Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."

"The people are leading the charge into podcasting, and we don't take it for granted that all they want is American Idol," says Ron Bloom, CEO and co-founder of PodShow.com, a podcast network that offers links to 60,000 podcasts in 135 categories.

Podcasts with wide audiences are not so new; the president, the pope and even the Queen of England all have them. But an increasing slice of the podcast menu is more specialized and education-oriented.

One podcast tracking site lists nearly 1,300 podcasts in its education category out of a total of about 30,000 tracked; another lists more than 1,900 out of about 32,000. On iTunes, ground zero for the podcast universe, a dozen education-related podcasts regularly rank in the daily top 100 podcasts based on subscriptions.

"Almost any category you pick in podcasting is exploding," says Dave Hitt, a talk-show podcaster (Quick Hitts) who also helps run the Podcast Peer Awards, in which podcasters vote on the best in 16 categories. "Podcasting didn't exist 2½ years ago, so the number (of podcasts) has gone from zero to estimates of more than 50,000" in a short time.

A growing number of Americans are listening to podcasts, but very few do so every day.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday that 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, an increase from 7 percent earlier in the year.

However, only about 1 percent said they download a podcast on a typical day -- unchanged from the survey earlier this year. The rest do so less frequently, perhaps only once.

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While podcast downloading is still an emerging activity primarily enjoyed by early adopters, the range of content now available speaks to both mainstream and niche audiences," said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew. "We are at a crossroads of a major transition in the way media content is delivered and consumed."

The array of individuals and mainstream media institutions that now provide podcasts has also expanded dramatically. For example, in November of 2004, Podcast Alley, a podcast directory website, listed fewer than 1,000 podcasts for download. Today Podcast Alley catalogs more than 26,000 different podcasts, totaling more than 1 million episodes. In addition to homegrown podcasts that cover topics ranging from music and fashion to religion and politics, mainstream media institutions such as NPR, the BBC and Comedy Central now regularly provide podcasted material as an alternative way to distribute their content.

Winer intends to recreate iPodder.org (now IndiePodder.org), one of the earliest podcast directories. iPodder's architecture was unique, because it was a distributed directory built on Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) text files, maintained by people around the world.

While iPodder was one of the first important podcast directories, it was limited by speed issues, dead nodes and other problems. This quickly led to the creation of dozens of other podcast directories. IndiePodder.org is now part of PodShow, which appears to be letting the site stagnate. The site was last updated five months ago.

Winer's project is ambitious. It is faced with overcoming both the performance and availability issues that limited iPodder.org, and the political challenges that have sidelined community directory projects like the Open Directory Project.

Thanks for checking out AmigoFish, a way of finding podcasts and videoblogs of interest to you. Sign up for an account, rate some shows and shortly you will get predictions based on what people with similar tastes to yours have rated. The more shows you rate, the better the predictions get!

Nielsen//NetRatings announced today that 6.6 percent of the U.S. adult online population, or 9.2 million Web users, have recently downloaded an audio podcast. 4.0 percent, or 5.6 million Web users, have recently downloaded a video podcast.

These figures put the podcasting population on a par with those who publish blogs, 4.8 percent, and online daters, 3.9 percent. To put this in perspective, though, Nielsen notes that podcasting is not nearly as popular as paying bills online, 51.6 percent, or online job hunting, 24.6 percent.

"The portability of podcasts makes them especially appealing to young, on-the-go audiences," said Michael Lanz, analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings. "We can expect to see podcasting become increasingly popular as portable content media players proliferate," he continued.

Young people are more likely than their older counterparts to engage in audio or video podcasting. Web users between the ages 18 and 24 are nearly twice as likely as the average Web user to download audio podcasts, followed by users in the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups, who were also more likely than the average Web user to do audio podcasting.

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn't as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there's lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

1) He will be hiring a full podcasting news team, a sort of National Public Radio for podcasting.

2) He'll build out what he calls Infotalk. This is where other people produce podcasts in partnership with Podtech, and there will be some sort of split of the revenue generated from advertising running alongside or within the podcasts.

3) He'll build out a sponsorship network. These will be businesses like Intel (you will see Intel's feature channel on Podtech's homepage) which will pay Podtech to produce and host podcasts.

To use the service, Partovi says, you sign up, call the 800 number, record the podcast, and press pound. You then embed the Gcast player into your blog and the podcasts update automatically when you save the recording. "By simply by cutting and pasting some html [for the Gcast player] into my blog, any time I update Gcast content, it updates the blog. You have to create account at Gcast and copy and paste code into your blog, but once it's set up, it automatically updates. I don’t even have to touch a computer if I don’t want to."

Partovi says that when most people think of podcasts, they think of 20-minute long-form broadcasts, but he envisions a much shorter form, perhaps only a minute for Gcasts. He says the long-form podcast is great for a commuter who has time to sit and listen for a sustained period of time, but for others, a shorter form could work better and could expand the medium. "What's out there is the tip of the iceberg because when you go to a shorter format and put the tools in the hands of anyone who wants to do it, you get broader types of content."

But Chris Pirillo, a technology pundit who runs the Lockergnome family of Web sites and is himself a podcaster, says what Gcast is doing is not really anything new. They have just put a new name on it. "Gcast sounds interesting, but it's a new spin on an old tactic. Audio blogging has been around, and you can record by phone. It can be [convenient], but it sounds like voice mail," he says, and Pirillo says voice mail does not make for a high-quality broadcast.

In fact, Edgeworth Church is just one of many evangelical churches using emerging technology - from online forums to podcasts - to attract a coveted crowd of teens toyoung professionals.

Across the country, evangelicals are tapping into the marketing power of popculture. Today churchgoers can listen to praise music on their iPods,watch sermons online and keep in touch with their pastors or fellowcongregants through social networks and church blogs.

"The whole evangelical movement has just bought lock, stock and barrel intothe blogging format," said Daniel Harrell, associate minister at ParkStreet Church in Boston.

"There is a lot of feeling outside the evangelical community that whatever you get by using this (technology) is not going to be substantive. It's too quick, too easy," said Allen Wolfe, director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

Many pastors admitted concern over the issue but said the churches frequently remind their congregations that services aren't meant to be watched online or listened to over an iPod.

"To miss church and catch it on the Web or radio is one thing," Harrell said. "To skip church and catch it on the Web or radio is another."

General Motors Corp., credited as one of the first corporate podcasters when it dipped its toe into the waters in February, records talk-radio-style episodes about its vehicles that were downloaded 75,000 times in August. Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary in May with a series recorded inside the park. Verizon Wireless issued one a few days ago to promote a cell phone that will, among other features, let you listen to podcasts.

International Business Machines Corp., which produces podcasts for investors about the future of trends, also set up a podcast-recording system for employee communication. And many media companies, from the BBC to ESPN to The Sun, have jumped on board for simple self-preservation.

"Companies are completely losing control of their messages, and the one way to get into the game is by blogging and podcasting," said Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media. "The companies that are early adopters stand tremendous opportunity to be the winners in the long run."