Yahoo has today launched a beta (what else?) version of Yahoo! podcasts, a tool for finding, organizing and rating podcasts. There's a lot that I like (browser-based player, tags — yay!), but I have one major beef — the web-based playback doesn't work for me in Firefox, Mozilla or Camino on the Mac. I get a "The playlist format is not recognized" error — anybody else seeing that? Beyond that — going with user tag classification instead of top-down categories is golden (the "main categories" list is also really just a collection of tag searches). The three column main page of editor picks, listener picks and "explore on your own" makes for several ways to dive in and find something interesting as well as for a relatively uncluttered interface — it's no 37signals, but it's a huge improvement over something like My Yahoo, e.g.

There are no podcast creation tools, as with Odeo, although there are apparently plans to incorporate them at some point in the future. For now, the goal seems to be bringing podcasting to the mainstream, with a lot of emphasis on explaining what podcasting is all about for the uninitiated. As such, there's a a good deal of relevant information presented without getting too complex or jargony and without seeming overwhelming (and I think a lot of first-timers will grok it fairly easily), but I do take issue with the very first thing people see when they go to investigate what podcasting is: "Think of a podcast as a radio show." Ach. I know it makes sense to ground new technology in what's already familiar, but it's also the trap we fall into in which we situate and envision new technologies largely inside of old frames. This is why it took us so damn long to realize web "pages" can actually be dynamic. Presenting podcasting to the masses as explicity as saying "podcasting is radio" certainly doesn't do anything to mitigate the tendency that already exists toward making podcasting yet another first-person pontification medium via a different set of protocols.