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Yahoo Makes a Major Podcasting Play Just as it defined the market for web search a decade ago, Yahoo hopes that it can corner the podcasting market with a comprehensive guide to downloadable audio feeds. Launched late last year, Yahoo’s podcast directory lets users discover new podcasts based on their interests and on other subscriptions in their profiles. As Yahoo’s podcast portal grows in size, executives at the search giant expect its presence to extend across a number of areas. Relevant podcasts will start to be highlighted along side news reports and incoming e-mail for registered users with a Yahoo account. Even though Yahoo is not creating much podcast material themselves, they’re gambling that providing such a rich experience will keep users using all of Yahoo’s services. Podcasting is a major part of the strategy spearheaded by Lloyd Braun, the head of Yahoo’s media group. In interviews, the former ABC executive loves to point out the advantage of using podcasts and other rich media to create an alternative to television and radio. With the level of user personalization available on Yahoo’s server platform, Braun and the rest of his team hope to become the top podcast aggregator in a fractured media landscape. Yahoo’s podcast portal heavily encourages users to post and share their own podcasts. Since podcast producers need access to affordable sound file hosting, Yahoo offers users two options to store files on their own servers. The Geocities service, once jeered at by the web elite, has found new life as a free podcast hosting option. Yahoo users can post their sound files at no charge on the Geocities platform, then offer the files to Yahoo’s users through the Yahoo podcast portal. For Yahoo users that don’t want to store their files on Geocities, or don’t want the risk of exceeding the free service’s bandwidth cap, Yahoo offers paid podcast hosting through its small business service. For rates that range between $10 and $50 per month, podcast produce...