Apple – iTunes – Podcasting As expected, Apple has released a new version of iTunes which supports Podcasting. The integration into iTunes is great and, unfortunately for ODEO, I prefer it to the alternatives since I don’t have duplicate Podcasts sitting around on my disk now (well, atleast I don’t have to manually remove them). I will say that, currently, ODEO seems to have a better selection of what Apple is calling ‘Indie’ Podcasts — but I’m sure that will change as more folks register with Apple to have their PodCasts added to iTunes. Tangentially, this morning while working out I was listening to the DSC and heard that the CastBlaster beta is available for download. So I rushed to the website and found out it’s only available for Windows. Ugh! Fortunately, it looks like Apple is pushing GarageBand as a Podcast recording studio. I haven’t tried it yet, but perhaps over the weekend I’ll experiment with recording a Podcast. I haven’t the faintest idea as to what I’ll speak about though.

I just took the MIT weblog survey, did you? Help Cameron finish his Ph.D. thesis.

Rabble is reporting in his blog that ODEO has launched! I’ve been eagerly anticipating ODEO since I first heard about them in the beginning of this year. Unfortunately, my invite hasn’t arrived yet so I can’t say much more about them, but thankfully Phillip Torrone has posted an excellent review with screenshots on the MAKE: Blog. Go check it out. Update 2005-6-24: Either the folks at Odeo saw my blog post, were reading my mind or finally got to me in the list of folks who registered awhile ago because I got my invite yesterday! After playing around with Odeo for a day-and-a-half now I have to say that the website experience is fantastic (go Rails!) and the ODEO Syncr for the Mac works well — though I’m slightly annoyed since my iTunes consolidates my library automatically and ODEO leaves copies in \~/Library/Application Support/Odeo/Downloads. Unfortunately (or fortunately for you), ODEO’s Podcast Creation tool doesn’t seem to be up yet. I haven’t seriously investigated any Podcast creation tools just yet, though the tool that Adam Curry uses for the DSC sounds interesting (CastBlaster I think it’s called). Anyway, getting back to ODEO, I think it’s a great tool and serves a definite need — though we’ll have to see what happens once iTunes 4.9 comes out with its PodCasting support.

Tristan Louis has an excellent analysis up on his site comparing Yahoo and Google (and Technorati too). His findings are quite interesting and mesh with my ad hoc searching for blogs in both Yahoo and Google. I urge you to go to his site and read his work, but here are the salient points:

# Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results \ # Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google.

Thus the reason for a higher rank for this unknown blog in Yahoo than in Google.

Russ has posted a great piece entitled What’s on my Nokia 6680. I’ve been interested in this phone since I first heard about it several months ago and it looks like Cingular is finally going to start selling the 6682 version shortly. The great part about Russ’s post is the list of all of the applications available for the Series 60 phones. I wasn’t even aware of several of them. Though my personal favorite is the Super GoBoy from WildPalm. Being able to play your GBC games on your phone is just incredible. And playing your old NES games is even better (using vNes)! If you’re interested in writing games for the Series 60, then the open source Frozen Bubble is a great place to learn from as all of the source code is available at SourceForge. Take the time to go and read through Russ’s post, there’s a bunch of great information there (both about the 6680 and Series 60 apps in general).