Yahoo Designs Podcast Development Tool

Specifics of the upcoming tool are scarce, but a Yahoo manager says  
the company is looking to make the whole production process easier,  
including posting video.

By Laurie Sullivan,  TechWeb News
Nov. 11, 2005
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml? 
articleID=173602321


...

At the first Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference 2005 in  
Ontario, Calif., Hayashi declined to provide specifics on the  
project, but said the challenges podcast publishers face are based on  
not understanding the technology behind the publishing tools.

Another difficulty is putting together the RSS feed, and publishing  
and hosting the podcast. "People have a personality to create the  
audio, but they fall down on understanding the technology from XML to  
RSS or iTunes tag," said Hayashi. "Broadly speaking, those are the  
challenges."

...

Yahoo! jumped into podcasting about a month ago when it launched the  
podcast search engine Yahoo Podcasts at podcasts.yahoo.com. The site  
is offered as a beta service where people can go to find and download  
podcasts from the Web based on keywords. "Finding a podcast was like  
going into Blockbuster after an earthquake," Hayashi said. "There is  
a playback control for people who want to speed through the content."