Podcast interview with Yahoo exec explains Yahoo! Podcasts

You can learn more about the new Yahoo! Podcasts (beta) service by listening to John Furrier's podcast interview with Geoff Ralston, Yahoo's Chief Product Officer. Ralston says Yahoo wants this service to be as open as possible at both ends — for consumers of podcasts and for podcasters. Ralston's message to podcasters is: "If you have a podcast we're going to find you. And if we haven't found you, you can come right to our website, you can give us the RSS feed, and we will get it in our index within 24 hours."

At the consumer end, Yahoo has tried to make the user experience simple and easy in a number of ways, according to Ralston:

• Ralston talks about Yahoo's attempt to seamlessly integrate as many players as it can.
• He claims Yahoo has made it easy to find the podcasts that you want. "We've used Yahoo search technology to index as much as possible about a podcast, so that if you're interested in a specific podcast about something or a specific episode you're going to be able to find it."
• He mentions a "cute" feature that allows you to speed up a podcast you're listening to on the web to help get to the content you're looking for.
• He points to Yahoo's interest in building a community that will rate, review, and tag podcasts, "telling the rest of the community what's cool, what's new, what's happening, what is a great podcast, and what you should be listening too."

So Yahoo is talking the right talk. We hope Yahoo! Podcasts, which is still in beta, lives up to these claims. For more, read Laurie's post on the announcement of Yahoo! Podcasts.