Odeo: Upcoming new podcast tool

I heard about Odeo a while back -- a work in project designed to make podcasting easy and free for everybody, much like blogging is. I signed up on their list to be notified about the project when the beta was ready.

Well, it's ready! Got the email today.

I only had a minute to look over the site, and it seems to be fairly easy to navigate and use. However, it doesn't have quite the slick and easy feel of iPodder, which I love, but seems to crash on me all the time.

But I'm only talking about Odeo's listen and sync features. And to be fair, I did only spend a minute looking it over. But to my next thought: Odeo seems to be exactly what the internet needs to push podcasting further to the masses. It is planning to have easy, create-your-own podcast features. By easy, I mean upload-your-mp3-and-it's-done easy. That's how easy it should be, and that seems to be the vision Odeo has.

That's cool. REALLY cool. Once we get tools like that out there, we'll get more podcasts from more of the smart people in the world who are smart about things besides technology. People with brilliant things to publish, but not knowing how to set it up themselves. Think of it: What if podcasting was as easy as talking into your telephone or computer, and hitting "submit"? What would that do to the young podcasting trend?

I'm excited! Way to go, O-D-E-O!