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So, I got my invite to Odeo, Evan Williams' podcasting service. Thus far, I'm not sure what to do with it.

The site has three portions: The podcasting portal, the syncing area, and the publishing area. While that is the order they are listed in, it is appropo, because it follows the path of my user experience.

The podcasting portal is excellent. I can't imagine anything exists out there that is better for finding podcasts. It lists the most popular casts, some of which have hundreds of subscribed listeners, and each show has info and tagging, and lets you download any individual show. You can also see a list of recent podcasts, and there are so many coming through, the list barely goes back a day. You can leave comments for the podcasts.

The sync area is where the subscriptions happen. You subscribe to a podcast program, or choose an individual show to sync up. The Odeo Syncr program is there to handle the whole thing, but I have no freakin clue what it does. It claims to be syncing the podshows, but I have no idea if they are somewhere on my computer, and they certainly are not on my iPod. The options for the program are sparse, and since the site has no documentation, there's no way for me to figure out what I'm doing wrong. So, so far I've downloaded 5 shows, and I have no idea where they are, how to listen to them, and how to get them on my iPod.

The publishing area is locked off. You have to request access. So, that's out. While finding interesting podcasts is nice, I'm primarily interested in using it to publish podcasts. I want to finally do a show for this site, while not risking all my bandwidth on them (regardless of what Odea eventually charges). If anyone close to Odea is reading this, please try to get my request accepted.

So, even though I can't really do anything yet with Odeo, none of this should be taken as me saying the service is bad. The stuff that does work is great, the stuff that doesn't has a great start. The whole thing just looks like it is going to make listening to podcasts real easy, and help popularize the medium. I can't wait to see how it develops.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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