Odeo is an interesting development. They seem to putting their marketing ahead of their product launch. But Odeo does have Evan Williams, who was co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs (the company that developed Blogger.com and was sold to Google) -- so that naturally draws attention their way. Odeo's marketing is also working since they have already been written up
in The New York Times, SFGate.com and elsewhere. Odeo hopes to make the idea of podcasting easy and accessible by anyone -- like blogging
tools did for web publishing. The Times writes that Odeo aims to: "be podcast central -- an all-in-one system that makes it possible for
someone with no more equipment than a telephone to produce podcasts and
also makes it possible for users to assemble custom playlists of audio
files and copy them directly onto MP3 audio players." Eventually, Odeo would like to see itself become a visible portion of this Blog Tool usage graph created recently by Elise.com. And, of course, Odeo has a blog available that you can read and follow. More on podcasting from last week: Podcasting Drum Beat Grows Louder.
