Yahoo started its own podcasting site a few hours ago (http://podcasts.yahoo.com). Although this will be a competitor for Toodou.com, I am actually glad to see this, because more people will become familiar with podcasting. In the end Toodou will benefit from this. Furthermore, Yahoo focuses only on audio, and Toodou is doing both audio and video (video is bigger than audio, it’s about 60:40 right now). Toodou also takes it a step further by building a community around it where you can rate and comment on the podcasts.
I tried out the new site and it works pretty good. Podcasts are searchable by tags (like Toodou), and you can add additional tags as a user. When you subscribe to your first podcast you need to download a small file that will automatically put your podcasts in your preferred program. I use iTunes for my audio podcasts, and it worked perfect. The search for podcasts also worked very well, and you get to choose between series or episodes. I noticed and downloaded an interesting podcast series for people who want to learn Chinese (search on ‘chinese’), chinesepod.com. Very basic, but fun to listen to if you want to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese (and for free). This is the kind of program that will make podcasting big!