Ev Head‘s new venture on podcasting, Odeo has been on the talk over the blogosohere for sometime now. Curious to see what EV is onto this time and also try my hand on podcasting, I had signed up for their beta version earlier when it was first announced.

Today I recieved the Google type invite for Odeo. When you sign in, you need to download a synchronizer with which you can subscribe to podcasts or create your own. While I subscriebd to some podcasts, I’m contemplating to create a podcast. Probably I will and will also be the only one listening to it. If you are the unlucky joe, you might get to listen my podcast where I drool over the Sonia Agarwal or go gaga over Spielberg‘s latest addiction to pre-visualization.

From Odeo’s create podcast page –

Odeo Studio – A browser-based tool that makes it easy to record and publish audio. With the Studio, and a cheap microphone (or even the one built into your laptop), you have everything you need.

Phone Posting – If you can leave a voicemail, you’ll be able to podcast, with Odeo’s phone-posting service-a quick and easy way to put your voice on the web (and in people’s ears).

Feed Creation and Hosting – If you already have audio, and you just want to get it into podcasting form, Odeo provides the turnkey way to do that. Just upload your MP3s, and you’re done.

There is nothing called as free lunch. Odeo too has it’s pricing plans to be able to do podcasts which I thought would be a free service. The price plans aren’t announced yet but sooner the craze catches up, the faster they would release their prices.

Neverthless, the first impression on Odeo is ‘Exciting’. Way to go EV and team !!

For starters – Podcasting is for radio what Blogging was for print media. It’s the name of technology by which you, as an individual, can create radio shows and air them through internet. Now, it won’t be exactly sent through air, but will be dumped into your domain server as an mp3/wma file. Your audience, if you get some, will download these mp3 files or podcasts into their IPOD/mp3 player and listen to it on the go. Podcasts can be like radio shows or comentaries with/without music as the background. Imagine instead of reading through a review of Star Wars, you will actually hear your favorite podcaster talking through it. This adds just another human dimension to it and you don’t need to actually read through the review, like audiobooks. It has it’s own pros/cons and the good news is that, many are still figuring out this animal.

That’s my definition, more on Podcasting in Wikipedia.