presence known in the various mailing list and some of us even received e-mail lets see how much they keep talking to the community. I do want to applaud their effort to communicate though.
Using the Yahoo Music Engine the player now has a podcast selection. But it simply loads the Yahoo site in the applications browser. The interface is pretty standard with what we have come to expect with most of the podcatcher clients. One thing that is not clear is if the feedback rating we can put on podcast tracks, the question is do these get fed back to the website. The ratings system may not be as susceptible to abuse as people will have to login to their Yahoo account to post a review only time will tell. Otherwise I suppose the Yahoo Podcasting site is at a good beginning. One thing I was pretty happy to see was they list my full rss feed, and my website URL in the listing which happily they did not do anything funny with the RSS feed.
I hope they do a better job of keeping the directory squared away and will not allow the abuse that has been happening in the Apple iTunes Podcast directory. Sites are still listing themselves 20 separate times under the guide of having 20 different categorized shows. I hope we start seeing some reportable stats from them. This will help podcasters in the long run.
One thing I did see was that this directory was not dominated by Adam Curry we will see if some other podcasters get some exposure now. [podcasts.yahoo.com]
