Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Podcasts (beta) today, which aims to help users find and listen to podcast easily. What does it offer inside the relatively more colorful than other Yahoo! services website?

Yahoo! Podcasts offers a comprehensive directory of all kinds of podcasts, including detailed search results, most popular and highest rated list, editorial picks, and a collection of tools.

The new service includes community tools like ratings, reviews and the ability to tag audio content, which will be displayed and browsable from the service homepage.

Lee Ott, a member of the Yahoo! Podcasts Team, blogged at Yahoo! Search blog:

Our web-based player makes it simple and painless to listen right through your web browser. An accelerated playback feature (IE only) lets you “scan” a program at 2x speed to get the gist of it faster. You can use Yahoo! Podcasts with aggregators like iPodder (thanks to Andrew Grumet), with desktop media players like the Yahoo! Music Engine (the integration is beautiful!), iTunes, and with the latest version of iPodder, the Windows Media Player and even Winamp. Or, you can download the shows you want to any mp3 player, such as the iPod, iRiver, Dell DJ, Creative Zen, etc.

Currently, if you want to subscribe to a free podcast show, all you need to do is find a podcast using the search function and hit subscribe. A dialog box will open, prompting you to open a special .pcast file using podcast-aware jukebox like iTunes and Yahoo! Music Engine.

A .pcast file is actually a simple XML file which contains the link to the podcast feed.

An online player is available if you decide to preview the podcast first before subscribing.

With Yahoo! rushing into podcast market following Apple, we should expect to see faster growth in podcast implementation for business. In the mean time, Yahoo has started developing tools to create and publish podcast/ audio blog.

Source: Yahoo Search blog.
Link: Yahoo! Podcasts.
See also: Podcast promotion.

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