We've launched some new features for browsing and playing on Odeo.
You'll notice new "PlayNext" icons () beside tag names. Wherever you see icons, click to play audio with that tag. It will keep playing audios with that tag, one after the other, until you tell it to stop, or click another tag. So, just click to turn on the comedy, or techno, or npr station.
We've also cleaned up and redesigned the big tag page to make it a more useful jumping-off point.
Note to podcasters: This means, the more you (accurately) tag your stuff, the more likely it will be played!
Over at Biskero, Alessandro has announced an Odeo podcast player that works via the Kero Mobile service, via Flash Lite.
I don't know what that all means, but from what I understand, if your phone has Flash Lite 1.1, you're all set. If it doesn't, you may be able to get it, then you're all set.
Anyway, I'm going to look into it more if I can find a phone that works with it, but thanks Biskero!
Creative Commons recently issued a general roadmap covering some of the legal issues specific to podcasting. If you're a serious podcaster, the Podcasting Legal Guide is well worth your time.
Colette Vogele, Esq., the guide's principal author, called in to the Odeo phone service with an audio introduction.
You can access the complete Podcasting Legal Guide, and order hard copies, at the Creative Commons site.
The Guide was made possible through the assistance, support and feedback of many. Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society provided a forum for discussion and support of this project. Lawrence Lessig is the program's founder, and Jennifer Stisa Granick is the Executive Director. Co-author, Mia Garlick, was instrumental in drafting portions of the Guide and The Berkman Center provided much of the research and writing on the music section
Got a plan? According to Ben Manilla - award-winning producer of shows like "Putumayo World Music Hour," "Starbucks' Hear Music," and "The House of Blues Radio Hour" - in order to be wildly spontaneous and brilliantly creative, you need to prepare.
Today we're launching some pretty significant changes to Odeo that I'd like to tell you about.
What We've Done The first thing you'll notice is we've changed the homepage. Well, we've actually created another homepage, as well. In fact, we've taken a big samurai sword and split Odeo down the middle, so there are now two Odeo sites: Odeo.com and Odeo Studio (at studio.odeo.com).
Odeo.com is the audio aggegrator and player.
It's for listening. It has a podcast directory with over 64,000 feeds and one million individual audios, the ability to create a personalized feed for downloading or listening on the site, and a variety of discovery and sharing mechanisms for this ever-expanding collection of content.
Odeo Studio is for creating and publishing audio.
The focus is on making it very easy to put out a podcast, by either linking to existing audio or recording something in our web-based recorder (the feature we used to call Odeo Studio). Odeo Studio generates a feed that (of course) is included Odeo.com, but can also be submitted to iTunes and other podcast directories, used by Feedburner, subscribed to in dozens of podcatchers and RSS readers, and mashed up in the hundreds of ways that RSS is good for. The Studio also gives you badges and Flash players to promote and publish your audio on your blog or other site.
We've done some other things very recently on the listen side in an effort to make it easier to dive in and start listening to interesting stuff without subscribing and downloading (note the Popular lists on the home page, the play links beside audios (), and of course PlayNext). More to come along these lines.
Why We've Done It From the beginning, there have been two sides to Odeo. We started with creation of content—Noah having created AudioBlogger (now run by Odeo), which let you post audio to the web, via the phone, years ago, and myself coming from Blogger. And our web-based audio recorder was one of the first things we built. But we felt there was a lot of room for innovation in the listening experience, as well, and by building these things together, they would be synergistic (creating drives consumption and vice-versa).
What we've realized is, while they may be synergistic, they're not the same product. They offer different value propositions and appeal to different (if overlapping) people (do people overlap?). We wanted to make it easier to understand what Odeo was when you came to the site and for the experience to be as straightforward as possible, depending on what you wanted to do. So we turned one site with lots of smooshed-together functionality into, hopefully, two much clearer ones.
What's Next This is just the first step, of course. What we're really excited about is this allows each site to evolve in its own natural way—and more quickly.
Our own Engineering Director, Tony Stubblebine, cruised the first-ever Maker Faire with a mic. In this clip, he talks with a father-daughter team who built a redneck pool heater.
We've launched some new features for browsing and playing on Odeo. 
) beside tag names. Wherever you see icons, click to play audio with that tag. It will keep playing audios with that tag, one after the other, until you tell it to stop, or click another tag. So, just click to turn on the comedy, or techno, or npr station.
), and of course 