For those of you that are keeping up with the revolution, you would have heard by today that Evan Williams (Google alumnus and co-founder of Pyra Labs the creator of Blogger), and Noah Glass are launching Odeo, a centralized resource for audio content online that is just about ready to go live. Simply put per the New York Times article:

“Odeo (pronounced OH-dee-oh) means to be podcast central - an all-in-one system that makes it possible for someone with no more equipment than a telephone to produce podcasts and also makes it possible for users to assemble custom playlists of audio files and copy them directly onto MP3 audio players.

The company plans to make money by selling audio content and advertising and, eventually, software for producing and editing podcasts.”

Rex Hammock, doesnt like this idea at all. He sees it as becoming the eBay of podcasting and thinks that is the polar opposite of what podcasting is all about.

“Podcasters shouldn’t be looking for a “central marketplace” that marginalizes them. They should be integrated into all the markets that exist today — and more. No, on second thought, don’t waste your time on marketplaces. If you had spent the past 140 days worrying about marketplaces, there would be no podcasting.”

My question is, does it have to just be Odeo? can’t there be other ideas and other players out there that help with the accessing and distribution of audio content online? Is there some kind of auto buy in that I am missing. I am not 100% for centralization of any of this, but lets play it out. Who knows, Odeo may suck after all, of course thats unlikely after watching the success of Blogger.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 25th, 2005 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.