EarIdeas is Hugh McGuire‘s brand-new web project, launching today, and promises to be a much better experience than his previous project, Collectik.net, which from Hugh’s own words was not focused enough. In itself, EarIdeas allows its users to list podcasts and audio on the web by categories, and invites them to browse and discover new podcasts. And it does it beautifully. I think that EarIdeas has a crisp and clean page design that highlights the content and does a great job in inviting users to browse around the website.
EarIdeas is not the first podcast aggregator though. There is iTunes Music Store which is the de facto portal, and where millions of iPod users have access to the most popular shows and podcasts. iTMS is controlled entirely by Apple though, and selects only the top shows in each country, leaving “the long tail” of podcasting unheard of. Another popular destination was ODEO, which offered plenty of features and options both to podcasters and listeners, and was more or less the perfect audio discovery tool. I wrote “was” because it has since repositionned itself into music and mp3s, after its founder left to focus on Twitter, 1 year and a half ago.
Podcasts, which was a niche in its early days, is now very popular, with shows like DiggNation, WebAlert, or Wine Library TV gathering audiences by millions. I am myself subscribed to 15 or so podcasts and find each of them more relevant to me and more engaging than content avalaible on TV, radio or cable. As dozens of thousands of invididuals and teams produce independent shows, I expect the general public to pick up, and portals like EarIdeas will then be in the spotlight.
Can EarIdeas pick up where ODEO left the trail? It might just be possible. The design, the name, the execution are a big improvement compared to Collectik. To jumpstart the launch, Hugh has also started a challenge to post about favourite podcast:
We *think* we have the best audio stuff on the net, but maybe we’ve missed something. We’d like you to help us make sure we’ve got the best.
To help him out, here are some podcasts I think he should feature:
- Open Source by Christopher Lydon
- Boagworld with Paul and Marcus
- Rails Envy podcast with Greg and Jason
- Slashdot Review with Andrew McCaskey
- The Pandora podcast with Kevin Seal
Comments
hugh December 06, 2007
… a clarification, though:
earideas is an edited directory …so in a way it’s very web1.0, and it’s like that for a reason, see:
http://blog.earideas.com/?p=11
earideas ... the weblog · comments from the b’sphere January 18, 2008
[...] Heri: In itself, EarIdeas allows its users to list podcasts and audio on the web by categories, and invites them to browse and discover new podcasts. And it does it beautifully. I think that EarIdeas has a crisp and clean page design that highlights the content and does a great job in inviting users to browse around the website. [...]