Yahoo! have just rolled out Yahoo! Podcasts – a service which lets users find, listen and subscribe to podcasts. PodTech has an interview with Geoff Ralston, Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer about the new offering where he says:

We want this to be as open as possible on both ends. We want to work with every device – however a user of Yahoo podcasts wants to consume their podcast, wherever they want to do it, whatever device, and on whatever jukebox. We’re going to work with them (jukeboxes) and we’re going to work with as many standards as possible using standard pcast format to integrate with a jukebox. You can listen to podcasts right on your computer, or you can listen to it right on the web itself. On the other end, we want to be as comprehensive as possible. If you have a podcast we’re going to find you, and if we haven’t found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we’ll get it into our index within 24 hours.

Finally someone has taken on ITunes’ monopoly in this market – iTunes offering is pretty poor, interface-wise, but as they had no significant competition, they didn’t have to improve it. Now, however, with the launch of Yahoo! Podcasts, they have competition from a serious player.

One of the most useful features of Yahoo! Podcasts is the search function – coming from Yahoo!, not surprisingly, it works like a dream. Another nice feature of the site, is the ability to rate and review podcasts – this will add significantly to the value of the directory as the better podcasts come to the top.

This makes me want to start podcasting once more! I’ll have to fix the soundcard on this PowerBook before I can do that 🙁